Grim Prospects: The Shake-Up Of Australia's Climate Science

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The fate of the 'sentinel of the southern hemisphere' is a pointer to how Australia's climate research will fare in a funding world that has lately turned more hostile.

Cape Grim: The future of climate science in Australia hangs in the balance. Photo: John Woudstra

Forty years ago next month Paul Fraser and three other CSIRO scientists towed a hardy NASA-built caravan chock with sensitive detecting equipment to Cape Grim on the pristine windswept tip of north-west Tasmania.
The make-shift facility quickly made its mark, detecting ozone-depleting chemicals in the atmosphere as they blew past in the stiff Roaring Forties. Over the decades since, the site also tracked the relentless rise of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide.
Researchers shed the caravan in 1981, replacing it with more permanent structures. The site is now "the sentinel of the southern hemisphere" and one of the top three in the world, says Mary Voice, president of the Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society.

Cape Grim in the early days: men in a van. Photo: CSIRO

If the gas collection and analysis were to cease, the emergence of new, ozone-eating or other harmful chemicals "might be missed" – let alone the tracking of gases that are heating up the planet, she says.
That Cape Grim's fate – and much of Australia's climate research – hangs in the balance surprises many just months after the country signed up to a global effort in Paris to limit global warming to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels.

It also comes amid a record-breaking heat wave acoss south-eastern Australia and international reports that January and February smashed global heat records for those months.

Stocking 40 years of gas samples from Cape Grim, at CSIRO's Aspendale centre. Photo: Supplied

The wrangling has been prompted by CSIRO's decision five weeks ago to cull as many as 100 scientists from its Oceans & Atmosphere division as part of 350 job cuts.
"Australia turns it back on climate science," was the New York Times editors' take a week ago.
CSIRO wants to steer resources to limiting and adapting to climate change, while cutting staff involved in monitoring and modelling by half.

CSIRO's GASLab at Aspendale, on Melbourne's sandbelt. Photo: Supplied

CSIRO says the university sector could take up the slack, but their funding is typically short-term. For instance, the seven-year funds for the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science - which takes in five universities including UNSW and Monash - run out at the end of 2017.
While CSIRO chiefs have pledged to spare Cape Grim, Fraser said in a submission to a Senate committee examining the cuts that the modelling and measuring capabilities of gases would "be unable survive the proposed 50-100 per cent" cuts.
Relations with 25 leading global research institutions were also at risk if the Tasmanian site and its supporting CSIRO labs in Aspendale on Melbourne's south-east were to go. Under threat include "the world's most important archive" of background atmosphere, and one of CSIRO's most-decorated research teams, Fraser – now an honorary CSIRO fellow – wrote.
CSIRO's climate funds were already facing a squeeze. The Australian Climate Change Science Program, axed by the Abbott government, was worth $5 million to CSIRO and $2.5 million a year to the Bureau of Meteorology.
Its replacement program, due to kick in from July, delivers an annual $3 million and $1.2 million, respectively, with $800,000 earmarked to universities. 
CSIRO has already slashed its contribution this year to Cape Grim by four-fifths to $230,000 after months of bickering with its bureau partners over contracts.
Sources tell Fairfax Media the two agencies are now discussing the transfer of key CSIRO modelling staff and some of the Cape Grim-related roles to the bureau. Questions remain over whether funding will accompany the scientists – and how many will be retained.
Alarmed by the potential disintegration of Australia's climate research talent, leading scientists have been brainstorming more radical alternatives. One is the creation of a new standalone national research institute to provide long-term funding for climate prediction.
CSIRO, itself, doesn't rule out supporting such a centre, which might take the form of the UK Met Office's Hadley Centre.
"This is an option CSIRO is working through with various parties, both internal and external, to ensure important climate research and modelling is continuing and to maintain strong linkages to the adaptation and mitigation work that CSIRO wants to increase its focus on in future," a spokesman said.
The bureau's official line is that it "is one of a number of parties with an interest in climate science and we are engaging positively to support Australia's climate science capability".
One senior bureau scientist, though, is wary about his agency becoming the main home for climate research. "If it lives in BoM, the knives will come out again for the bureau," the scientist says, referring to attacks during the Abbott government.
While a long-shot, creating a separate centre and basing it in Hobart – home to Australia's antarctic science and support operations – could be a shrewd political move, the scientist says.
A senior government official agrees the creation of a new centre is unlikely at this point, with efforts concentrated instead on a smooth transition of resources to the bureau.
Fraser frets, though, about carving out CSIRO's climate units. Remaining related work, such as aerosols and reactive gas monitoring, "would end up with sub-critical mass and be very vulnerable" to future cuts, he tells Fairfax Media.
On the other hand, public-good science – which is of value even if customers aren't readily available – has been a dwindling proportion of CSIRO's work for years.
"Perhaps the only way out is to completely divest CSIRO [of the climate work] and give it to someone else," he says.

