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Australia Cuts 110 Climate Scientist Jobs: "The Science is Settled."
An anonymous reader writes: With an ax rather than a scalpel, Australia's federal science agency last week chopped off its climate research arm in a decision that has stunned scientists and left employees dispirited. Why? Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says. No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance.
Sure, we know the answer is "The world is getting hotter and it's all our fault" - but there are still a heck of a lot of questions that need to be answered. "How Fast?" and "Will the extra CO2 help crops or weeds grow faster?" and "What can we do about it?" and "Will such-and-such course of action have enough effect to avoid such-and-such consequences?"
We need those guys even more than we did before the original question was answered.
www.sjbaker.org
Obviously we know what has to be done. That money will be better spent doing it than flogging a dead horse.
Science is NEVER "settled".
Science is based in SKEPTICISM and PROOF.
Anything else is a de facto RELIGION.
They should have take lessons from the diet/exercise industry. If diet and exercise products worked in 6 months and you kept the weight off after that, you wouldn't need their product anymore and they lost a customer aka revenue.
He got into power, they explained that Australia could not meet the CO2 targets, so he would be labelled a failure, so he loosened CO2 targets to be the same as his predecessor, and now is removing the measuring of CO2 emissions and atmospheric CO2.
So now he's not a failure, he's a success! Well at least nobody can scientifically show his failure!
He's a slimey politicians, but they all are.
[Trump/Palin 2016 make America grate again!]
Errr...you mean the U.S. government that recently signed on to the latest climate protocol by the U.N. The government headed by Obama who has been warning about global climate warming? Is that the government you are thinking about? Stop watching TV, it is bad for you.
I know. And today it snowed in the Washington D.C. area. Coincidence? I don't think so.
I'm surprised that /. would like to the definition of schadenfreude. It seems like every slashdotter is WELL acquainted with that principle.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Anyone that tells you the science is settled is not a scientist.... they are a politician wanting to shutdown inquiry on an issue and install dogma in its place.
Science is not dogma, and if someone who is a scientist tells you that "The science is settled"; that is really just their personal opinion on the topic, And it should be taken to assume that the research results they produce might be accidentally (or maliciously) biased to reflect results consistent to the bit of science they would claim to be "settled".
The Turnbull government would have pulled the plug on Newton's silly academic musings and set him up to slave away at the mint.
Yes, I know you're not supposed to read the article. You find out all sorts of interesting things like the fact that noone was actually fired, they were re-assigned to other stuff. You also find out why some of the stuff they were doing was interesting.
But the thing that caught my attention with shades of "we have to pass the bill before we know what it does" was that one of the reasons given not to transfer the people was that they were needed to figure out what the recent climate agreement actually meant.
So apparently the climate agreement was so badly expressed that the several people who were not transferred away from basic climate research are not sufficient to figure out what it actually meant?
Didn't Kerry block the language change that would have made it require anything?
No one in climate science is interested in answering those questions. It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything,
If you read what actual climate scientists say, and not the hype in the press, they in fact don't say "It's all "X is caused by global climate change", where X can be literally anything," Over and over, they say things like, no particular storm can be attributed to global warming-- it's a long term global effect. Over and over and over. But the press likes disaster stories. They'll keep looking until they can find a way to write the story that makes it a disaster story, and bury the "other scientists caution that there's not enough data to attribute X to climate change" on page 2.
with pictures of polar bears in the background.
I've read a lot of papers by climate scientists, and never seen one with "pictures of polar bears in the background." I think I can safely say that if what you're reading has pictures of polar bears in the background, you're reading the popular press, and not a scientific paper. Even the paper (one paper-- count it, one) that talked about dead polar bears in the arctic didn't have pictures of polar bears in the background.
...Turnbull’s government has also emphasized science that can be easily commercialized...
It seems to me that climate scientists would be a key part of any strategies, techniques, and technologies that are developed to either counteract or accommodate global warming. Future work in this area will be heavily commercialized, just as wind and solar power and electric vehicles are commercialized today. Sounds like Turnbull is thumbing his nose at a big economic opportunity. Not to mention that, in some sense, he seems to be selling out his fellow human beings for a bit of short-term political capital. Way to make your country's economy more durable, Mr. Turnbull!
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Once again ignorance has decreed that all that needs to be known is already known, in a field. New knowledge must be heresy in that case. This is so stupid.
"Do you want fries with that?"
Suddenly global warming is the least of their problems....
If it's settled that human-emitted carbon is warming up our climate that might mean fewer jobs for climatologists, but it will mean a lot more jobs for reactor builders and people who can assemble and pilot supertanker loads of iron dust.
"No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance."
Seriously? So, your position is that anything that science has a decent understanding of should not be further investigated? It's this kind of ignorance that shows not only your bias in posting, but a total lack of understanding of how the scientific method proceeds.
The process of science means that *any* understanding can be revisited for further investigation in light of new data. We are still working on basics like how antibiotics actually work, and which of Newton's insights apply at various scales, and a huge variety of other investigations going on into what can be definitely described as "settled science". (Settled - There are antibiotic compounds that kill germs, and Newtonian physics is deeply useful in engineering on a human scale.)
The idea that an accepted understanding in a field of study warrants no more study, as an "inevitable and logical consequence" of that understanding, is stunningly anti-science and violates the methods we've used successfully since the Enlightenment to understand the world around us.
It's a turn of phrase in this case, but we know that man's emissions cause some aspect of the climate change we're seeing.
"Some aspect" where the exact amount is undefined.
Oh, and the total amount of warming we'll see is undefined.
Oh, and the amount of warming that is harmful is undefined.
Oh, and the benefits to the world from a warmer climate are undefined.
Oh, and the mechanism that triggers an ice age is undefined.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With no "climate scientists", when every single prediction from the models come out wrong again, who will go back, adjust the models, and then retro-predict real life?
Seems the lessons of history must be learned over and over. Mixing up politics and science, religion and science or even politics and religion is generally always a bad idea. How soon we forget and each subsequent generation repeats the same mistakes..
Well, at least we know what to expect..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
So I guess there's no reason to spend any more money on microbiology or antibiotics research.
