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| CSIRO chief executive Dr Larry Marshall says that since climate change has been proved to be real, the national science agency can now shift its research focus. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP |
But scientist are still in the dark about who will lose their jobs; no specific scientists or programs were identified.
On Thursday Marshall sent an email announcing that 350 jobs would be lost from the CSIRO as the organisation moved away from studying how climate changes, and towards ways of mitigating or adapting to climate change.
A senior scientist from CSIRO who attended Friday's meeting said Marshall had confirmed 110 full-time equivalent staff would be cut from the oceans and atmosphere flagship, which has roughly 130 full time-equivalent staff. Another 120 staff would be cut from the land and water flagship, and a few more from other areas.
In the email to staff on Thursday, Marshall said that since climate change was proven to be real, CSIRO could shift its focus.
"Everybody is laughing at Marshall's statement," the scientist told Guardian Australia. "Who is he to declare that climate change is answered? The IPCC says so many problems are not answered yet. And unless you know how the climate is changing, how do you adapt to it?"
Then, on the ABC's program 7.30, Marshall further defended the shift saying universities were focused on the issue.
"The 7.30 response is a con," the scientist said. "There are a lot of thing that universities cannot do.
"Because most university research is dependent on temporary research grants, many programs the CSIRO has built over decades would be impossible to reproduce."
One example he gave was Cape Grim, in north-west Tasmania, where the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology run an atmospheric monitoring station, one of only three in the world to get "baseline" data from the cleanest possible air.
"We've been doing that for 40 years," he said. "Universities are not doing the carbon budget or the carbon cycle. There are a lot of capabilities that are not in universities that are in CSIRO. Unless they have a new huge injection of funds this capability would be lost. This took us 40 years to build."
Tony Haymet has previously been the Policy Director at CSIRO and the director of the SCRIPPS Institution of Oceanography in the US, where he is now a professor. He likened Larry Marshall's management of the CSIRO to "schoolboys playing at being managers".
"If you are a complete failure, what you do is take one of your best divisions, shut it down, and invest in your pet project," Haymet said.
"That's the coward's way out ... The job is to raise more resources. It's like shutting down the Australian cricket team, saying we need a lacrosse team, and spending three decades investing in that."
He said several key capabilities will be lost from the country and the world.
"If this was a whole of government approach, and they said we want to take this capability from the CSIRO and park it at the Bureau of Meteorology or a university, that's fine but I've been told they didn't consult with stakeholders at all," he said.
Haymet said the cuts are "a kick in the guts" to farmers, the fishing industry, the navy and people who live on the coast and is worried about sea level rise.
"We've only seen the beginning of climate change. We don't know what the heck is waiting for us," he said.
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