Antinuclear

The current mission is retracing previous journeys along the 170 W longitude line to measure precisely how key parameters such as temperature, salinity and acidity are changing As Dr Church notes, including in a Nature paper published last month, sea-level increases are accelerating as a warming planet melts glaciers and swells oceans.

From increases of a few tenths of a millimetre annually in the 1000 years before about 1850, the rate jumped 1.7 mm on average in the 20th century. Since 1993, the rise has quickened to about 3 mm a year, he says.

Despite this trend, CSIRO will slash about half the climate staff – about 70 scientists – in its Oceans & Atmosphere division. New hires will be made in climate adaptation and mitigation, the agency promises but numbers cited so far are much smaller.

As with other CSIRO staff, Dr Church will get a chance to save his job. The sole scientist on board to be told of a pending redundancy, he was granted until June 16 – or three weeks after the voyage ends in Wellington, New Zealand – to argue his case.

Letter of support

Scientists from leading research agencies, such as NASA of the US and France’s CNES, have called for Dr Church’s group to be retained……..

‘Inconceivable to the world’

Rosemary Morrow, one of the letter’s authors, said CSIRO’s undermining of its oceans expertise “is just inconceivable to the rest of the world. Especially for a country at the crossroads of so many evolving climate modes – …of droughts and driving rains.”

Outspoken

Dr Church, who has been among the most outspoken scientists criticising the current round of CSIRO job cuts, was told one reason for his firing was the need to consolidate sea-level change into regional impacts.

“This is essentially a repetition of [chief executive] Larry Marshall’s incomplete, naive and misleading statements, except for a focus on my area of science,” he said.

“Any reading of the literature or of the most recent [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports would clearly indicate that the overriding uncertainty in sea level remains the amount and distribution of sea level rise,” he said.

Also mentioned was the cutback of external funds, including the Abbott government’s ending of the Australian Climate Change Science Program that had been funded from 1990 until June this year.

……….”Sea-level rise is a long term issue,” he says, noting that without emissions reductions, the world is committed to seas rising several metres over coming centuries.