Hey, Malcolm Turnbull, Chris Pyne, Larry Marshall, Greg Hunt:
What the hell do you think you are doing?
We need our CSIRO climate scientists.
Wednesday, February 24, 2016
He..e..e..lp! We need our CSIRO climate scientists...
Sou | 9:49 AM Go to the first of 21 comments. Add a commentWe need our CSIRO climate scientists.
21 comments:
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I do not want to upset anyone but if one looks at the history of the rise and fall of all previous 'empires' the evidence shows that their fall had the same symptoms.
ReplyDeleteBefore the final decline was obvious the populous chased after myths and superstitions to alleviate or condone their ignorance. These same ignorant masses ignored their wiser elders and knowledge gained through careful analysis.
We now have an advanced society where our leaders have NO IDEA of what is rational and evidence based decision processes. It is all about exciting the fears and hate of the populace.
This is mirrored in the corporations where the short term gain for exorbitant bonuses for the top executives are at the price of job losses and running the enterprise into bankruptcy.
Bert
I'm not much of one for 'End Times' narratives, but with decisions as blatantly Stupid as this one in this country, a consequence of having actually voluntarily elected an idiot as palpable and egregious as Abbott, and with the US on the cusp of a President Trump, it's pretty hard not to conclude that Anglophone 'civilization', at least, really is teetering on the edge of terminal decline...
DeleteThere is an obvious alternative view Bill. That is unscrupulous leaders will use masses of under informed idiots to further their own short term gains. These same idiots will vote against their own best interests.
DeleteEnd times that the 'faithful' believe in is ordained by their chosen god. These twits cannot see that they are responsible for their own future by their actions. Not sitting there like dumb sheep.
When our "advanced society' falls down to the level of people who are now on what we call subsistence we will find we just cannot compete at that level! We have no idea hoe to even start!
Bert
This potholer54 video, that just popped up on an ATTP thread, seems apt.
DeleteIt is legitimate to ask if the internet has become the greatest tool for collective delusion ever created. That's not all it is, of course, but the ability for people who 'just know' that scientific and/or rational authority is wrong to get together and mutually reinforce their stupidities has become a force of history...
Same diagnosis here.
DeleteAnd it's bl**dy time to upset people about it, too.
Well made video. Good idea to make a post out of it. Have done the same.
ReplyDeleteThe LNP government's talking heads keep saying that this is a "CSIRO organisational decision", as if there's nothing political involved, but there's only one person in the CSIRO organisation that thinks that destroying our national capacity to do fundamental climate science is necessary - and that is the government's man in CSIRO, the CEO Larry Marshall. Marshall is not a scientist, he's an entrepreneur who isn't particularly interested in scientific understanding; he's only interested in commercialising people's ideas. As such he is also the perfect agent for a radically-right wing and anti-rational group of politicians who are interested only in feathering the nests of their corporate buddies and future, post-politics employers.
ReplyDeleteThis move to hamstring the CSIRO's climatology capacity has been a long time in the making. One simply needs to consider the chronology of the LNP's antipathy to the science, well mapped in the long memory of the interweb. Interestingly Chris Wright, Professor of Organisational Studies at the University of Sydney, said as much a few weeks ago.
Marshall and the LNP have the response to human-caused climate change completely arse-up. The actions required are simple, and technologically possible now. They are informed by the science that has been conducted to date, and that science needs to continue in order to track the effectiveness of (any) responses.
The notion that now only adaptation research is required without the fundamental research to inform it is completely pie-in-the-sky: it would be like speeding down a highway at night without headlights. Without the ongoing research we will have no idea where we are headed, and if we have no idea that things are not conforming to what would rapidly become historic understanding we cannot know how to “adapt”: if the climate system continues to change without our knowledge or understanding, how on Earth can adaptation be effective? To what would it be that we are actually adapting?
This “learn to adapt” line is a political one, not a scientific one. Human-caused global warming must be mitigated – stopped – as anything less will make “adaptation” measures obsolete even before they are rolled out. And without the pivotal fundamental research of the CSIRO Australia and the Southern Hemisphere (and thus the whole planet) are driving down that highway at night with just that interior light on, seeing only what’s in the vehicle and not what’s in front of it. The international community understands this, which is why 3,000 scientists from around the globe signed an open letter to protest against the destruction of one of the best scientific groups in the world.
There can be no adaptation without mitigation, and there can be no mitigation without understanding how the climate system is responding to contemporary human activities. Larry Marshall is the LNP’s saboteur in a radical and sociopathic right-wing political campaign to benefit a small group of businesses at the expense of the rest of the country, of the world, and of the future of cohesive civilisation and of biodiversity on Earth.
