Staff at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) received an unpleasant e-mail when they came to work Thursday morning, one that outlined some specifics of long-awaited restructuring plans. The gist of the message? You've done such a good job, we have to let you go.

CSIRO’s CEO Larry Marshall's lengthy message stated, “Our climate models are among the best in the world and our measurements honed those models to prove global climate change. That question has been answered, and the new question is what do we do about it, and how can we find solutions for the climate we will be living with?”

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that about 110 of the 135 people in CSIRO’s Oceans and Atmosphere division will be cut, and there will be a similar reduction in the Land and Water division. Smaller cuts are also planned for the Manufacturing and Data61 digital technology divisions. The remaining positions in Oceans and Atmosphere will be shifted away from climate science and toward mitigation of and adaptation to climate change.

CSIRO’s climate research program is a significant one, and climate scientists in Australia and elsewhere are unsurprisingly furious with the decision to abandon it entirely. Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, who currently has a visiting position at the University of New South Wales, told the Sydney Morning Herald, “Closing down climate research capacity at a time of rapid global warming is not just short-sighted, it borders on the insane. A country that amputates its ability to analyze and understand climate change in its own region will simply harm itself—it is basically setting out to adapt to a changing climate blindfolded.”

Writing in The Conversation, the director of the University of New South Wales’ ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science described Marshall’s justification for the cuts as “among the most ill-informed statements I have ever heard from a senior executive.”

“Without the next generation of climate modeling capability,” he wrote, “we will lack the tools to provide detailed information about threats like drought. Australia will spend billions of dollars on things like dams or desalination plants, but rather than relying on strategic information, these billion-dollar decisions will be based on guesswork.”

Marshall got his PhD in physics before becoming a Silicon Valley venture capitalist. When he was selected to lead CSIRO in 2014, he sent more than a few academic faces into palms by talking up dowsing rods and suggesting that CSIRO ought to look into them.