Cutting The Public Good Out Of CSIRO: We All Lose

Fairfax - Will Steffen*

The sign in front of CSIRO's long-time headquarters on Limestone Avenue in Canberra proudly proclaimed "Australian Science, Australia's Future". With the savage cuts to the organisation's public good research, that lofty ambition now appears to be abandoned and trashed.
CSIRO CEO Larry Marshall believes that transferring public funding away from the public good to support widgets and spin-offs will deliver more value towards Australia's future. But does that simplistic assertion stack up under careful analysis?

Professor Will Steffen. Photo: Alex Ellinghausen / Fairfax

We know that public investment in research on average pays off at least five to one in terms of the public good over a decade or so, even discounted to present value. In comparison, a typical angel investment portfolio averages 2.5 times return on capital put into start-ups, and venture capital funds not much better on average, at least over the past 10 years. Of course, someone has to support new businesses, but it is clearly not a good use of public research funding.
In fact, the drastic cuts at CSIRO are part of an alarming worldwide trend towards dismissing or misunderstanding the value of public good research. This misguided trend was given an added boost in Australia by the actions of the Abbott government, the shades of which are playing out through the disruptions at CSIRO at the moment, but has ramifications for us all.

Does transferring public funding away from the public good stack up? 

Let's be clear what we mean by "public good" as the term can easily be twisted to suit a variety of purposes.
The public good has a clear formal definition around benefits that are not easily privatised nor readily valued in any market, so that everyone benefits from them but no one feels responsible for them. Issues such as clear air, national parks, public health and a stable climate spring to mind.
In reality there is a grey area, as the benefits that tourism gets from national parks can be privatised to some extent, and private benefits from a new vaccine may nonetheless deliver public outcomes. Often the distinction is as much between short and long-term benefits as much as strictly private and public outcomes.
However, the voting public generally has a pretty good sense of how they get value from public good research. They can see where businesses are really in it for a quid, compared to where researchers are delivering something that helps society and which no company would invest in.
Indeed, such issues were clearly a major part of the mission of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation when it was established over 80 years ago, and remain a firm part of its legislative base. In fact, it has been the public outcry in support of its public good research record that has always protected CSIRO when ideologues have sought to dismantle it in the past.
It is thus particularly dismaying to see what is being dismantled in CSIRO at present. There has been much public outcry about the gutting of climate science in the Oceans and Atmosphere unit, but, much more quietly and controversially, its Land and Water section is slated to lose just as many staff from critical public good areas of research in cities and landscapes. Many of these staff are Canberra-based.
Consider cities. Globally everyone knows cities are crucial, with more than 50 per cent of the human population now urban, growing at a rate that requires the equivalent of a new city of two million people to be built every week for the next 20 years. Australia is on the cusp of this trend with nine out of ten people already living in our cities.
Yet there are profound public good questions to ask about our urbanisation. Cities are currently planning for growth (with all its challenges) that is only half that actually expected in Australia this century: where should the other 20 million people go once the current cities get full? Where will they live and work? How will they travel around the city? Will there be adequate green (living) infrastructure?
Here's another complex challenge. Our capital cities all say they want to halt urban sprawl, yet all of our cities are sprawling as fast as ever: what incentives are need to overcome this seemingly inexorable trend?
Last year, for the first time a conservative government in Australia established an urban portfolio to deal with these sorts of issues nationally (previous Labor governments have established such portfolios, and the conservatives have subsequently abandoned them). Yet in the midst of all of these trends, CSIRO's senior management is dismantling the urban systems capability within the organisation. This does not make sense.
Gutting CSIRO's urban research capacity leaves a gaping hole nationally that universities cannot fill. The complex, system-level challenges of rapid urbanisation create big picture policy questions, needing highly interdisciplinary teams to address them. By their nature, universities are not well equipped to deal with these challenges as they often run on three-year funding cycles and are built around individuals or small research teams. While such research is valuable, it is CSIRO's unique niche to lead the longer-term, highly interdisciplinary, large team research that these "wicked problems" demand.
In fact, university and CSIRO research are complementary, and create an effective national-level research system. Gutting the CSIRO component also reduces the ultimate value of university-based research.
Urbanisation isn't the only complex, long-term research challenge. Consider our landscapes. We all know that Australia has its own remarkable landscapes and biota, its own challenging soils and variable – and now rapidly changing – climate. Managing these issues is not something we can take off the shelf from elsewhere in the world. Indeed, our expertise in dryland agriculture is just one of the examples of where our solutions to our local challenges have given our rural industries an edge, providing advice and investment in drylands around the world.
But it is not just that good landscape management is critical to maintaining returns from agriculture. A healthy Great Barrier Reef and other reserves underpin a significant part of our tourist industry – delivering $1 billion a year just in Victoria. Healthy coastlines mean less damage in extreme weather and storm surges. Healthy waterways mean less need to invest in expensive water treatment infrastructure (for example, New York City spent $1.5bn on catchment protection to save itself at least $6 billion in water treatment). In fact, healthy environments directly support our human health and mental well-being – national parks in Victoria contribute an estimated $200 million a  year in avoided healthcare costs alone. On top of all this are the many important benefits to our wellbeing that cannot be easily quantified in a monetary sense.
Understanding our landscapes and the ecosystem services they provide in order to manage them well not only pays dividends directly here in Australia, but it also provides immense comparative advantages for our businesses. Yet once again, CSIRO is disinvesting​ in the landscape management skills in the organisation. Does this make any sense?
Research on urban systems and on landscape ecosystem services are two key areas of public good research that are being destroyed in CSIRO at present. Yet these are precisely the areas where the interdisciplinary capability to bring together large teams to work on national challenges is the specific leadership role that CSIRO can and has previously played. In fact, while research in CSIRO generally is conservatively estimated to return $5 for every $1 invested, research in Land and Water in particular has been estimated at double this – $10 for every $1 invested – in line with other analyses of similar work. Furthermore, these are also two of the most significant areas in which responses to climate change, both mitigation and adaptation, must play out.
The public can obviously see that these cuts are crazy. Surely these decisions must be reversed. Of course CSIRO management may say that CSIRO cannot do this alone, without active investment in public good research from government. But surely political parties of all persuasions should be interested in making investments of public funds with such assured returns.