Bah, I feel like stirring up some nutty X-Files level conspiracy shizzle...
Why would you do this? You're reassigning the scientists, not firing them. It's not about costs.
So basically, those in ultimate power, the ones pulling the strings, expect things to get much much worse, far far quicker than even the science to date has suggested.
In order to keep control, to keep the status quo as long as possible, they have decided that it is too risky to risk the science getting more accurate results that would expose the real situation. That might risk profits!
So they've cut the climate change funding completely. This isn't head-in-sand ostrich politics, this is happening for a real reason, and that's to cover up a worse reality than even the current state of climate science suggests.
Everyone knows there is more to learn, more accurate models to build, more precise future situations to demonstrate, , so the only reason to transfer these people away from those roles is to stop people from learning what that is.
All the propaganda outlets assure me that Gore-Bull Warming is all a conspiracy to keep those evul scientists rolling in dough. Well, all they have to do is start working for the other side.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
and it is man's fault. But there is still a lot to learn. And the most important issue is how to reduce the effect. The firing is to get rid of the scientist so that the world can continue its suicidal climb. The fossil extraction industry must continue making profit even if doing so dooms mankind. The action is to intimidate and silence the Climatologists.
This may test the conspiracy theory that scientists lie or exaggerate to get more government funding. Let's call it the Handout Bias Theory (HBT).
If you get fired when you "prove" it, then proofs should now stop. Scientists would come to nebulous conclusions so as to keep their jobs, under HBT. "We need more research & funding to really know..."
However, the conspiratorial types are likely to replace one conspiracy with another when evidence goes against the original. I don't know what they'll dream up yet to replace HBT, but conspiracies can wild-card explanations almost as well as Creationism: "God did it that way because he simply wanted do." Maybe they'll claim scientists want to shut down operations to hide their dirty deeds now that The Patriots are on to them.
Table-ized A.I.
And, since we know Mars and Venus are also getting warmer, it must be the Martian's fault.
Well, given that we don't know that Mars and Venus are getting warmer we don't have to look for causes for that nonexistent warming.
How much of the change is likely to be caused by which of the several known factors, and potentially unknown factors?
If there are unknown factors causing the warming then there are also unknown factors causing cooling that happens to exactly balance the unknown factors causing warming, since the observed warming fits pretty damn well the known factors that can cause warming. Or maybe we should just use Occam's razor?
What is the long-term temperature trend, based on long-term actual data (as opposed to COUGH corrections COUGH made up on the spot and added to the data).
The long term temperature trend is slightly cooled the corrections that are carefully considered. You might like to see a doctor about that nasty cough.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
Asking a rhetoric question since everyone knows the answer.
"If the weather science is settled, why then, are weather scientists still unable to predict weather than my coin throwing each morning?"
You loose Australia...
Climate scientists were only too willing to play the political game with their science. Well, guess they didn't really think it through.
Importantly, they can can with 100% certainty conclude that their firing is man's fault.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
With the economy slowing down following on from the Chinese, in their major export earner, New Zealanders packing their bags back home and Brits choosing less to travel, someone has to pay the price in any effort to lift things up in the country... manufacturing and mining have to take centre stage once again... scientists pay the price.. same old politics
Well lived, well enjoyed
Australians can spell "axe" properly.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'll start acting like it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis.
So, when did Canada's former Prime Minister Stephen Harper move to Australia?
I expect crap like this from New Zealanders... but Australians?!
I agree, but we need more than that - climate engineers who can figure out how to modify the system to prevent the worst effects. I think it's great that among the general population the narrative is to reduce emissions and environmental destruction, but nothing about the nature of humans convinces me that we won't eventually end up having to use engineered solutions to the problem.
Just look at the US elections. Every four years I see a bunch of politicians turn up in some coal town and spout on about how clean coal is the future. The mindset in these places is so hard to change, made especially so by the fud spread by vested interests. Given the rise of solar and electric, it might be possible to wean rich westerners off fossil fuels over a 30-50 year period, but I can't see how we will convince developing countries to do the same, especially when the price for fuels falls through the floor.
What really scares me is if a nation that starts suffering the effects of climate change first, gets desperate and takes matters into their own hands. It doesn't take many aerosols pumped into the atmosphere to potentially cause a lot of effects on the planet, and if we don't know what those effects are it could be a massive disaster in a very short time frame.
"Die Schadenfreude wird Dir im Hals stecken bleiben."
Schadenfreude will get back at you.
Is a term deeming the people that experience "Schadenfreude" to be susceptible for the upcomming or imminent threat to experience also a same of a kind situation from the opposite side.
Because people that experience "Schadenfreude" tend not to concentrate on their own problems.
(Example: A car driver laughs about the owner of a broken luxury car, and does not concentrate on the car driving in front of him, where the driver does same thing plus braking to get a better view. Result tail bump and the "Schadenfreude" got back at you.)
In this case it's climate scientists have worked out that the climate is anthropologically influenced on a large scale.
But that influence is what we experience just right now and not what could happen in the future, these predictions with their various scenarios are essential to at least have an idea for example where settling could be dangerous or economically unfeasable.
All prediction on the future also need to take into account a changing behaviour and energy production landscape.
And this is how Schadenfreude has the tendency to get stuck in your throat and choke on you if you enjoy it for too long.
Well, you wanted to be all sciencey and so smart and now look where it got you: no more sciencey things for you, the fast food beckons! You will be smartest dishwashers ever! Flip those burgers, science boy! And where are my fries, boffin? Take that mop and go clean the vomit upstairs, prof cleanitup. :)
And those climate models have been created and are available as software. It's now just a question of applying them.
The global climate models are there, and are getting pretty well validated-- although you do know that the error bars are still plus or minus fifty percent, right? But the more you want fine-grained data, though, the more you're still going to need to do a lot more work.
"Overall, things are getting slightly warmer at a pace we know to within a factor of two"-- that's something we know. "Australia is getting hotter"-- that's slightly harder to say with certainty: Australia is not the world. "These detailed results will be the result"-- that's getting very hard to predict.
The devil is in the details.
So tell me, what do yuo consider science?
