blah blah blah, double down on what clearly wasn’t a mistake when it was you.
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Their words do say as much. But you know, accepting the fact of disease-causing germs wasn’t exactly the end of what we should know about them, and so it is with the complex results of climate change. Even if they accept its reality, their actions are saying it’s not worth paying it attention.
That said, you’re right, it would be a mistake to look at this as simple climate change denialism. Instead, it’s about the other part of the title, eliminating basic research. There’s an ever-more pernicious tendency to treat countries as a business, and treat everything as worthless unless you can prove it directly and measurably improves a companies’ bottom line. Even investments shown to give returns to society at large – things like health care, education, and infrastructure – are often attacked.
Much of what generates wealth and innovation in the first place has been languishing as a result. “Blue skies” or “fundamental” research has very much been part of this. As the article notes, it’s the kind of uncertain investment very hard to get outside of governments; sidelining it to focus on innovation, usually only meaning advances that can be commercialized, harms even such applications in the long run. A number of fields have been suffering from it, and this looks like it will be one more.
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Malcolm Turnbull is like Obama - centre-right. Same old shit, except pretty noises.
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True, but the shine wore off even quicker.
At least Obama could always claim that he was being hampered by a hostile Congress. Turnbull has to fight his own bloody party and it shows.
At least the budgie smugglers aren’t a feature any more…
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Maybe they are getting rid of the researchers because the science behind climate change is “settled”.
Thats not how you science.
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Amen. Can we get this printed on a billion postcards and then airdropped everywhere?
So many countries (including the US) are being gradually eviscerated this way.
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Small, nimble companies are better at innovation; large lumbering behemoths of countries are better at the long-term boring data gathering.
Both are necessary.
[I’m agreeing with you.]
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And if you read the REST of the article besides the first paragraph, you’d see that just saying “we accept climate change so we don’t need to study it any more” doesn’t make any scientific sense.
The CEO is shutting down all scientific research towards understanding and predicting the effects of climate change, science that all the actual scientists quoted in the article say is still sorely needed.
This is similar to saying “ok, we know many diseases are caused by viruses, we don’t need to study viruses anymore.”
The CEO has specifically said that he only wants to focus on the commercialization of science, and that climate research in its current form isn’t commercialisable.
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Incredible.
“Climate science becomes secondary to business; business comes first,” Spash said. “The interests of the corporate sector, of the mining and resource extraction industry, are primary in Australia.”
Business (and pretty much everything) is going to be at the mercy of climate.
Might really want to study that.
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Not in the time period between now and when he’s moved on to some other job, so what does it matter?
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Depressing.
Usually a bad sign…
And now we have a new deputy Prime Minister who has said the science around climate change is ‘not settled’. I thought things couldn’t get worse than when under the ridiculous Abbott government. I was badly, sadly, so wrong. For fuck’s sake.
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Although to be fair, this is plainly not worse than having the Mad Monk for PM.
I’m wondering when we get our Corbyn or Sanders, to be honest.
Sadly, I don’t think we have the political climate for it; Bob Brown was about as close as we’ll see for the foreseeable future IMO… this country is too fat and stupid for someone like him to be a major player. We haven’t done it hard enough for people to wake the fuck up, and our mainstream culture is so obstinately whitebread. Consider the cultural cringe and brain drain of the 60s and 70s, when it was exciting everywhere except here.
If Sanders and/or Corbyn get up, that’ll be the story again, at least for a while… Although these days shit could flip thanks to the interweb, fingers crossed.
Bob Brown trivia: he was the doctor who pronounced Jimi Hendrix dead.
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