The End Of The Enlightenment In Australia - Op-Ed On Devastating Climate Research Cuts At CSIRO

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Climate change has been a contentious issue in all of these countries. Significant political constituencies have evolved that would be happy if climate change would go away. Climate change will not go away; therefore, climate scientists are a good proxy to target. In all of these countries there have been both subtle and overt efforts to discredit the scientific study of climate as well as climate scientists. There are constant disruptions to public-funded research, with occasional grandiose budget reductions. There are political attempts to restrict the use of knowledge, and, at times, to limit the use of the word “climate.”

These efforts to disrupt and discredit climate science have been quite effective in keeping climate policy from forming, disallowing planning and preparation for accelerating climate change, and maintaining a public dialogue of doubt based on misinformation. In fact, let’s look at my last blog entry. I was organizing and analyzing information to help a scientist colleague, who is not a climate scientist, explain manufactured doubt about the warming of the Earth. That discussion was to be had on a vacation cruise. That manufactured doubt motivated research to vanquish that doubt, a disruption that consumes time, money and highly trained people.

We are presented in Australia with what has all of the appearances of a politically motivated purge of climate scientists from Australia’s premier government research institution. It is justified, according to The Guardian, by: “Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?”


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The simple conclusion that the climate modeler’s job is done might play well with a willing audience that finds the message of climate science to their dislike. The simple thread of logic that we have taken the observations that have been used to make their singular and compelling point might appeal those who want to cut budgets. However, the argument that climate modeling and observing needs to be cut away to make room to find solutions has no credibility in knowledge-based reasoning. We know that the Earth is warming, ice is melting, sea level is rising and the weather is changing. We know that we will not stop these trends in the decades of those currently living. Therefore, a constant factor in our lives and our children’s lives will be that the climate is changing. We will be required to live with sea level rise. We will be required to adapt to changing weather. We have the high likelihood that persistent patterns of drought and flood will become more persistent and more intense. We have the fact that oceanic and terrestrial ecosystems will be changing rapidly; the value stream that we expect from those ecosystems will become uncertain. We have the fact that agriculture will have to adapt to changing climate as well as to changing populations.

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http://www.wunderground.com/blog/RickyRood/comment.html?entrynum=362