Taking data, analyzing data, making models, verifying models, refining models, taking more data, taking more data.
All the stuff that climate scientists actually do, and climate deniers don't.
why the Australian government should fund the opposition under the guise of science. Great move Australia!
The fact is that the world and the US DID have a consensus regarding human-induced climate change prior to the Koch brothers injection of denialism into the public discussion. You have only to read some of the eexhaustive and authoritative books available to you : Dark Money, Merchant of Doubt Doubt Is Their Product and The Hockey Stick And The Climate Wars to understand therehas been a deliberate coordinated attack on climate science and climate scientists for the express purpose of deferring and delaying action on climate change. The Koch brothers own study told them the mainstream science was correct, and they buried that study.
http://thinkprogress.org/clima...
Alright then. What are we really looking at? We are looking at a group of terrorists who have built and set off a bomb called global climate warming with the specific intent of handing the world's governments- which governments they have openly called for the desmantling and destruction of- a problem so large they will not be able to cope with the fallout. They have set off a bomb which they believe will cause the collapse of the United States Government. In this they have been aided by anti-government conservatives, conservative moevements, conservative think tanks, other conservative billionaires, all stripes of conservative publications, editors writers and bloggers. Each and everyone of is a terrorist or a supporter of terorism and the result of those terrrorist activities is hundreds of millions dead and condemend to death the permanent destrcution of the habitiblity of large portions of the Earth , mass envrionmentally caused political upheaval, population dislocation wars and diseases taking the lives of yet hundrends of millions more.
Those are crimes. Those are crimes so vast, the criminals believe they can never be charged with them. The criminals believe they will not be held accountable. The criminals believe there are too many of them to be prosecuted and their actions resemble too closely mere opinion offering to ever be labled as crimes.
I'll give them this- their plan to radically deconstrcut then reconstrcut the American government is going to suceeded beyone their wildest dreams. Because under our pre-Global Warming system of government, they would have gotten away with everything. But as we the afflicted, the destroyed, the people forced to live under the New Koch-Inflicted Reality, we the victims of Scalia and Thomas and Americans for Prosperity and the Wall Street Journal and Scaife and Murdoch and Norquist and all the tens of thousands of other organizations and individuals who together joined to systematically destroy our species common heritage, our ability to sustain life human civiliation on this planet, take power they will meet a very different United States Government. They won't be facing corporate water-carrying bitch boys and and fucking house niggers like Holder and Obama. No, it'll be more like the full Black Lives Matter treatment, joined by Yellow Lives Matter and Red Lives Matter and While Lives Matter and All Lives Matter. They'll be facing real justice courtesy of the United States Government and in accordance with the United States Government's laws, served up hot and they'll be no limit to scope of their assets we'll seize, or the nooses the United States Government's courts of law will sentence them to swing from.
In the pre-Global Warming American government, no mere opinion maker would have been put on trial for his life for "opinions" he offered. Under the post Global Warming American Government, they're very lkely find that the tolerance for mass-murder via mass-lies has been exhausted and, just as the world will witness unthinkable climatic and ecological and social events, so too the world will witness the trial of "average" citizens for Crimes Against Humanity. Let them tell the court and the wo
It's nice to see the climate science fraudsters beaten at their own game. I don't even mind that they won the argument on faked and adulterated data. It's enough to me to hear someone say "fine, you keep saying the debate is over. So, I guess we don't need you anymore!" :-)
I guess Robin Williams will be having a spot about this on his radio show this week. It's a pretty good show from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and can be found at http://www.abc.net.au/radionat....
You kidding? Give this article a full week and come back and look at it again. This is going to get tons of people to respond. Your geek crap like that overclocking article will hardly be at 20% of the total number of clicks and comments that this one will gain.
Political ramblings, religion bashing and fanboy traps is what pays the bills around Slashdot. Real tech is nice to see but hardly even keeps this site above water.
Even if the change (non-zero temperature derivative) is accepted,
the change could be changing (2nd derivative)...
The fact is, the ice caps are Mars are indeed melting. Look at the data yourself. You're entitled to your own opinion about what we should do about that, if anything, but the fact is each time we send a probe to Mars, the ice caps there are smaller. The principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera, Michael Malin, says the martian polar ice cap is shrinking at "a prodigious rate." You can look for yourself and compare the pictures even from 1999-2005; it's visibly noticeable even in that short time frame.
We also know that Jupiter, Titan, and Pluto are warming.
So again, the question is "how much of the long-term trend on earth is attributable to the same causes that are occurring throughout the rest of the solar system?" the best estimate I know of is "probably about 30%, but maybe half that, maybe twice that."
Settled science: Energy is supplied to our planet from the sun. The entire planet loses energy to space. Our atmosphere dictates the rate at which this energy is lost.
Yep.
Not Settled Science: What is the rate at which this energy is lost,
That's extremely well known.
and what is the quantitative change to this rate when CO2 concentration is increased or decreased.
Error bars on that are currently a factor of plus or minus fifty percent.
Not Settled Science: What are all the effects, good and bad, that an increase of CO2 in our atmosphere will have.
Right. That is a much harder question than global average temperature, and the more detail you want, the more this question needs work.
Not Settled Science: Increased CO2 and a warmer atmosphere are a bad thing and should be prevented.
"bad" tends to be a judgement call-- you could call this an engineering trade-off, but it's not really a science question. And "should" is a social (which is to say, political) decision, not science at all.
>No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled"
> face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance.
Brainwashed, anti-scientific Conservatives may choose to respond with glee, but that's just because they're deeply stupid, and participate in a subculture that wants so badly for their propaganda to be true, that they find knowledge repulsive.
This destroyed the wingnut talking point that scientists are just in it for the grant money, so we should trust oil-company shills instead.
If I'm getting warmer because of a fever, and the chicken breast in my oven is also getting warmer, they must be related or neither is really getting warmer. CHECKMATE AL GORE!
Delete your account you stupid fuck.
You are welcome on my lawn.
To be more precise, there are enough scientists around that describe a worse situation, but the government is removing support for the ones it had more control over because it fears a paradigm shift that lets it loose control. Now I really wonder why Australia should be like a large Florida, it can hardly get more dry.
