Matt Canavan challenges CSIRO on climate link to bushfires

Matt Canavan says CSIRO scientists are too ‘reticent’ back their own studies which found no climate link to bushfires.

Nationals Senator Matt Canavan speaks during a Senate Estimates hearing at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: AAP

Former resources minister Matt Canavan says Australia’s government scientists are too “reticent” back their own recent studies which found no link yet between bushfires and climate change.

Senator Canavan had to wait nearly a minute in Senate estimates on Wednesday afternoon when he asked CSIRO officials if they still backed the lack of a link between fires and climate change, when they failed to include the same evidence in a more recent explainer document.

After several long seconds of silence, the CSIRO said it still backed the previous findings.

The Nationals senator told Sky News on Thursday that scientists and officials are feeling pressured to follow the “orthodoxy” on climate action. 

CSIRO has said before that "no studies explicitly attributing the Australian increase in fire weather to climate change have been performed." When I asked why this view wasn't included in a recent bushfires "explainer", they couldn't explain it. pic.twitter.com/PejYYTRM4F

— Matthew Canavan (@mattjcan) March 4, 2020

“That sentence not linking climate change was pretty high-level I thought. That wasn’t in (the more recent document) … eventually they confirmed no studies linking climate change and bushfires,” he said.

“I fear that our scientists fear the same pressures we do … perhaps we need to re-establish the importance of unorthodoxy.

“It all has to be one way – climate change is bad, it is the cause of everything.

“Scientists feel that pressure so they feel reticent to put the more complex picture into papers like this.”

Since leaving cabinet for supporting Barnaby Joyce’s failed tilt for the Nationals leadership, Senator Canavan has been more outspoken on resources and climate issues.

The former resources minister has warned he would cross the floor and vote against the Liberals on key issues like climate and energy, calling a target of zero net emissions by 2050 supported by some Coalition MPs – but rejected by Scott Morrison – “fantastical”.