Links

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African Diet, Jobs Will Be Hit Hard by Climate Change

National Geographic - Tracie McMillan*

African farmers will lose much of their crops to global warming in the coming decades. Photograph by James L. Stanfield, NG Creative

Corn, beans and bananas could start to disappear from sub-Saharan Africa—where those crops are among the most important for local consumption—by century's end. The culprit? Climate change.
A new study of staple crops in that region, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, predicts that by 2025, 30 percent of land in the region currently cultivated for bananas, primarily in West Africa, will become unsuitable for the crop, say researchers with the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research. Bananas are significant for local consumption, say researchers.
Meanwhile, 60 percent of bean agriculture will cease to be productive by 2050, as will 41 percent of land currently dedicated to maize, the study says. Those crops are incredibly dominant in the sub-Saharan diet, featured in dishes ranging from githeri, a flavorful corn and bean stew, to ugali, a mush made of cornmeal and water.
Five other prominent crops—millet, sorghum, cassava, groundnut and yams—are expected to maintain production levels through 2100. Crops grown primarily for export, such as coffee, cocoa, and tea, were not studied.
The research marks the first quantification of crop "transformation"—planning for the inevitable decline of certain crops—in Africa, said lead researcher Julian Ramirez-Villegas, a research fellow at the University of Leeds. In addition to projecting crop viability through the century, researchers also describe a three three-stage process for managing the shift.
The research has serious implications for sub-Saharan Africa, said Ramirez-Villegas. Agriculture contributes nearly two-thirds of all employment in that region and food insecurity rates there are already the highest in the world. "It's kind of a combination of a lot of different vulnerabilities coalescing at the same time," said Ramirez-Villegas. "And, at the same time, agriculture is a key sector for africanAfrican livelihoods."
As those crops fail, farmers will need to adjust, either switching crops or, in extreme cases, give up agriculture altogether. And if crop outputs diminish, that could pressure sub-Saharan Africa, already a net importer of food, to rely even more on other countries to stay fed.
Much of the land being threatened by climate change will need to be "transitioned," said Ramirez-Villegas, and put to other use. While maize, which only became a staple in Africa over the last century, may no longer be as viable, it could be replaced with millet and sorghum, which are native to Africa (and tolerant of heat and drought), and would likely thrive. The other alternative, say researchers, could be swapping crop agriculture for another kind of farming, such as livestock. Kenyan farmers, for example, began exploring camel husbandry as a replacement for cattle—or leaving farming altogether.
Those changes would have a direct impact on the food security and diet of residents in sub-Saharan Africa. With the exception of bananas, the crops in the study are all grown primarily for domestic consumption.
"Most of the production [studied here] is consumed locally and sold in local markets, or produced for subsistence," said Villegas-Ramirez. "But African countries are also importing significant amounts of food."
Researchers plan to expand their research to explore additional substitute crops, said Villegas-Ramirez, as well as project the direct impact of changes in agriculture on the diet available to residents.

*Tracie McMillan is an independent journalist covering food and equity. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The American Way of Eating, and is a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

Links

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The More We Learn About Antarctica’s Past, The Scarier The Present Looks

Washington Post - Chris Mooney

A zodiac carrying a team of international scientists heads to Chile's station Bernardo O'Higgins in Antarctica in January 2015. (Natacha Pisarenko/AP)