The only thing that is settled is that a majority of scientists agree that the surface atmosphere is getting a bit warmer and mankind is partly responsible.
This leaves the big question of understanding the system and planning a course of action other than the green's knee jerk reaction of going back to the stone age.
Building the models to understand this requires continuous measurements over long periods of time.
Unless you wish to move to another planet, this seems like table stakes for living here in the style to which we are accustomed.
Sadly, some short sighted folks in Australia decided that this is not something worth doing, because there is no immediate commercial gain.
If not Australia, then who else?
The choices for folks able able to step up to the plate and do this work in the Southern Hemisphere seems limited.
On the other hand, the actual number of scientists involved may be small enough so that another country can take this on?
What, exactly, do you think would cause the other planets to warm, and not have the same effect on earth?
> Delete your account you stupid fuck.
I certainly understand that it can be quite uncomfortable, once you've picked a team and become a fan, to have clear, indisputable facts get in the way of your team's political puffery; you've invested some significant self-esteem into the idea that Al Gore was telling you the truth. Unfortunately, facts are what they are.
If -something- is warming the other planets, is there any reason earth should be special and be unaffected? Or is it more likely that earth, just like the rest of the solar system, is affected too, and a politician exaggerated the human-caused portion for -gasp- political purposes.
I kind of feel for you, for what you'll likely go through soon, because I think you're too smart to be a lemming to Gore and now Hilary. I don't think they'll keep you fooled for much longer, because you're not stupid. That will be painful, though, coming to accept that just as Santa Claus doesn't exist, Gore and Clinton are just another pair of wealthy politicians, who say whatever polls well with the masses.
And, since we know Mars and Venus are also getting warmer, ...
Oh please, cite the data that shows Mars and Venus are getting warmer. All I ever hear is the claim without any data to back it up.
Let's assume that the claim is true, we've studied the problem sufficiently to the point that we understand the problem and therefore our need for people to work on climate models and so forth is diminished. Let's also assume that while we can do away with some climate studies we cannot end it completely since we will need to monitor progress and guide policy.
So, what should we do? It seems that many of the people in positions of power talk a lot about doing an "all of the above" approach. This means doing anything and everything that can possibly reduce our carbon output. We've seen PSAs telling us to turn off the lights in rooms we aren't using and to turn off the tap while brushing our teeth. We've seen government subsidies for solar panels, windmills, corn ethanol, and electric cars. What's missing here? IMHO, we've got government support for every tactic to fight global warming except the one that has the best chance to reduce our carbon output with the least cost and smallest impact on our daily lives.
That solution is nuclear power.
Any politician that claims that the government needs to fund this and support that and ignores nuclear power is not serious about the problem. This tends to lead me to think that global warming is not the problem that they claim. It also doesn't help that they'll chide me for driving my light truck while they fly in jet planes all over the world. They have a meeting of the world powers on how to combat our carbon output, flying all these people there to meet, and all they've agreed to do is meet again in five years to talk about it some more.
I thought global warming was the greatest threat this nation, and this planet, has ever faced. Yet these people don't seem to be acting like it is.
I'm not convinced that global warming is a problem based only on the actions of the people with the ability to have the greatest effect on the carbon our modern society produces. If these people were convinced on the problem we faced then we'd see them talking about nuclear power. If they cannot bring themselves to bring up nuclear power as part of the "all the above" strategy to fight global warming then I can only conclude that they fear losing votes more than they fear the end of civilization. A true believer would not be concerned about the next election, they'd be concerned about the next century.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Economists are not scientists.
Careful there. Some economists can very accurately be called scientists because they use the scientific method and economics is quite properly categorized as a social science. These economists establish hypothesis, build models, conduct experiments against these models, etc. That IS science. The fact that it relates to human interactions does not change that fact, nor does the fact that some of their research involves difficult to analyze phenomena. Now there are also economists whose work has little or nothing to do with the scientific method but you shouldn't paint with too broad of a brush.
Better to have parapsychologists than economists. At least the parapsychologists have a little bit of rigor in their discipline.
I'm guessing you don't actually know any real economists.
...and leon's getting LLarrrrrgerrrrrrrr..(jumps away)
By reducing the number of people hitching a ride on the gravy train. Heh
But the press likes disaster stories.
Yes they do and in general the popular press is REALLY bad at science reporting. I've had a few direct interactions with science reporters for our local paper and holy cow they were a bunch of idiots. They mostly have NO training in the scientific method, their knowledge of technology and science is severely lacking, and they ask incredibly stupid questions and misunderstand the answers. Worse they often come in with an agenda about what they are going to report about and will twist any facts you give them to suit their narrative. The only exceptions I've run into is if you get one of the reporters for a big paper like the New York Times or (obviously) one of the actual science journals. But that's rare. Local TV news are the worst of them all. Bunch of borderline retarded talking heads them...
I used to work at a tech center where we had all sorts of cool machines. Lasers, rapid prototyping, CAE, engine dynos, virtual reality, etc. Very cool stuff and visually interesting too. So they wanted to take pictures which is great. One of these idiots points at the wall where he sees a bunch of blinking lights and asks what that machine does because he thinks it would be a cool picture. We gently mentioned that, ahem... our air conditioning control panel was about the least interesting thing in the building. The guy didn't even have the brains to act embarrassed.
comes in all forms. :(
Since the science is settled, now we can look to see the Australian government start slashing spending on fossil fuels, getting rid of bureaucracies and governmental subsidies that enable and support the mining, production, distribution, and sale of fossil fuels and taxing the fossil fuels industry to death. It is a glorious day in Australia, unless of course they plan on ignoring the settled aspect of the science for all but the fired scientists and continue on with business as usual.
One can't help but wonder with so many questions still remaining in climate science as to how hot, how fast, where and who will be first to affected, by how much, etc., whether this is just a shameless ploy to limit the visibility these scientists and the science they pursue so that business as usual can simply continue without adverse publicity. Then again, perhaps it's just an effort to make sure that Australian science lags behind that of other nations and to encourage their best scientists to leave for positions abroad.