Heh, I only watched the video after I typed the above. It says what I tried to, just far more succinctly.
DeleteI am so disappointed in Turnbull. I understand that he has to placate the RW rump of the Parliamentary Liberal Party but this is beyond that pale. Let's make the CSIRO cuts costly. Don't wait for an election to be announced, target seats like Corangamite today.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
ReplyDeleteThat's easy for you to say.
DeleteThat is some heavy door at the end of the video.
ReplyDeleteI've documented how the Harper Administration profoundly crippled Canada's Earth science. Now what? … how can folks from around the world exert any moral pressure on Marshall, Turnbull and such? It's one thing to be aware of it, it's another to be able influence the destruction of knowledge that these Masters of the Universe have dreamt up this time.
ReplyDeleteDocumenting Stephen Harper's Administration's Attack on Science
http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2016/02/documenting-harper-attack-canadian.html
Help Stop Larry Marshall from gutting Australia's CSIRO's climate science program.
http://whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com/2016/02/marshall-gutting-csiro-climate-science.html
There is this petition, but they need more I bet:
Australia's Climate Research Is Far From Done
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1oNpMWOSWMNdMfISN-EnvC8zHJ51LoVHgU1vBzUGvpq8/viewform?c=0&w=1
Larry Marshall and the political animals who are abetting him are carrying out a crime against humanity [1] but will such a charge fly?
ReplyDelete[1] As are any from governments elsewhere on the globe who are engaged in activities which are against the spirit of COP21.
We have a similar situation building here in the UK. The government's poured large amounts of money into the MET office during the current Climate Scare - this has, in the main, been squandered on "Modeling" and "Modeling Personnel" and the effort has demonstrably failed.
ReplyDelete"All models are wrong, but some are useful"
Well, what to do if they're not even useful? Best outcome for all is for these people to re-train and do something productive.
KBO.
DeleteYour comment does not even pass the sniff test.
It's no problem. The UK gets flooded for it worse every year and the price of that is a different number.
DeleteSwim on KBO.
"...been squandered on "Modeling" and "Modeling Personnel" and the effort has demonstrably failed."
ReplyDeleteWrites KBO. Is this the same KBO who waltzed into a comment thread at DeSmogblog with asinine opinion regurgitated from The Australian and ClimateDepot?
OK, how long before the next election?
ReplyDeleteWe don't know. Later this year, but the date will be determined by Turnbull's flat-lining popularity and the rate at which it's plummeting, whether they can get through the proposed (pseudo-populist Right micro-party crushing) Senate electoral reform measures quickly, and whether they opt for a double-dissolution (both houses completely dissolved), symbiotically dependent on the above. Turnbull's popularity has fallen flat as is his government's basically turned out to be Abbott's with a glibber figurehead, and he's too afraid of the Right to rope in the noisy, bigoted utter-nutters in his party; people who would be well-and-truly happy in the Trump camp...
DeletePosted elsewhere but it deserves to be included on this thread too...
ReplyDelete-----------
R the Anon.
You've pre-empted everything that I was going to type last night after a little bird told me about the meeting yesterday afternoon, but which I couldn't post due to ongoing conversations...
It bears repeating though...
Larry Marshall did not deign to attend the hearing - he has minions to do that sort of menial work, apparently.
There was not a Liberal or National senator to be seen - apparently the gutting of the national capacity to do climatology and oceanography is not of concern to the conservative political parties of Australia.
Private email was used to orchestrate the gutting of CSIRO's climatology and oceanography. In future years this may become a part of the hindsight acknowledgement of a scandal involving right-wing and vested-interest moves to silence the voices of urgency and scientific reason for the sake of a small cabal's self-interest and profit.
The Federal government is planning to "offshore" the research, so it's still going to cost - it's just that it won't involve inconvenient Australian voices, Australian jobs, or top-quality Australian expertise that understands the Southern Hemisphere better than anyone else.
Any impartial, informed and rational scrutiny will understand the Marshall/LNP plan to be one that is a last-ditch effort to silence the evidence that would otherwise spell the doom of the fossil fuel industry, if only that evidence can be given the attention that it deserves. Oh, with the side benefit of raiding the nation's science budget to line the pockets of business entrepreneurs in a fashion that does not result in maximum benefit to the public, nor in optimal response to the issue of climate change.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Marshall and the LNP are treasonously shooting the messenger so that they can profit from the actions of the enemy's agents. They're happy for their country to lose the war, and for their population to suffer and even die prematurely, because they'll be alright mate...
Australians should be out in the streets deploring this cynical move to destroy their futures, but it seems that the country is simply going to drop their collective trousers and allow Marshall and the LNP to bugger them and the planet senseless.