For the second time in a month, leading scientists have closely tied the ancient history of the vast Antarctic ice sheet to a key planetary parameter that humans are now controlling — the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Last month, new research showed that during the Miocene era, some 14 to 23 million years ago, Antarctica gave up huge volumes of ice, equivalent to tens of meters of sea level rise, when levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are thought to have been around 500 parts per million. We're at a little over 400 parts per million now.
And now, new research in the journal Science goes back even farther, to the ancient era when the ice sheet's growth is believed to have originally begun, some 34 million years ago during a time period known as the Eocene-Oligocene boundary. And it finds that at this time, too, a fall in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels appears to have been involved in allowing glaciation and ice sheet growth.
"Before 33.6 million years ago, there was no ice, and CO2 was above 750, was above the threshold," said Simone Galeotti, lead author of the new study by a large international collaboration of authors, and a researcher at the Università degli Studi di Urbino in Italy. But then came a transitional period with lower carbon dioxide and a variable ice sheet — and then, 32.8 million years ago, carbon dioxide levels dipped below 600 parts per million, and the Antarctic ice sheet greatly expanded.
The research is based on a nearly kilometer-long core of deep ocean sediment taken from the western part of the Ross Sea, not far from the United States' McMurdo station. The distribution of key bits of rock in different layers of the core, said Galeotti, suggests that it wasn't until 32.8 million years ago, emerging from the warmth of the period known as the Eocene, that icebergs were breaking off of an ice sheet that stretched all the way to the Antarctic coast. These icebergs floated out into the sea and melted, and rocks or "clasts" carried in the ice fell to the sea floor, leaving clues that modern geologists can read.
"We see ice-rafted clasts reaching the drilling site only at 32.8 million years. Which says that before that time, the ice sheet was not fully developed," Galeotti said.
Before this period, in the Eocene climate — typically referred to as a "hothouse" world and occurring between 55.8 million and about 34 million years ago — Antarctica actually featured trees and vegetation. The Arctic was also extremely warm back then — alligators swam there.
The planet at the time did not have land-based ice and was far hotter than now, with much higher seas overall and much higher carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. This changed in the transition from the Eocene to the Oligocene, which ushered in a cooling that closely tracked declining levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — although it was also buffeted, over long time periods, by tweaks and changes to the Earth's orbit.
"This is one of the biggest climate changes that the planet has seen in the last 50 million years, when Antarctica went from being forested and vegetated, to really … it became glaciated at this Eocene-Oligocene boundary," said Rob DeConto, one of the study's co-authors and a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
In this context, the new research further tunes our understanding of how much carbon dioxide allows the ice sheet to grow or causes it to melt. "The ice sheet was particularly vulnerable between 33.6 and 32.8 million years ago, with the CO2 level between 750 and 600," Galeotti said.
That might still sound pretty far off from where we are now, but here's the catch. When the Antarctic ice sheet initially formed, scientists don't believe that it had one of its most distinctive current features — large portions, particularly in West Antarctica but also in key regions of East Antarctica, where ice is grounded deep below sea level.
That's because after the ice sheet formed, its huge and crushing weight deformed the land surface beneath it over time, allowing these particular areas to become submerged. And these regions, where ice is not on land but rather lies on a foundation deep beneath the sea, are expected to be vulnerable well before 600 parts per million of carbon dioxide levels are reached, Galeotti said.
"The part of the ice sheet now sitting below sea level is making this ice sheet even more vulnerable than the Eocene-Oligocene boundary ice sheet, because there are different mechanisms for melting," said Galeotti. Specifically, warm ocean water, or ocean currents, now have access to the ice sheet, which was not the case when it was fully on land.
Such differences between now and 34 million years ago, however, also signal a major caveat when drawing inferences linking Antarctica's ancient past to the present. After all, other processes than those associated with carbon dioxide may have further enhanced the growth of the Antarctic ice sheet back then — processes that are either no longer operative today or not really relevant because of the speed at which we are now changing the planet.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research shows what would happen if glaciers in West Antarctica melted. (Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research)