"and smallest impact on our daily lives"
Yeah, I'm sure the folks living next to Fukushima and Chernobyl all feel the same way. I say scrap fission power that has no future because of the costs of the screwups (both in lives and in currency) and put any subsidies for nuclear into research into fusion power. It looks as if the Chinese, at least, have the sense enough to take this approach. In the meantime tax fossil fuels to death and use the money to implement alternative energy solutions (solar, wind, tidal), which are far more cost effective and far less politically destabilizing when total costs are considered.
Climate change is partially cyclical and partially influenced by human action. How much is which? It's unknown. We've only been observing it for 50 years or less. We've already made changes. Cleaner cars, factories, etc. How much has this helped? We don't know yet. Don't we need the answers on this to judge our progress?
Here's some information from NASA. (Nasa.gov link below.) Many people are rightfully concerned about measuring the polar ice caps on earth. When reductions were measured in the north* that was considered major evidence of global warming. Here NASA talks about the same thing happening at a much faster rate on Mars. NASA measured the reduction at 3 meters per Mars year.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...
Again, because I think peoples passions make it hard for them to actually pay attention to what they read: this solar-system-wide phenomenon seems to account for perhaps 30% of the warming on earth, not all of it. You can still feel good about recycling paper bags.
* on the other hand, 30% MORE ice at the south pole means nothing at all, some say. Pay attention only to the one that supports your team's politics. ;)
I thought that was more of a convenient frame of reference that makes things easier. The sun does not actually go around the sun, it's just more convenient to assume that the earth orbits the sun.
On a deaths per joule comparison nuclear power wins over them all by a large margin. Do you think that people don't fall from windmills and rooftop solar panels? People die.
Also, people in Fukushima got more radiation by flying from the area than if they stayed. Chernobyl was barely a first generation reactor, it didn't have modern safety features like a containment dome. The answer to this problem is not to stop building nuclear power plants but to build more so that we can afford to decommission power plants like those at Fukushima.
Japan shut down all their nuclear power plants for a while but were forced to restart them. This is because without nuclear power they had to resort to dirty, unsafe, and expensive coal. Wind, solar, and tidal power would cost us more in money and lives then even building more Chernobyl type power plants.
Thankfully we don't have to build another Chernobyl, Fukushima, or Three Mile Island to keep the lights on. We can build fourth generation nuclear power, reactors that are safer, cheaper, and more reliable than even the already very safe, cheap, and reliable first and second generation reactors that caused us so much panic.
At a minimum we should at least have some government funded research in nuclear power like we have government funded research in wind, solar, and tidal. We have much to learn on nuclear power, and claiming we cannot harness that power safely is like claiming we should not invest in Tesla motors because the Model T and Pinto were unsafe. A modern nuclear reactor would not be built like those at Fukushima.
We can build much better nuclear power plants but we've held ourselves back because of failures of completely unrelated designs. Failures that, BTW, involved very little cost in lives and cleanup when compared to the alternatives.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Well, at least you are getting to the crux of the matter. Controllability. To what optimal would you control climate over the whole globe? Climate cannot be ideal everywhere. Happy polar bears may mean drought in the Sahara. What you really need are enormous machines that belch or absorb massive amounts of CO2 on a planetary scale. But you have only crude, indirect tools of coercion through political structures. I hope this helps you see how truly crazy the whole notion of 'climate action' is.
"No doubt many will experience a case of schadenfreude as they see those who have long claimed "the science is settled" face the inevitable and logical consequence of that stance." ????
Neither logical nor inevitable.
The part that's settled is that its happening and at human hands.
That doesn't mean you can just stop taking measurements, refining models, or continuing basic research.
Stupid summary is stupid.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
The current Australian government hasn't previously acted like it believed the climate scientists. It's reasonable to be asking if there might be another motive for them to want to fire these scientists when their first action upon getting into office was to rescind a carbon taxation scheme. Saying that you believe them, while acting like you don't.. Starts to ring hollow.
Based on experiments (with gas in tubes and lights shining through them), a doubling of CO2 will result in a ~0.9 degree increase. This is not controversial, and even skeptical climatologists accept it. It's also not very scary.
The reason some climatologists predict a 6-12 degree warming is because of feedbacks (warming melts ice leaving dark earth behind, and dark earth absorbs more heat, etc). These feedbacks are significantly more controversial, but also more scary.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Except that "verifying models" step. None of the climate models are making better predictions than the null hypothesis,
About all I can say to that is "sorry, but you are wrong.".
or for that matter than the "lgw blindly asserting it's getting colder" model. Global temperatures have been remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so,
Sorry, but you are wrong. Here is the data from four groups on three different continents: http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... temperatures have not been "remarkably steady for the past 19 years or so" - they have been rising. and while that's within the error bars for most of these models, it's better predicted by the null hypothesis, and within the error bars if you take any of these models and put a "-" in front on their predicted temperature change. So, yeah, the negative of the models predicts as well as the models right now.
Not an argument that they're all wrong, but an argument that there's no reason to think any particular one is right, either. The "science" part is ongoing, but hasn't verified any of the models.
The "Government" didn't sign it. Obama did.
Without enabling legislation or ratification as a treaty, it's fancy toilet paper from a legal point of view.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
All you need to do is figure out how MUCH the oceans will rise, and then invest in 'beach front' property at this new height. Sure, its a long term investment, but I'm betting there are some rich people who are quietly doing this now (along with setting up rescue bunkers for their families and friends).
If I had money, this is what I would be doing now.
And you literally have no idea what that means.
Sure, cut research. And then watch as your other budgets literally burn in massive fires.
Morons.
Stop exporting coal. There's your answer, Australia.
Fossil fuels are dead. Fini. Over.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Obviously this has nothing to do with climate change science - it's an excuse for the government to justify the massive budget cuts they've forced on the CSIRO, an excuse the CSIRO are happily repeating as they know everyone will be outraged.
It would help if any of the climate models demonstrated some degree of predictive ability. The difference between model projections and reality have grown to ridiculous proportions.
