Chubb: Scientist duty to offer unflinching advice

Outgoing Chief Scientist Ian Chubb says hostility towards climate science may be easing but scientists still have a duty to offer unflinching advice.

Australia’s chief scientist through the bitter “climate wars” has some advice for scientists denigrated and disparaged by those who do not like their evidence-based advice: “don’t flinch”.

And as he prepares to leave the job on Friday, Ian Chubb has some unflinching parting advice – Australia will inevitably have to adopt tougher greenhouse gas reduction targets.

Chubb is also on the board of the independent Climate Change Authority, which the Abbott government unsuccessfully sought to abolish, and he is convinced Australia will eventually have to adopt targets similar to those advocated by the CCA.

The CCA found Australia should be cutting emissions by between 40 and 60% by 2030, measured against 2000 levels. Measured the same way the target announced by Tony Abbott and then adopted by Malcolm Turnbull equates to a cut of between 19 and 22%.

“That was solid work and I stand by those recommended targets,” Chubb said in an interview with Guardian Australia.

He said the continuing process set up under the Paris international climate agreement, struck late last year, and Australia’s particular susceptibility to the effects of global warming, meant “we will have to reconsider our target, I cannot see how we could possibly not”.

The Turnbull government has not ruled out increasing its targets as a result of the five-yearly reviews required under the Paris deal but has said it has no plans to do so.

Chubb recalls that he had “a lot of pushback” during the first few months of the Abbott government, “the emails from the usual suspects, people like Maurice Newman [who headed Abbott’s business advisory committee] who continue to believe [climate change] is all some vast conspiracy involving thousands of scientists around the world”.

In 2014 Chubb suggested Newman should “stick to economics rather than “trawl the internet” for papers questioning the overwhelming scientific opinion on global warming.

But Chubb said his conversations with the former prime minister himself had always been “rational and reasonable.”

“I was surprised at some of Tony Abbott’s public comments about climate change and some of his government’s initial responses and policies ... because [Abbott] and I talked about climate change quite rationally and reasonably,” Chubb said.

“He didn’t necessarily agree with me, we tried to persuade one another, but his questions were primarily about the modelling and the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 and how to build policy around the range of the projections.”

He also referred to a controversy over claims of threats against climate scientists at the Australian National University, where he had been chancellor.

“I was also questioned in the early stages because there was a suggestion that some scientists at the ANU had received death threats,” Chubb said. 

“I never said there had [been] death threats but their offices were open to the street and I thought it sensible to move them to offices accessed with a swipe card. The Australian newspaper spent a long time running FOIs [freedom of information requests] on that. I think they wanted to prove that I’d somehow timed the release of the information for a particular purpose, which was of course ludicrous.”

But Chubb says the antagonism towards climate science was easing.

“The debate here and overseas is much more sensible now, the sheer weight of scientific evidence is having a bearing,” he said.

He said he had also been deeply disappointed by the science funding cuts announced in Abbott’s first budget but was happy that the last budget and the recent innovation statement had seen some “selective reinvestment”.