For instance, in an accompanying commentary in Science, Carolyn Lear of Cardiff University and Dan Lunt of the University of Bristol note that there have long been arguments that the tectonic widening of the Drake Passage, between South America and Antarctica, was involved in the original development of the Antarctic ice sheet, by allowing the continent to become more isolated. They now argue that this widening, by enabling the Antarctic circumpolar current and better connecting the Atlantic and the Pacific, may have also acted to help bury carbon dioxide in the ocean — which, in turn, would have simultaneously enhanced ice sheet growth.
We may be driving planetary carbon dioxide levels right now, but plate-tectonics is another matter — so there are clearly aspects of this story from the past that are not as relevant to the present.
And there's another caveat — studies of how the ice sheet changed over millions of years may or may not be relevant to the timescales that today's humans care about. What we really want to know is whether Antarctica is going to give up a major amount of ice in the next 100 years or  more. You can't directly answer that question based on the new study.
Still, the research suggests that the Antarctic ice sheet can do things that our computer simulations, alone, may not capture, said Thomas Wagner, program scientist for the cryosphere at NASA, who is familiar with the new study.
"We run all these ice sheet models for things like the IPCC report and sea level rise projections. And they're great, they represent an amazing integration of mathematics, cutting edge computing, and integration of disparate fields like ice physics and oceanography," Wagner said.
"But we also know from the geologic record that the big ice sheets undergo major, rapid changes from time to time that are difficult to capture in our models but can cause sea levels to rise very rapidly — as in more than five feet in 100 years. Results like this one — connecting Antarctica to atmospheric CO2 levels not far off from where we are now — are important because they tell us what the ice wants to do. It helps guide future modeling, gives us a new way to frame our current studies, and provides bounds for hazard assessment for sea level," he said.
As is often the case with major Antarctic research, the new study is also an example of international collaboration. The scientists involved are from Italy, the United States, New Zealand, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The ideas were hatched when the researchers came together for a summer program in paleoclimatology at Urbino in Italy, said Galeotti.
The bottom line, said DeConto, is that the new research is "just adding to the mountain of evidence that, when greenhouse gas concentrations were high in the past, climate was warmer, there was less ice" in Antarctica.  "And even in times when there were ice sheets when CO2 was higher than today, those ice sheets were variable; they grew and shrank."
The more we come to understand Antarctica's history, the more this continent, whose ice sheet is too big to even wrap our minds around, becomes relevant to our present.

Links

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• Antarctica could be much more vulnerable to melting than we thought
• Scientists confirm their fears about West Antarctica — that it's inherently unstable
• Scientists confirm that East Antarctica's biggest glacier is melting from below
• It's official: We can now say global warming made some weather events worse
• Next up from climate change: More polar bears on land, potentially running into humans
• Before his tragic death, nature photographer shot iconic images of climate change's threat
• China vowed to peak emissions by 2030. It could be way ahead of schedule
• What the Clinton-Sanders divide on fracking says about our energy future

CSIRO Climate Cuts 'A Catastrophic Failure Of Public Policy', Senate Told

The Guardian - Michael Slezak

US and Australian climate research experts say staff cuts will make it hard for Australia to achieve best policy results in international negotiations

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'

Study: Global Warming Set To Further Increase Inequality

Independent Australia - Tim Radford

As temperatures rise with climate change, the Earth's natural capital will change too − but there may be few winners, even among the wealthy. Tim Radford from Climate News Network reports.

(Image via Toles / Washington Post)

Climate change could seriously redistribute resources and reallocate wealth — but not in a fair way. In a reverse of the famous Robin Hood folklore, it could rob from the poor to give to the rich, according to researchers. Yet even the rich may not feel any richer.
In one clear instance, as scientists have repeatedly warned, fish stocks are likely to move away from the equator and towards the poles as the tropics heat up and expand.
This means that at least one valuable resource will move away from some of the world's poorest nations and in the direction of societies that are relatively wealthier — if only because economic power has for so long been vested in the temperate zones. And this shift will have economic consequences.
Dr Eli Fenichel, assistant professor of bioeconomics and ecosystem management at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in the U.S., says:

"People are mostly focused on the physical reallocation of these assets, but I don't think we've really started thinking enough about how climate change can reallocate wealth and influence the prices of those assets. We think these price impacts can be really, really important."

Only last month, Dr Fenichel identified a way of calculating a real cash value for what environmentalists call "natural capital".
Now he and other colleagues, in a study for Nature Climate Change, have started to think about where and for whom the cash might start accumulating. He has no immediate answer.
Says Dr Fenichel:

"We don't know how this will unfold, but we do know there will be price effects. Prices reflect quantity and scarcity, and natural capital is hard for people to move. It is just as inevitable as the movement of these fish species."

The researchers say cautiously that climate change, driven by greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels in the last century or so,

'... can reallocate natural capital, change the value of all forms of capital, and lead to mass redistribution of wealth.'