Let's look at that. The very first numerical greenhouse effect model was Manabe and Wetherald 1967-- That's the classic, the model from which pretty much all current climate models stem. Since the paper was submitted in 1966, that's 50 years ago-- definitely long enough to see how well the prediction worked. They predicted that the climate sensitivity to CO2 (assuming constant relative humidity) was 2.3C. Comparing that to the actual carbon dioxide, for the rise from 320 ppm to 400 ppm (here) using the Arrhenius relation, we get 0.74C for the temperature rise from 1966 to 2015. The measured temperature rise (here) is 0.7C, with the error bars in the figure 0.1C.
Looks like not merely a good prediction, but an outstandingly accurate prediction.
For comparison, the current IPCC 5th Assessment report estimate of sensitivity is that it is the range 1.5C to 4.5C with "high confidence", so Manabe and Wetherald's value of 2.3 is still is the range of current estimates.
mars and venus both have climates driven by completely different mechanics than the earth.
venus is a runaway greenhouse effect, with an atmosphere composed of something like 99% CO2, at a pressure many times that of earths atmosphere.
mars is also a mostly CO2 atmosphere, >95%, but its atmosphere is less than 0.001% the volume of earth's. its atmospheric content is not the driving factor in its climate. rather its the dust and planetary albedo.
on earth we have a totally different mechanic where the biggest factor in climate is water vapor, that exists in a perpetual equilibrium cycle as it evaporates out of the oceans and condenses into precipitation. Water vapor is the single biggest greenhouse gas in out atmosphere, but it general exists in equilibrium. what we've found though is that other GH gases can affect that cycle causing a feebback loop that results in more and more water vapor trapped in the atmosphere further retiaing more heat in the atmospehere.
The IPCC papers cannot go more than a few sentences without throwing in something about income inequality, rich country vs poor countries, redistribution...
Climate change may be a serious issue, and it may impact people (countries) with differing income and wealth differently, and it is obviously intertiwned with economic issues--i.e., developed countries produce more carbon dioxide than undeveloped ones--but the climate change science is rapidly taking a backseat to the goals of SJWs.
One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.
(OTTMAR EDENHOFER, UN IPCC OFFICIAL): That will change immediately if global emission rights are distributed. If this happens, on a per capita basis, then Africa will be the big winner, and huge amounts of money will flow there. This will have enormous implications for development policy. And it will raise the question if these countries can deal responsibly with so much money at all.
(EDENHOFER): Basically it's a big mistake to discuss climate policy separately from the major themes of globalization. The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War.
(EDENHOFER): First of all, developed countries have basically expropriated the atmosphere of the world community. But one must say clearly that we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy. Obviously, the owners of coal and oil will not be enthusiastic about this. One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. This has almost nothing to do with environmental policy anymore, with problems such as deforestation or the ozone hole.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...
Economic development in B1 is balanced, and efforts to achieve equitable income distribution are effective. As in A1, the B1 storyline describes a fast-changing and convergent world, but the priorities differ. Whereas the A1 world invests its gains from increased productivity and know-how primarily in further economic growth, the B1 world invests a large part of its gains in improved efficiency of resource use ("dematerialization"), equity, social institutions, and environmental protection.
A strong welfare net prevents social exclusion on the basis of poverty.
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports...
The distributional dimension of global poverty was illustrated vividly by the Human Development Report 1989 (UNDP, 1989), in the form that has come to be known as the champagne glass (Figure 1.4). This representation of global income distribution shows that in 1988 the richest fifth of the world’s population received 82.7% of the global income, which is nearly 60 times the share of the income received by the poorest fifth (1.4%). More recent statistics indicate that inequality has widened further since then and that in 1999 the richest quintile received 80 times the income earned by the poorest quintile (UNDP, 1999).
"Because the science is settled, there is no need for more basic research, the government says." Before enjoying your schedenfraude, realise that this has been organized by political forces who think 'climate change is crap' and have dismantled as many government agencies with responsibilities in this area as they can. Justifying these cuts with 'the science is settled' is disingenuous to a comic extreme.
The CSIRO well retain the same number of staff and scientists, they are simply culling one department and expanding others.
The oceans and atmospheric global warming department is only getting cut by 35 and will retain over 300 employees. They are cutting jobs that were focused on research for "awareness" of global warming and "psychological study" (often about of deniers etc.).
The cut jobs are being replaced them with field jobs. For example they are massively increasing the number of scientists at Antarctic research stations and other fields science stations. They are also increasing tech research into green technology and other mitigation techniques.
The howling from universities is because many departments have used "awareness" as an excuse for existence for a long time, and many of the people in global warming departments don't do anything involving measuring, forecasting, or mitigating warning. Rather they ate involved in purely awareness activities and other social sciences about the public perception of warming.
"My greenhouse is warmer than the outside. But the outside is also warmer than it was last night. Therefore, the greenhouse isn't doing anything"
http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
It isn't until you get to the last paragraph that TFA finally gives you the underlying cause of this astonishingly shortsighted and imminently disastrous decision:
“Climate science becomes secondary to business; business comes first
So there you have it. The ability to make money trumps EVERYTHING. Kind of answers the question of why we never see aliens. If all intelligent species tend towards a capitalist society, they all end up committing environmental suicide.
*** *** You're just jealous 'cause the voices talk to me... ***
I call this karma, cosmic justice is served, how does it taste you corrupt bastards?
That solution is nuclear power.
Any politician that claims that the government needs to fund this and support that and ignores nuclear power is not serious about the problem. This tends to lead me to think that global warming is not the problem that they claim.
Barack Obama (October 2007, before becoming president): ”It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power from the table.“
(2009, after becoming president): "We must harness the power of nuclear energy on behalf of our efforts to combat climate change.” (citation)
James Hansen (probably the most famous of the climate activists), 2013:
"We call on your organization to support the development and deployment of safer nuclear power systems as a practical means of addressing the climate change problem... in the real world there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power." (citation)
The probability of less that 25 million people coming up with anything so good or so bad that it has a significant impact on the lives of the other +7.1 billion is small.
So leave them to deal with their financial problems as they see fit and worry about what the rest of humanity is, or isn't doing because the actions of those vast masses will be far more influential.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.treasury.gov.au/Pub...
