Sounds great, right? Maybe robots with Hellfire missiles or torpedoes? I totally missed the “science robot” part of the headline:

SYDNEY – Driven away by Somali pirates, international scientists are asking the Australian and U.S. navies for a favor: deploy 19 robotic instruments in the Indian Ocean to record critical data on climate and monsoon.
The Australian and British robots will be deployed by the two navies over the next six months, said Ann Threhser, a lead scientist at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia’s national science agency.
“Everyone is concerned about climate change and this is the first big program that can monitor climate change in the ocean,” Thresher told The Associated Press on Friday.
The robots collect key data used for forecasting monsoon and rainfall in Australia and South Asia. A “hole in our observations means our errors are much larger, our uncertainties are much larger and we can’t tell farmers what to do because we don’t know ourselves,” she said.
The nearly 2-meter (6.5-foot) -long robots are programmed to drift 1,000 yards (meters) for 10 days, then fall 1.5 miles (2-kilometers) into the ocean to collect data before ascending to the surface and transmitting information to satellites.
They provide near real-time observations of conditions such as heat and salinity patterns, which drive the climate and monsoonal systems that bring rain to Australia.

Great. Global warming robots. If we can militarize a global warming robot, then maybe we’re getting somewhere. Until then, scientists need to man-up and plant their own buoys.