And it isn't obvious, they suggest, that even the better-off will always benefit from changes of natural capital, such as a shift in the fishing grounds. An influx of desirable species off the more northerly fishing ports could actually reduce the cash value of catches.
Dr Fenichel says:

"If the northern community isn't a particularly good steward or manager, they're going to place a low value on that windfall they just inherited. So the aggregate could go down. To be clear, the gainers here are clearly better off. They're just not more better off than the losers are worse off. The losers are losing much more than the gainers are gaining. And when that happens, it's not an efficient reallocation of wealth."

Climate scientists have frequently warned that climate change could hit the poorest hardest. For example, the world's drylands are likely to become more parched with climate change and many of the world's poorest people are already feeling stress.
Tropical forests and reefs are rich in the "natural capital" of biodiversity, but global warming also threatens some of this.
"We tend to think of climate change as just a problem of physics and biology," says co-author, Associate Professor Malin Pinsky, an ecologist at Rutgers University.

"But people react to climate change as well, and at the moment we don't have a good understanding of the impacts of human behaviour on natural resources affected by climate change."

Links

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• Cash is key to Paris climate talks success

CSIRO Looks To Britain To Outsource Climate Research

Fairfax - Peter Hannam | Adam Morton

Australia's climate research is in the spotlight after CSIRO revealed plans for deep cuts to modelling and monitoring research. Photo: NASA

CSIRO is considering outsourcing climate modelling work to Britain - a step a senior executive conceded would reduce Australia's strengths in the field.
Grilled by Labor and Greens senators at a Senate inquiry in Hobart over cuts to up to half its climate research workforce, CSIRO executive Alex Wonhas said the organisation was considering contracting some work to counterparts in the British Met Office.
"I don't think that I can credibly claim that everything [we are doing now] will continue," Dr Wonhas said. "There will be a reduction in our activity."

Alex Wonhas, a senior CSIRO executive, says contracting out climate work to Britain is an option. Photo: Supplied

It is understood CSIRO executives hope signing a contract with leaders in international climate change research at the Met Office will blunt international criticism of its climate research cuts.
That criticism included a New York Times editorial on Friday, which described the cuts as based on "a deplorable misunderstanding of the importance of basic research into what is arguably the greatest challenge facing the planet".
A CSIRO spokesman said the organisation was looking to deepen its existing collaboration with the Met Office, rather than outsourcing work. "It is part of consultation and discussions with stakeholders about how research in the climate area can be maintained and maximised in the future," he said.
In a sometimes testy exchange at the Senate inquiry, Dr Wonhas revealed agency officials had used private email addresses, outside the the CSIRO server, to discuss plans to cut climate and other programs ahead of the announcement.
The CSIRO spokesman later explained: "There was concern that distress may be caused to staff if options for staff reduction, which are not yet finalised, were leaked or distributed."
Opposition industry spokesman Kim Carr described the evidence of the CSIRO executives who appeared before the committee - Dr Wonhas, who oversees environment, energy and resources, and chief financial officer Hazel Bennett - as startling.
"It's extremely concerning that senior executives think they could increase the security of documents about the latest round of cuts by directing staff to use personal emails," he said.
"The motive might have been innocent, but it is just incredibly inappropriate and potentially a breach of the law."
The inquiry had earlier heard that managers at CSIRO's major research partners, including the Australian Antarctic Division and Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies, learnt of the cuts either just before or as they were publicly announced.
They agreed they had no idea what the ramifications of the cuts would be, but feared they could dismantle or dramatically reduce scientific programs in the Southern Ocean and Antarctica.
Institute of Marine and Antarctic Studies executive director Richard Coleman said: "I've had discussions with some of the key people at CSIRO in Hobart ... but they can't really tell me."
Senior CSIRO scientist John Church told the inquiry that CSIRO chief Larry Marshall's suggestion that climate change research was no longer needed was "incorrect, naive and misleading".
He said Australia had long been an attractive play to work for the world's leading scientists, but that had already begun to change since the announcement.
"Our reputation is now trashed internationally," Dr Church said. "We could not attract those people again at this time."
Appearing in a personal capacity, Dr Church and fellow CSIRO scientist Richard Matear questioned the leadership of the organisation, saying they did not appear to understand how science worked.
Dr Matear said of the cuts and the way they had been handled: "It's just a really crazy way to run a scientific organisation."
Committee chair Peter Whish-Wilson, a Greens Senator from Tasmania, said the hearing exposed the "catastrophically haphazard nature" of the decision-making process that led to the cuts.
He said the Australian Antarctic Division was still yet to be consulted on the cuts and about 50 doctoral students at the University of Tasmania did not know if their CSIRO co-supervisors would still have a job in coming weeks.
"The idea that CSIRO management are now looking to reduce the impact of the climate cuts by outsourcing climate modelling work to the UK is alarming," Senator Whish-Wilson said.
"How can Australia gain the innovation dividends from our investment by sending the work overseas?"
The Senate inquiry was jointly convened by the Greens and Labor. No Coalition Senators appeared on the committee on Tuesday. The next hearing is in Melbourne on Friday.