*Will Steffen is emeritus professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University.

Global Warming Gives Science Behind Nuclear Winter a New Purpose

New York Times - Clyde Haberman

Carl Sagan and other Cold War scientists once feared that a nuclear war could plunge the world into a deadly ice age. Three decades later, does this theory still resonate?

With global temperatures rising inexorably, some scientists and national security theorists have pondered cooling things down by tinkering mechanically with the planet's climate.
The goal of this geoengineering would be to create an effect not unlike when clouds suddenly block the sun and chill a warm afternoon. Average surface temperatures might be held down by a few degrees worldwide, these experts suggest — enough, they theorize (maybe with fingers crossed), to stave off environmental cataclysm.
How to do this? With smoke and mirrors. For real.
One idea is to launch giant mirrors into space, where they would bounce back some of the sun's energy. Another suggestion involves spraying ocean water into the air to whiten clouds and thereby increase their capacity to deflect sunlight. Then there is a widely discussed plan to pump sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere. Those particles, too, would reflect the sun's radiation back toward space, comparable to the effects of natural phenomena like volcanic eruptions. The haze created by the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines in 1991 spread so widely that average global temperatures dropped by nearly one degree for more than a year.
Let's set aside these proposals for a moment to first note that the aerosols plan faintly echoes a terrifying scenario that informs the latest offering from Retro Report, a series of video documentaries that study the continuing impact of major news stories of the past.
In the 1980s, fears took hold that a war-prone world lived in the shadow of catastrophic global cooling, a potential disaster called nuclear winter. Perhaps no one was more effective in warning of the peril than the astronomer and science communicator Carl Sagan, who died in 1996. In 1983, Dr. Sagan and four other scientists published their conclusion that an all-out nuclear war, presumably between the United States and the Soviet Union, could doom humankind. The horror would go well beyond the immediate devastation of cities and mass deaths in the hundreds of millions. What would follow would be a winter so severe that the living might well envy the dead.
With forests and scores of cities set ablaze, enough dust and smoke would be hurled into the upper atmosphere to blot out the sun. The darkening would last for many months, most oppressively in the Northern Hemisphere, though the Southern Hemisphere would hardly be immune. Beneath the sun-blocking canopy, surface temperatures would plummet, conceivably by as much as 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Plant and animal life would die. Famine would spread across the globe.
Climatic change could become climactic change. In the ominous concluding words of a paper published in the journal Science in December 1983, "the possibility of the extinction of Homo sapiens cannot be excluded."
But soon enough, scientist skeptics weighed in. The temperature drop would not be as precipitous as Dr. Sagan and Company had forecast, they said. Nor would the quantities of combustible material — plastics, wood, petroleum, vegetation — be as vast as first thought. For some scientists, "nuclear winter" was a good deal less probable than a milder "nuclear autumn." The end was not nigh. By 1990, even those who had issued the earlier doomsday warnings took a step back.
One of them was Richard P. Turco, a physicist who had coined the phrase "nuclear winter." Not that menace no longer loomed, he asserted. "Essentially, what we say is that the basic physics we proposed turned out to be correct, although the magnitude of the effects has been moderated somewhat," Dr. Turco said in 1990.
