So where were the climate scientists in this year’s Australia Day honours list?
Conspicuous by their absence is the answer. Honestly, as a nation, do we value their world-class work so lowly? Or were nominations discreetly shuffled out of the pack and side-lined by selection committees as politically inconvenient?
Whatever the reason, it’s pretty depressing that none of Australia’s advisers to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the ones that shared a slice of the Nobel Prize with former US vice-president Al Gore) rated a mention. It also doesn’t bode well for stemming the nation’s continuing exodus of scientific talent to better paid and higher regarded jobs overseas.
Every Australian gold medallist at last year’s politically controversial Beijing Olympics got a gong, but only one scientist who’s been an inspirational leader in tackling climate change across the country received an Australia Day honour.
The climate guy in question is Canberra-based Dr Tom Hatton, director of CSIRO’s Water for a Healthy Country research flagship, and he deserves every honour this drought-ravaged country can throw at him. In the Australia Day honours list, Hatton received a Public Service Medal for “groundbreaking research into current and future water availability and management in Australia’’, which is something of an under-statement given the ambitious scope of his achievements.
Hatton has captained a massive research effort that is more likely to be the enduring stuff of legend in coming decades than a few medal- winning laps of the Beijing pool. He heads Australia’s biggest research effort on water management and he captained a team that mapped all water resources across Australia’s food bowl, the Murray Darling Basin.
It’s the first time in the world that a major river system has been mapped in such scientific detail and among its findings was the grim news that sprawling regional towns and big irrigation developments have cut annual flows to the Murray River mouth by 61 per cent. That means Australia’s dying Coorong wetlands now receive less water than at any time in the 20th century – including the Federation drought of the early 1900s, which is regarded as one of the worst droughts recorded in Australia.
Like many of Australia’s talented and laconic scientists, Hatton makes his achievements look deceptively easy. But when he took over the CSIRO’s $87 million a year national water research flagship, it had got off to a pretty shaky start. It was viewed with deep mistrust by farming groups, and at its launch in Canberra some four years ago, former deputy prime-minister and Nationals leader John Anderson, warned it “must deliver real research’’ rather than obtuse policy waffle.
The flagship was viewed by farming groups as top-heavy with bureaucrats and awash with jargon-riddled position papers on water policy and climate change. Where was the CSIRO’s bold action plan for future water management? Where was the hands-on research that farmers and water managers could use?
Prior to taking over the research flagship, Hatton was a senior CSIRO hydrologist in Western Australia, where he had an impressive track-record of getting things done at a cracking pace and motivating good research. As the CSIRO website puts it, his salinity research in WA “significantly redefined the role of trees in landscape water balance’’ and he ‘put a polarised and emotional debate on wheatbelt river engineering (saline drainage) onto a more objective and scientific basis.’’ That means he got things done and he talked to people.
Mapping the Murray-Darling river system has been the biggest single undertaking in CSIRO’s history, using a sophisticated solar-powered wireless sensor network and computer modelling to track river flows, runoff and groundwater levels across one million square kilometres of Australia’s food bowl.
The project was massive, involving 200 people from over 15 organisations. It linked groundwater measurements with surface water availability, calculated flows through and between all rivers in the Murray-Darling system, as well as factoring in state water-sharing arrangements. It also estimated future water availability across the basin.
This is incredibly clever stuff and a world-first for tracking the impact of climate change and rates of water extraction on river catchments. It’s a contribution to the nation that’s priceless.