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While almost half of our country’s population – 40%, to be more exact – doesn’t even believe in climate change, other countries have already started taking drastic measures to fight it, or at least to attempt to fight it. According to a report from the land down under, 230 Australian scientists fired because of climate change.
Climate change and job cuts
Yes, you read that right – climate change is also responsible now for getting people fired; but it’s not actually as simple as that, since there are multiple reasons behind the decision, the majority of them being related to climate change.
Australia’s federal funded CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) will see a huge amount of job cuts, with only 30 positions remaining occupied out of the previous 140. The land and water program will see a similarly large number of staff cuts, losing 120 positions. Another 350 climate experts will start new jobs, unrelated to their expertise.
This is a rather strange move, although sort of understandable. For the majority of the world, climate change is an accepted reality against which people are trying to fight. And since the Australian government is kind of short on resources, they decided to shift funds from investigating climate change to investigating ways to fight it.
So, basically, instead of keeping spending money on investigating something already confirmed to be real, the Australian government shifted its focus on coming up with ways to fight against it – even though we still need more information on how climate change manifests worldwide.
Australia’s future climate research
This means that Australia will from now on dedicate resources to fighting something they’re no longer investigating. It’s not only the fired scientists that are worried about the state of the nation continent’s climate capabilities, but also more experienced, international ones.
With 80% of the country’s climate capabilities gone, the Australian scientific world won’t be the only one to suffer – the status of the entire Southern Hemisphere’s climate change situation relied on the findings recorded by Australia’s CSIRO.
Since CSIRO is done with investigating the worldwide matter, it’s up to other far more impractical stations to investigate the effects of climate change in the Southern Hemisphere.
For a better analogy in order to emphasize the level of chaos this move is going to generate, think about it like this – what happened is basically similar to NASA just firing most of its personnel and stopping its focus on outer space just as an asteroid that might or might not crash into Earth is spotted.
Image source: Wikimedia