Actually, he said, he never believed humankind was likely to be wiped out. "That was a speculation of others, including Carl Sagan," he said. "My personal opinion is that the human race wouldn't become extinct, but civilization as we know it certainly would."
Some might see an element of the surreal in a debate about whether the long-range effects of a full-scale nuclear war would be (a) indescribably horrible or (b) cosmically ruinous. That said, the specter of nuclear winter helped spur major reductions in the superpowers' nuclear arsenals, by making the utter folly of nuclear warfare plainer than ever. Any country that dared to launch an attack would inevitably wind up under the same toxic gauze as everyone else, and thus commit national suicide.
The worldwide inventory of nuclear weapons is now believed to be about one-fourth what it was in the early 1980s. Last year, the total stood at an estimated 15,850, with more than 90 percent of them in the hands of the United States and Russia, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, which tracks the armaments.
But there are also now more nuclear-armed countries than in the 1980s — nine of them, by the institute's count: the United States, Russia, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Not all are paragons of rational behavior. And not every scientist is convinced that the world is out of danger.
It would not take an American-Russian conflagration to inflict enormous environmental damage, said Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University.
"A 'small' nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each using 50 Hiroshima-size bombs (far less than 1 percent of the current arsenal), if dropped on megacity targets in each country would produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history," Dr. Robock wrote in 2011 in the journal Nature. Temperatures, he continued, "would be lower than during the 'Little Ice Age' (1400-1850), during which famine killed millions."
Back to geoengineering. Pumping chemicals into the upper atmosphere would amount to a mild — one can only hope extremely mild — version of a nuclear winter effect. Ideas along this line have been around for a while, but putting them into practice has proved elusive. For starters, who gets to choose what method, if any, should be employed? Do all countries have a say? How much would the project cost?
And how does anyone keep the immutable rule known as the Law of Unintended Consequences from kicking in? "Anything built by humans and operated by humans can fail," Dr. Robock told Retro Report. "So would you trust our only planet to this?"
A concern often expressed about geoengineering is that it might undermine efforts to achieve the fundamental goal of keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere. Would people change their carbon-spewing ways if they believed some quick fix existed?
Similarly, in the hypothesizing over the extent of climate change in the aftermath of a nuclear war, might not a more useful focus be how to keep the bombs from falling in the first place? Thoughts turn to "WarGames," a 1983 film in which a supercomputer, thinking that it is merely caught up in an exercise, nearly touches off global nuclear warfare.
"A strange game," the computer finally concludes, to everyone's relief. "The only winning move is not to play."

Links

• Climate Policy's Advocates Take Page From Same-Sex Marriage Playbook
• The Danger of a Runaway Antarctica
• Obama and President Xi of China Vow to Sign Paris Climate Accord Promptly

March Temperatures Sets Record As Hottest Ever, Bureau of Meteorology Says

ABC News - Sara Phillips

Summary Australia's March mean temperature warmest on record at 1.70 °C above average National March mean minimum temperatures warmest on record, with an anomaly of +1.97  °C National March mean maximum temperature anomaly +1.42 °C, the seventh-warmest on record Australia's warmest March day on record, on the 2nd Prolonged March heatwave affects many parts of Australia Australian rainfall for March was close to average overall South Australia recorded its seventh-highest March rainfall (163% above average)

