Director of CSIRO's Climate Program Certain Australia's Drying Out While Former Head of CSIRO's Atmospheric Research Warns Business. (September 6, 2006)

    The muzzling of CSIRO scientists took something of a hit earlier this week when Dr Bryson Bates, the director of the CSIRO's climate program told the ABC's Rebecca Keating, "I think we're certainly seeing drying going on across southern Australia and the eastern seaboard at the moment. Temperatures are also rising right across the continent - we've seen a rise in the order of about 0.7 degrees so far."

Dr Bates went on to discuss his reasoning, "Climate modelling experiments that have been done in recent years ... quite clearly demonstrate that if you want to explain this temperature rise we've seen since about 1960, you have to include an increasing concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. [Also] it's becoming clearer with each release of these [Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change] reports about every five or six years that climate change is already happening and there is a human fingerprint to this."

Dr Bates also told Keating that he sees the naysayers as playing a useful role as Devil's advocates, "By criticising the science [they put pressure on] the scientists who are trying to advocate climate change... to make well-considered arguments and I think that's a useful role. [But] if we wait until we get full scientific certainty, we will be too late. The challenge of adaptation will become more difficult the longer we wait."

He went on to illustrate:

In this part of the country [Queensland] annual rainfall won't change that much but there will be a slight reduction probably in spring.

But certainly across southern Australia it will be quite a bit drier than it is now.

[And in south-west Western Australia] if you drew a line between Geraldton and Esperance [it's] south-west of that line.

If we look at the various climate modelling experiments around the world, there's about eight global climate models that perform well across Australia, seven out of eight are basically saying that area will be drier.

And in his opinion:

[A] portfolio of solutions is required.

Nuclear energy isn't going to solve the problem, clean coal isn't going to solve the problem - it's going to be a mix of the things that we put in place and the way we behave. I think we've had it good in terms of plentiful supplies of cheap water [and] I don't see that continuing quite frankly. With a lot of our cities we've already exploited a lot of the cheap sources of water. From now on, as these cities and areas keep on growing we're going to have to start using more expensive sources of water and we're going to have to pay for it.

Concurrently Graeme Pearman, former head of CSIRO's atmospheric research warned the business community that industries which rely on water and energy need to consider how climate change will affect their investments. "If you're investing in water resources or things that depend on water supply then you need to understand that there are some risks associated with whether you'll be able to continue as a business in the same form or whether you'll have to modify it."

This past February TFW reported:

Graeme Pearman told ABC television that he was censored "at least half a dozen times" during his final year with CSIRO, but never directly by the government. "I was told I couldn't say anything that indicated that I disagreed with government policy, and I presume that meant federal government policy," and added that the organisation was "enormously frightened" of interpretations of his work that might be construed as being critical of government policy.

 

CSIRO environment executive, Steve Morton said he ordered Mr. Pearman not to participate in one discussion "which clearly had policy prescriptions in it. I asked him not to talk about the targets and the time frame in which greenhouse-gas reductions should be made."