A) How much of the change is likely to be caused by which of the several known factors, and potentially unknown factors?
You will never find out with the present crew of Climatologists, everybody wants a mention in the big game, an IPCC Assessment Report, and the IPCC's mission is to access anthropologically caused global change through CO2 release anything else is outside their purview.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
If the science is solid, then if a new set of scientists look at the same inquiry in the future, they'll come up with the same results. I mean, Galois theory is valid despite Galois getting killed in a political duel. If the theory can be rediscovered by people not mentored (and thus biased) by the original discovers, it will have that much more scientific footing.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Flat.
It's funny how nuke fan deniers can so readily accuse independant scientists of corruption due to grants, then in the same breath claim no clear is safe because scientists employed by nuclear industries told them so.
Laughably hypocritical.
Politicians seem to be following the native inhabitants by sticking the heads in the sand, maybe if you ignore the problem it will go away.
Too stupid to have understood the basics of this science when it was realized 30-odd years ago.
Too stupid to have acknowledged the scientific consensus til it (and fires, droughts, cyclones) was hitting them over the head.
Too stupid to manage their own government science program, believing there was only one simple question, and it's answered already.
Dumb. Dumber. Dumbest. Are these the only choices we can elect?
Why is that exactly?
Why is above average intelligence and knowledge with a tinge of reality-bias not a prized attribute when we select our national leadership?
Do we follow some principle of not wanting to elect someone smarter than ourselves because, who knows what they might get up to that would just go right over my head? Instead, we seem to be way more comfortable electing "Joe nice bloke down the pub. Solid handshake on 'im.". What gives?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
and all about the politics.
This is just another salvo in our current (right wing) government's attacks on science and environment in this country. It's hard to fathom why, existing projects were doing great research and delivering profitable discoveries.
Over past two years there have been massive cuts across the technology sector, including:
- $300 million cut to Sustainable Research Excellence at universities
- $115 million cut to CSIRO
- $75 million cut to Australian Research Council
- $107 million cut to Cooperative Research Centres
- $8 million cut to Australian Institute of Marine Science
- $28 million cut to Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation
- $16 million cut to Geoscience Australia
- $120 million cut to Defence Science and Technology
Over 1400 jobs have been lost at the CSIRO (the guys who invented the main technologies behind WiFi), and to add insult to injury we didnt even have a Science Minister in our government cabinet for several years there.
And on the environment:
- abolished the carbon tax
- wound back renewable energy targets
- abolished the Climate Commission
- attempted to abolish the Clean Energy Finance Corporation and the Renewable Energy Agency, and recently prevented them investing in mainstream wind / solar
- defunded the environmental defenders office
Meanwhile, they repealed a mining tax and wanted to drop the company tax rate. They also wanted to sink $244 million into a non-secular school chaplain program, but the high court ruled it was invalid.
You can see where this is going yeah?
WTG Australia!
I mean that in the kindest way.I could not agree more with your decision!
Mars briefly got warmer because a global dust storm turned up the surface dirt making mars darker, I don't know where you got Venus from, Pluto was the other planet climate change denies like to reference, which is just dumb, Pluto's orbit goes in and out of the orbit of Neptune, so yes its been getting warmer because it been at its closest to the sun. If the sun was responsible for the extra heat then all or most of the planet/minor planets should be getting warmer not just a cherry picked 2, Uranus has been getting cooler, for reason nobody knows.
That's interesting, thanks.
FACT: Reading a thermometer is not 'theory". It is a Reading, producing a Fact (a piece of Data).
Scientists have made such temperature Readings millions of times, over many, many years (more like 10E5 years). Plot that data and it is still not a "theory" – just the display of a Collection of Facts.
Observing the Plots requires no "theory", either. Anyone can see that the surface of the Earth has been getting hotter, exponentially. We're still in the realm of Facts here.
THEORY: A set of well-Tested Predictive Models, based on Facts. This Results from extensive Testing and Refinement of Predictive Models. Test them enough times (like, kazillions), and a general consensus will eventually emerge that the Theory, despite its "being just a theory", has withstood vigorous Tests and Experiments intended to Challenge it, for a long time. Yes, there is Uncertainty, but by this stage, that Uncertainty (or "disagreement among scientists", as the Press like to call it), is generally around the 99.99999999999% Confidence Level. So certain that it's generally accepted as Fact. (But scientists never shut the door completely. Ever. To avoid re-repeating Tests with known outcomes – boring! – we accept strong Theories as Fact, and explore new things that build on the Known.)
QUESTION: Are humans Causing Global Warming?
Yes.
I refer you to any book on Thermodynamics – the Collection of Theories concerning thermal phenomena (like closed-systems, steady-states, and so on). There have been many completely different approaches and/or starting points variously taken, and they've all ended up in extremely close agreement (see above). (To us, it's fact within any conditions we will ever encounter. Theoretical physicists dream-up exotic situations where things can vary, or we observe extreme conditions like black holes merging, but I'm not planning a trip to visit one.)
SO WHY KEEP TESTING AND REFINING MODELS?
And what is this "disagreement" among Climate Scientists?
ANSWER: We cannot see into the future. Better models will help us deal with the issues of Climate Changes induced by the overall heating of the Earth's surface.
SIMPLER ANSWER: We don't know whether we're all doomed by 2050 AD, or by 2300 AD. :-)
PS — To anyone still on that "only a theory" hobby-horse, I have a brick and a ladder for you. Please use them to test the "only a theory" status of Gravity, and have your mortician get back to me.
Yes, the Mars orbiter from 2005 has data and photos of the same areas as the 1999 data. The principal investigator for the Mars Orbiter Camera, Michael Malin, says the martian polar ice cap is shrinking at "a prodigious rate."
I've gotta run, but I'm sure you want have too much trouble finding tabular data if you want, NASA has a Mars section on their site. Also, various people arguing global warming have cherry-picked data points and argue about them, but I prefer NASA.
As I've mentioned earlier in this thread, it seems like whatever is affecting the other planets (the sun) would probably explain about 30% of the warning on the earth. That's a really rough estimate it could be 15% or 60%; we can reasonably say it's significant, but not the sole cause.
