Intrepid Science Blog

CSIRO cuts: as redundancies are announced, the real cost is revealed Chris Turney , UNSW Australia The unfortunate manner in which the latest phase of restructuring of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has played out has raised questions about Australia’s scientific capability and our ability to meet international responsibilities. Faced with a budget cut of A$115 million, some 275 staff have apparently been identified for redundancy ( though the final number may be as high as 317 ). Many of them are scientists contributing to long-term sea, air and climate science programs. The restructure is geared towards focusing CSIRO’s attention on the question, as framed by chief executive Larry Marshall, of “ how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with? ” The problem is that the programs at threat form the backbone of national and international research efforts. Virtually all of them are critical for helping us mitigate and ...

Scientists need to engage more with the public to secure funding Chris Turney , UNSW Australia and Christopher Fogwill , UNSW Australia We live in an age when society is crying out for scientific solutions to global problems. Just a few of the many considerable challenges we face include the urgent need to transition to a carbon-free economy, the need for new drugs to combat disease and improved agricultural yields to meet the needs of a growing world population. But in parallel to this increasing demand for science we face worrying trends in Australia and across the wider Western world. From high schools to universities, there is a long-term decline in students in the so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Meanwhile, government funding in many Western countries is also falling, with Australia continuing to reduce the total science budget . Repeated studies demonstrate public science investment has a strong multiplier effect on the econo...

There’s an old sailor’s expression: ‘ below 40 degrees south there is no law, below 50 degrees south there is no God ’. No where is more isolated and extreme than the Antarctic. But while it may be out of sight it most certainly shouldn’t be out of our minds. Cut off from civilisation by the storm-ridden Southern Ocean, the Antarctic ice sheets hold around ninety per cent of our planet’s ice and seventy per cent of its fresh water. There’s so much water in the Antarctic that if only a small proportion of it were to melt, global sea level could rise by several feet, threatening the likes of Dhaka, New York, Sydney and London. The big question is just how much will return to the world’s oceans in a warming world? While previous scientific studies have suggested Antarctica should be relatively immune to higher temperatures over the next hundred years, a spate of recent research has suggested the seventh continent is far from being as omnipotent as we had once thought, with some areas a...

Cape Denison holds a special place in the history of Antarctic exploration. A small outcrop of rocks on the remote East Antarctic coastline, Cape Denison is forever associated with one of the most spectacular and often forgotten tales of survival. A century ago it was the main base of operations for one of the great explorers of the south: the Australian scientist Sir Douglas Mawson . Privately funded, three bases and one research ship supported a science team that explored a region the size of the United States between 1911 and 1914. Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition, however, suffered terribly during their time at Cape Denison: a sudden turn of events led to tragedy on the ice, the death of two men, allegations of cannibalism and with the return of winter sea ice, an extended stay in Antarctica. But when they first came upon Cape Denison, Mawson was ecstatic. Greeted by squawking penguins: ‘ We were soon inside a beautiful, miniature harbour completely land-locked. The su...

500 years of drought and flood: trees and corals reveal Australia's climate history Patrick Baker , University of Melbourne ; Chris Turney , UNSW Australia , and Jonathan Palmer , UNSW Australia Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a recent paper we’ve shown that’s been the case for more than 500 years. As part of our Australia and New Zealand Drought Atlas we’ve published the most detailed record of drought and wet periods (or “pluvials”) since 1500. The data reveal that despite the severity of the Millennium Drought, the five worst single years of drought happened before 1900. But 2011 was the wettest year in our 513-year record. The dominant theme of Australia’s drought history is variability. We may get one year of extremely wet conditions (for example in 2011) or we might get six years of extremely dry conditions (such as 2003-2009). North Queensland may be flooded out while Victoria suffers with drought. Or in extreme circumstances, the entir...

In Lewis Carroll’s wonderful book  Through the Looking Glass , Tweedledee emphatically declares to Alice: ‘Contrariwise: if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic.’  It’s always a struggle to move beyond ‘contrariwise’. There’s a remarkable inertia in large institutions and industry to get the order of things right. Even when the need is a pressing one. Our planet is experiencing a frightening number of environmental crises. Extreme and abrupt climate change, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, ocean acidification and deteriorating water quality are just a few of the many important challenges we face on a worryingly large list.  But all are interconnected. Several years ago the United Nations Environment Program launched an ambitious target: for the world to develop a ‘ Green Economy ’, one which is low in carbon, efficient with resources and socially inclusive. By making the shift to a green economy an...

DNA evidence proves climate change killed off prehistoric megafauna Chris Turney , UNSW Australia and Alan Cooper Imagine a world populated by woolly mammoths, giant sloths and car-sized armadillos – 50,000 years ago more than 150 types of these mysterious large-bodied mammals roamed our planet. But by 10,000 years ago, two-thirds of them had disappeared. Since the end of the 19th century, scientists have puzzled over where these “megafauna” went. In 1796, the famous French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier suggested a global catastrophe had wiped them out. Others were appalled. The great Thomas Jefferson was so against Cuvier’s idea he sent an expedition to try to find vast herds of these animals grazing contentedly in the American interior. The only thing anyone could say with certainty was there should be a lot more of them than we see today. Alfred Wallace, who wrote the first paper on evolution by natural selection with Charles Darwin, noted that “we live in a zoologically ...