Links

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Latai Taumoepeau's 'Disaffected' Puts Climate Change Under The Spotlight

Fairfax - Elissa Blake

Latai Taumoepeau explores climate change in Disaffected, a new multi-disciplinary theatre work premiering at the Blacktown Arts Centre. Photo: Katy Green Loughrey

The best way to make people understand climate change, says performer-activist Latai Taumoepeau, is not to use maps, charts and diagrams. It is more immediate and more impactful, she says, to use the human body.
Taumoepeau is one of three performers exploring climate change in the Pacific region in Disaffected, new multi-disciplinary theatre work premiering at the Blacktown Arts Centre.
"Over the years, I've accumulated a lot of research from climate scientists and economists," says Taumoepeau. "It's such a huge issue on so many fronts. But I've come to the conclusion that the best thing I can do is to show people what it feels like to be impacted by climate change.
"What it feels like to have your homelands swamped. What it feels like to have to leave your land and culture behind, or to see the bones of your ancestors washed away."
Among other things in Disaffected, the human body becomes a metaphor for land and those Pacific nations facing inundation as sea levels rise over coming decades.
"We're trying to give the audience a way into ideas that are overwhelming," Taumoepeau explains. "We want them to come away with an awareness of the urgency of the issue."
Devised by Taumoepeau, who has Tongan heritage, Valerie Berry (an actor originally from the Philippines), Ryuichi Fujimura (a Japanese dancer) and director Kym Vercoe, Disaffected sees the Blacktown Arts Centre turned into a makeshift disaster shelter for an immersive exploration of what it is like at the frontline of climate change.
"It's going to be a very messy, visceral piece," says Vercoe. "The space is an old church hall and as soon as we saw it, we thought this is exactly the kind of place people are brought to in an emergency. It's perfect for taking the audience on an imaginative and emotional journey."
Instead of conventional seats, the room will be a sea of mattresses and tarpaulins, says Vercoe. "The audience is going to be in the same space as the performers while they unpack what it's like to be living in the kind of situation faced by people in the Philippines after [Typhoon] Haiyan, or by people in Fiji right now."
Disaffected is a blend of movement, dance, sound (composed by Tom Hogan) and material taken from interviews with people from Kiribati, the Cook Islands and the Philippines.
"The voices of those communities and what they have told us has very much influenced the piece," Vercoe says. "We are representing the whole Pacific region in this work. The cast is also bringing their own cultural backgrounds to the piece as well as their Australian sensibilities to the performance. So we have people who know what it is to live in relative privilege and wealth in Australia who also have strong ties to the region."
In some ways Disaffected draws on the practices developed by Vercoe with the Sydney performance company Version 1.0.
"But Version was a totally collaborative set up, so me calling the shots as director is a very different experience for me," Vercoe says. "So is working with people with a very strong movement and physical theatre background. But what I've always tried to do in my work is to unlock the doors for people to understand what is going on around them."
Vercoe hopes Disaffected will lead its audience to consider Australia's leadership role in the region and affirm the need for the country to ramp up its efforts in dealing with the effects of climate change.
"We're experiencing record heat and humidity, stronger storms and heavier rains. We've seen records being broken everywhere. But I don't think Australians can say we really understand the harsh reality of climate change. For some people in the Pacific region, life has become a never-ending cycle of devastation, rebuilding, and devastation again."
Disaffected is at Blacktown Arts Centre March 17-20.