Virtually all the climate scientists working at Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation — Australia’s answer to NASA — have been fired or moved out of climate research.
Australia is the driest nation on Earth. Last September, a Parliamentary coup ousted Tony Abbot, a notorious climate denier, replacing him with Malcolm Turnbull, viewed as being friendlier to climate science.
In January, Larry Marshall, “a Silicon Valley entrepreneur,” was made CSIRO’s CEO, and declared that CSIRO’s focus would be “innovation” rather than “basic science” — similar to the positions of other notorious climate denier governments, like the former Harper regime in Canada.
Marshall stated that “climate change is now settled science, and basic research is no longer needed.”
Governments are generally viewed as the best funders of basic science, performing the economically vital role of developing scientific knowledge itself, from which industry draws inspiration for new products and services. Australia’s climate science is some of the best and most important in the world, and is authoritative on the impacts of climate change on the southern hemisphere.
CSRIO is a federally funded research agency akin to NASA in the United States. Its climate change program is the largest in the nation and the most advanced in the Southern Hemisphere, a part of the world that is 80 percent ocean and is home to 12 percent of the world’s population. The bottom half of the planet has historically been understudied, a problem because gaps in monitoring the Southern Hemisphere mean gaps in understanding the global climate. CSIRO began filling in some gaps in the 1970s.“This is not about just Australia,” another CSIRO scientist said. “Australia plays a very important role in measurements in the Southern Hemisphere.”
Australia Cuts 110 Climate Scientist Jobs
[Gayathri Vaidyanathan/Scientific American]
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