CSIRO Emails Reveal Savage Proposed Cuts To ‘Public Good’ Climate Research

You’d think Australia – a country with a predilection for being on fkn fire – would devote a fair crack of its scientific brawn to researching the effects of climate change, regardless of immediate profits from said research. You’d think. 

Well, in a slew of emails exchanged by heavy-hitters at the Commonwealth Scientific And Industrial Research Organisation, the exact depth of proposed cuts to the organisation’s climate research division has been hinted at. And they’re deep. 

The Age reports that before up to 110 scientific staff were slated for nixing from the CSIRO, senior staff discussed how the changes were focused on “eliminating all capability” in the organisation’s climate change research endeavours, and that there’d likely be a clean break from “public good/government-funded climate research”.

Moreover, the emails also state the deep cuts were intended to weed out sectors that weren’t bringing in enough dough. That aligns with a viewpoint presented by the CSIRO’s new head Dr Larry Marshall, who has previously said “you’re caught in one direction towards pure science, and in the other towards economic reality, commercialisation and industry.”

While CSIRO staff will be formally clued in on the cuts later this month, a much-maligned draft proposal from February showed the organisation was looking at abolishing research on global greenhouse gas emissions, rising sea-levels and decades-long climate monitoring efforts.  

Dr Marshall did intimate that at least 35 positions would eventually be replaced, but their focus would be on rectifying this mess of a climate instead of purely cataloguing its ongoing affects. Read: climate science for the sake of, well, science, could be indefinitely shelved in favour of more pragmatic endeavours.  

Regardless, spokesman Huw Morgan said some of those early proposals had already been discarded, and Marshall will be fronting a Senate inquiry about the cuts on Thursday.