You could be forgiven for not noticing the end of summer — March was a hot one. Information released by the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) indicated it was the hottest March on record, reaching 1.7 degrees Celsius above the long-term average.
This eclipsed the 1986 record of 1.67 degrees above the average, BoM said in its monthly climate report.
The unusual heat was particularly noticed in the Top End, where the failure of the monsoon allowed temperatures to creep up.
This, coupled with a high pressure system off the east coast of Australia, caused a heatwave strong enough to prompt BoM to issue a special climate statement about the phenomenon.
March 2 became Australia's hottest day on record.
Averaged across the country, it reached a top of 38 degrees Celsius.
There was no relief overnight either with minimum overnight temperatures the warmest ever, smashing the 1983 record by 0.83 degrees.
The hot March came on the back of the hottest February globally, and the hottest year for 2015.
A strong El Nino weather pattern prevailed at the start of the year, which has traditionally been associated with hotter weather.
Although the El Nino is weakening, the heat effects are expected to persist for a few more months.
Climate change is thought to be adding to the unusual heat.
The scorching start to 2016 prompted Australia's chief scientist Alan Finkel to warn that the world was "losing the battle" against climate change.


Links

• February 2016 the hottest month on record: climate scientist
• Record heat 'shows world losing battle against climate change'
• 2015 'shattered' world temperature records

Decision On Coal Mine 'Defies Reason'

Fairfax - Tim Elliott

The decision on Sunday to approve mining leases for Queensland's Carmichael coal mine is akin to "evil", according to one of the world's foremost marine scientists.
"It defies reason," said Dr Charlie Veron, former chief scientist at the Australian Institute of Marine Science. "I think there is no single action that could be as harmful to the Great Barrier Reef as the Carmichael coal mine."

"It defies reason": Coral expert Dr Charlie Veron. Photo: Angela Wylie

The $21.7 billion project, which involves mine, rail and port facilities, would allow Indian multinational Adani to extract 60 million tonnes of thermal coal a year from the Galilee Basin, in central Queensland. Adani claims the mine will generate 5000 jobs during construction and more than 4000 during operation, with construction to begin next year.
The decision to grant the leases came after "extensive government and community scrutiny", according to Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk.
"I know the people of north and central Queensland will welcome this latest progress for the potential jobs and economic development it brings closer for their communities," she said.
But conservationists say the mine is an environmental disaster waiting to happen, citing particular risks to the Great Barrier Reef.
"It's an extraordinary decision, especially coming at a time when the Great Barrier Reef is experiencing its worst ever coral bleaching event," Australian Conservation Foundation chief executive Kelly O'Shanassy said. "We know the bleaching is because of global warming, and Carmichael will only make that worse."
By Adani's own figures, the mine and its coal will emit more than 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide over its lifetime. "The pollution from this mine is so big that it cancels the pollution cuts the Turnbull government committed to at the Paris Climate Summit," Ms O'Shanassy said.
The impact of such emissions could be terminal to the reef, according to Dr Veron. "The reef is obviously in dire straights, irrespective of what anyone says, and that's blindly obvious.
"There is extraordinary disconnect between science and the political action. Politicians think the mine is good because it's good for economy, but we are selling out the next generation of Australians as fast as we can go."
Dr Veron has devoted his life to studying coral reefs: he discovered more than 20 per cent of the world's coral species, and has been likened by Sir David Attenborough to a modern day Charles Darwin.
"Roughly a third of marine species have parts of their life cycle in coral reefs," Dr Veron said. "So if you take out coral reefs you have an ecological collapse of the oceans. It's happened before, mass extinctions through ocean acidification, and the main driver of that is CO₂."
Dr Veron recently travelled to Canberra to talk to government about the decline in the reef. "The politicians do listen to scientists, but that is the worst part of it," he said. "If this was all done out of sheer ignorance, that is sort of understandable. It's like child porn – you might say you don't know it exists, but if you know it exists and you do everything to promote it, then that's evil."
The granting of the Carmichael leases coincides with increased concerns over threats to Great Barrier Reef from land-based pollution, including sediments, nutrients and pesticides.
Australian Institute of Marine Science principal research scientist Dr Frederieke Kroon has told the ABC that government policies designed to keep the reef on UNESCO's World Heritage list are insufficient.
"Our review finds that current efforts are not sufficient to achieve the water quality targets set in the Reef 2050 Plan," she said.

Links

• Adani's Galilee Basin project mine leases approved
• Aerial reef surveys reveal coral bleaching