Add in what we know about C02 and the two probably explain the observed trends pretty well. Of course the C02 data varies wildly, with "highly respected" organizations estimating global C02 by measuring it ON A VOLCANO that's spewing tons of C02, but anyway we know C02 has an effect, and we know there's an effect that's more than just on earth.
Okay, so you're explanation is that all of the other planets have big forest forest fires over the last few decades. Okay.
Or are you saying that the rest of the planets (and their moons) have volcanoes, which cause them to warm up? Which do you think best fits the data?
This is not about science at all, but about money.
Australia is close to broke. Rather than face that fact the Neanderthals who are currently in power are appointing those of like mind to positions where they can scrape a few dollars together to buy the next round of drinks ( or whatever they do in Canberra.) by digging into the petty cash box and the like. Those institutions that still have a few employees are prime targets; get rid of those few and you can spend their wages on more important things like booze.
It seems that the main requirement in any potential applicant for one of these positions is that his/her tail doesn't show when making public statements; from the performance to date, there are certainly no intelligence requirements.
Do you have any citations for any of your claims excepting Pluto? All my Google Foo can come with is simple comparisons of weather mistaken for climate except Pluto where it is summer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
The Australian government is one of the world's most vitriolically opposed to acknowledging anthropogenic climate change. It is probably not entirely coincidental that, for the past 15 years or so, the Australian economy has been riding high on sales of coal to China.
Those sales are now flagging, and the Australian economy is flagging with them. Cutting these jobs out of sheer spite is exactly how petty I would expect the current Aus federal government to be.
Mars is of course getting a lot of attention lately, so the Mars section on NASA.gov is pretty good. Most of it in the Mars is pretty straight, without arguing about global warming, adding adjustments to make the data fit the model or whatever.
I'm sure you can find your way around mars.jpl.nasa.gov, but here's one page to start with. Many people are rightfully concerned about measuring the polar ice caps on earth. When reductions were measured in the north* that was considered major evidence of global warming. Here NASA talks about the same thing happening at a much faster rate on Mars. NASA measured the reduction at 3 meters per Mars year.
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/galle...
Note again I'm not saying this effect accounts for ALL or even MOST of the warming on earth. It seems to account for between 15%-60% of it, probably close to 30%. The majority is very likely carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide, with deforestation being a problem we should keep in mind.
* Some say we should ignore the 30% INCREASE in polar ice on the south pole. Polar ice only matters when it fits your campaign pitch, perhaps.
The "garbage" article that pretty much all the climate scientists refer doubters to is this one: http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
And you haven't read it. You're like every other moron that thinks they know something but is really just following the crowd. Good job.
I notice that, although you claimed you could debunk it in two minutes... you didn't.
Game over.
Look up what that means before you say it again. Are you using the "random Al Gore quote machine"? You picked a rather irrelevant quote. Hint - weather systems are SMALLER than solar systems.
I just ripped on your other reply to me (GP to this one), so I should say this post is thoughtful. Thanks.
The science is settled, there is no longer any doubt about the link between smoking and cancer ... so lets cut 90% of funding for cancer research.
depend if you and the chicken are in the oven? togeather?
That example is so fucked up, you should take your own advice, "Delete your account you stupid fuck."
and like most idiots, you forget that the increased cloud causes an albedo change which reduces heat absorption!.
It's way more complicated than the fucking idiots we have employed as climate scientists can work out!.
1. you said the "garbage articles" passed along by people who "worry about climate change" could be debunked in "two minutes of thinking."
2. I posted a link to the source that people who pay attention to climate science most commonly reference: this one, http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/...
3. you did not debunk it. You didn't debunk any part of it. You didn't even try to debunk it.
4. Instead, you moved to an ad hominem argument. Nice try. I have, in fact, read it, but you can now change to a "yeah? prove it!" argument, which effectively changes the subject and nicely covers up the fact that you failed.
5. You said you could debunk it in "two minutes of thinking," but in fact, it has real facts, real data, and actual critical thinking. You can't debunk it-- not in "two minutes," not at all: you're afraid to even read it.
You failed. Game over.
Horseshit. CO2 is rising. By simple laws of radiative physics this must result in warming. What alternate possibility do you imagine exists?
No one is debating how CO2 works. What's the cost-benefit analysis on human action going forward? What are the feedback loops, in both directions, and how much does this matter? What's the dominant factor in determining future temperatures on Earth? (Hint: it's yellow)
Wrong! It's GREEN as in money.
I am an entrepreneur with engineering and music background.
Of course that I want my business to flourish, who not? However I am clever enough to understand that without a continuous development in basic science we won't have future enterprises.
The sad on this is that it is not the first time in modern history that this type of decisions destroy innovative companies (worst in government area). It is simple, you can't create richness from the air, it is important to create the basement for that.
Could be possible that all politicians and government officials around the world need to have some history courses? At least for not to repeat the obvious mistakes.
so it makes more sense to suggest that earth has a fever and mars is being baked for dinner?
Bzzt. Clouds also trap heat, and the Earth is not 100% covered by clouds and never will be, whereas it is 100% covered with CO2/water vapor. So even if clouds did not contribute to warming, they would still have to have a smaller effect than the CO2 and H2O. The Earth is also already a pretty cloudy place, so you need a hell of a lot of clouds to try and get rid of the ~1 degree C minimum forcing per doubling (which is not argued even by Watts) and the projected 4-6 degrees of feedback forcing. Good luck with that one.
Your argument has been seriously considered by climate scientists. Climate contrarian Richard Lindzen has proposed this exact same theory, and it has been refuted. Google "Iris hypothesis".
I see this as the inevitable consequence of political science becoming more acceptable in climate study than, well, science. When lemming-like behavior is all that remains among climate scientists because all of the dissenting views have either been fired, unfunded or shunned into silence, you get a gestalt of sameness. Science is the messy pursuit of all theories in the effort to explain observed data. No mess, no science - no science, no scientists..
Organization? You must be joking..
An article about Australia. Source: scientificamerican.com
Keep up the great work, /.
So, is Australia's federal science agency called AFSA, or what?