US and Australian climate research experts say staff cuts will make it hard for Australia to achieve best policy results in international negotiations
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| The Senate committee was told the staff cuts at the CSIRO would be wasting millions of dollars of investment in expertise. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP |
Cuts to climate research at Australia's science agency, CSIRO, are a "catastrophic failure of public policy" that will damage the UN's climate change work and will hinder Australia's ability to represent its self-interest at international climate change negotiations, the Australian Senate has heard.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change produces the world's most authoritative statements on the nature of climate change, its impacts, and how to adapt to and mitigate it. To do that, it combines a suite of climate models.
That process would be hampered by the CSIRO's recent decision to shift resources away from climate modelling and monitoring, Karl Taylor, of the program for climate model diagnosis and intercomparison at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the US, told a Senate committee hearing on Friday.
"The CSIRO model ... has been involved in all of these international modelling activities that have contributed immensely to the IPCC's understanding of climate change, and that would be cut dramatically," he said.
The cuts would also make it hard for the government to achieve the best results for Australia at international negotiations.
"When the government prepares to go to the conferences annually where they discuss climate change policy – and negotiate, as they did in Paris this last year – they need advice," he said.
"And I think cutting the efforts at the CSIRO will undermine the government's ability to really represent its own self-interest at those negotiations because they would lose the advice of the experts there."
Paul Durack, also from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said it did not make sense to cut from work on understanding climate change in order to shift towards work on adaptation and mitigation.
He said the IPCC process demonstrated the problem with that logic. In that process, the IPCC publishes three chapters or "working groups". The first is on the physical basis of climate change. The other two, which focus on the impacts and how to mitigate and adapt to them, are published later, and rely on the information published in the first chapter.
"The way it occurs very much highlights the dependence between these different working groups and the requirement to actually have physical information about the climate system," Durack said. "You can't do these things independently and they're very much dependent on one another."
David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne, told the committee the decision would be wasting millions of dollars of investment in expertise.
"My estimate is it is of the order of 1,000 person years of experience or more," he said. "And that's at least $100m of investment. And it appears to be thrown away or put into a rubbish bin."
Snow Barlow, from the University of Melbourne, works on climate change adaptation and mitigation. He told the committee it was a mistake to take resources away from monitoring and modelling climate change to focus on adaptation and mitigation: "It's a catastrophic failure in public policy."
In a hearing on Wednesday, the same committee heard the CSIRO's international reputation had already been "trashed" by the announced cuts, and a new science body was needed.
Earlier, a report by the Climate Council said the cuts would breach Australia's obligations under the recent Paris climate change agreement.
The CSIRO's chief executive, Larry Marshall, said in a radio interview last month the reaction to his planned cuts was more like religion than science, and compared climate science with the oil lobby in the 1970s. He later apologised for the reference to religion.
Links
- CSIRO's global reputation 'trashed' and new science body needed, Senate told
- CSIRO chief confirms climate modelling and monitoring jobs to be halved
- Australia's chief scientist says he was not warned about CSIRO climate cuts
- CSIRO climate cuts attack a national treasure when we need it most
- CSIRO climate cuts will cost Australia dear, world scientists warn government
- Senior CSIRO scientist derides chief executive's claim climate change is 'answered'
- After climate cuts at CSIRO, who should we ask about global warming impacts on Australia? Netflix?
- CSIRO chief says row over climate science cuts 'more like religion than science'
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