Of course it makes sense to biff out all the old deadwood involved in climate science after all if the world is going to hell in a hand basket why bother about climate science?
Just get on with start-ups that will make plenty of money for entrepreneurs and keep the good times rolling.
As the temperature creeps up to the level where human (and all other) life is unsustainable, we ( the 1%) can cower in our bunkers and count all our money.
We do not need scientists to tell us how bad it is going to be, we would ignore them anyway.
I am sure that if enough scientist effort is put into it we can probably convert coal into food and water as well as using it to cool the planet down.

Hi Don,

0.8 degrees per century doesn't sound all that much. Is that what all this has been about ?

And surely we should be doing both - measuring, modelling. etc., and devising programs to ameliorate, or take advantage of, any changing conditions ? Well, all three - monitoring, innovating and reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. Massive tree-planting across the North would do at least two of those at once, as well as taking advantage of increased rainfall in the North. Not to mention, lucrative lifelong employment for Aboriginal able-bodied people from the Pilbara to central Queensland.

If I were a farmer, I would be asking what is the CSIRO doing to produce new strains of grains or bananas or paw-paws or whatever, ideally which both produce more crop AND suck CO2 out of the atmosphere; what applied research is the CSIRO doing to improve water quality, or irrigation efficiency, pest control, etc.

In other words, why can't both sorts of work be carried on, monitoring and applied innovation ? As my dear old grandmother would have said, surely we can walk and fart at the same time ?

Cheers,

Joe

well said Loudmouth.
Don you continue to demonstrate why it's good that your no longer on any funding committees.
Google has this wonderful feature that you can see who else is associated with people. Guess what, whenever you do a search on scientist skeptical about global warming, you get the same small bunch of people almost universally aligned to right wing think tanks in the US.
As someone said recently "Quoting John Christy On Climate Change Is Like Quoting Dick Cheney On Iraq". The funniest bit though is their ( Johns and Roys) reluctance to show their working out.

Words fail me about these cuts and Aitkin's response so I will quote from others better qualified:

Andy Pitman from the University of New South Wales:

"What we don’t know is, over Australia, what the detailed pattern of rainfall change will be, how extremes will change, how much cyclones will intensify, how much heatwaves will intensify and a whole range of other things that are precisely what you need to know in order to adapt. And the closing down of Australia’s climate modelling capacity leaves Australia hopelessly exposed to the range of climate impacts we are likely to experience."

Tony Haymet, previously a policy director at the CSIRO and a director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in the US:

"Australian farmers and the fishing industry, the Royal Australian Navy, anyone who lives on the coast and worries about erosion or sea level rise, this is a kick in the guts to them because there are so many stakeholders and users of this CSIRO capability who not only need it now but are going to need it more in the next 30 years."

John Birmingham, columnist Canberra Times:

"They'll be roaring with laughter around the board table at Big Oil as they light themselves another fistful of stogies and wonder whether whether they can afford their own cutbacks to all of the pseudoscientific climate change denier foundations and institutes they've been funding for years."

Enough said

You will note that the email sent out to staff said that they had provided "climate change" existed or had occurred. Of course it had, but what was the change due to?

The problem for the global warming industrial complex that it has spent so long whipping up hysteria on global warming (27 years) and setting five and 10 year deadlines and the like, which are all now in the past, the industry now has to acknowledge that it is too late. If any of the forecasts are actually proven right by the passage of time, then the one option now is adaptation - efforts to cut emissions internationally have simply proved too difficult.

I have taken to ignoring climate change waffle. However, I would like to say that ALL jobs and ALL expenditures connected with the stupid idea that man can do anything about climate change should be cut to nil. The only money or effort put in should be in ADAPTING to climate change.