CSIRO priorities 'all wrong' - Sarah Gill

As I'm writing this, the mercury is heading towards 40 degrees outside. Again, I've only just recovered from the recent four-day swelter-thon that broke the 50-year record for Perth. It's all very well if you want to cook Heston Blumenthal's slow-roast chicken in your car, but not if you'd prefer not to broil yourself or your offspring at the 3pm school pick-up.

by Sarah Gill

Just weeks ago, Perth broke the benchmark for the number of summer days over 40 degrees, so this spike takes us sailing into uncharted territory: a phenomenon repeated across the continent as records fall like dominoes, starting with the summer's widespread record temperatures across the south-east and Victoria's highest-ever minimum temperature, clocked in December 2015.

The recent bushfire in the south-west of Western Australia – a monster blaze that created its own weather pattern and raged for 17 days, claiming two lives and razing the town of Yarloop​ – is just one chapter in this year's devastating bushfire saga, which included the devastation around Victoria's Great Ocean Road in December.

Read Sarah Gill’s opinion piece in today’s Melbourne Age - “CSIRO cuts: getting our priorities all wrong.”

(Work done by the CSIRO is about saving lives and yet our Federal Government keeps a tight grip on the organization’s purse strings, so much so that the body has elected, with the government’s knowledge, to change its emphasis on what is does in terms of researching, documenting and responding to climate change.

In a contradictory sense, it was also announced that while doing less about addressing climate change, our government will spend $2 trillion on defence over the next two decades; defence, when taken back to its first principles is about killing people.

More than half of that $2 trillion should be spent on helping Australia, and Australians, prepare for the significant changes unfolding, quickly, because of climate change. That is, of course, if the Turnbull-led Coalition Government really cares about saving lives – Robert McLean.)