CSIRO Aspendale staff start receiving redundancy notices as federal funding for climate science set for another 50% cut in 2017

The job ax has begun to fall on CSIRO climate scientists, some of whom walked out on CEO Larry Marshall when he had a meeting with them in February to announce the federal cuts on the agency’s budget. Among the first to be affected are staff at the Aspendale laboratories in south-east Melbourne.

ABC reports that based on estimates, 32 climate scientists from the Aspendale facility – set up after World War II to improve weather forecasting – would lose their jobs. Some of them have received redundancy notices.

A total of 74 jobs from CSIRO’s Ocean and Atmosphere Division are expected to be the casualty of the federal budget cut on climate science programmes. According to Marshall, funding for climate science has gone down by 70 percent in the last three years and expected to be reduced by another 50 percent in the next financial year.

Indicating that his hands are tied on the budget cuts and redundancies, Marshall says, “It would be great if we can fund everybody … But given the finite envelope – both appropriation, government funding and external revenue – we’ve got to shift the emphasis from the measurement and modelling to the mitigation and adaptation.”

Marshall believes all of CSIRO “has outstanding science,” which makes the decision of cutting jobs hard for him in his 18 months of heading the science agency. The CEO says he plans to visit the Aspendale facility before it shutters.

For Dr Graeme Pearman, an ex-CSIRO scientist who helped establish its climate science group, he considers the impending closure and job cuts to something like vandalism. “The agenda is this belief structure, this ideology, that somehow or other people who don’t actually even know how science operates are audacious enough to say, ‘well science should just be about wealth generation,’” Pearman says.

The best argument in favour of not cutting CSIRO funding is that climate change played a role in the storms that battered eastern Australia on Monday, killing several people in flooding. In an article in ABC, Acacia Pepler, from the University of South Wales, writes that while she sees no significant change in the intensity of the most severe east coast low each year, based on the models studied, warming oceans would provide more moisture.

It would result in a seven percent increase in intense rainfall for every degree of global warming. Pepler warns that more properties would become vulnerable to storm surges and the impact of a given storm surge is expected to be worse.