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Hot on the trail of grant money

“The future of humanity and the quality of our daily lives necessitate a deeper understanding of Earth’s climate system, which sustains all life and is now threatened and compromised by human activities (population growth, economic development and unsustainable resource use).” Executive Summary Proposal for a $12 million Climate, Water and Carbon Program (CWC) at Ohio State University (dated 2006, but now approved and funded). On the web page, it says they want to find out why there is “rapid” climate change, so maybe they threw that word WHY in there to cover all their bases just in case it's the sun or weather patterns. Could there be a possibility that humans aren’t causing it? And if so, how would you get money for funding a new program if you didn’t comply with scientific orthodoxy that already has a “consensus” on the cause and effect of the problem? I thought it strange that the research is going to be on Mt. Kilimanjaro, when most of Ohio used to be under a glacier, and some of Ohio's climate changed quite rapidly, as did Europe's and Greenland's. And imagine the carbon footprint those faculty and grad students will make flying back and forth to Africa!

Click over to “Is it Hot In Here?” to watch the lecture of Dr. Jay W. Richards of the Acton Institute on April 17, 2008. He explores the biblical foundations for our stewardship over the environment and its importance in the debate on Global Warming. He also discusses the mainstream views on Global Warming and answers four of the main questions concerning global climate change:

1. Is the earth warming?
   
2. Are we causing it?
   
3. If the earth is warming and we are causing it, is that bad?
   
4. Would the advised policies make any difference?

Dr. Richards notes that if all the countries could manage to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, the reduction in temperature would be so small as to be unmeasurable, and would cost $50 trillion--to accomplish nothing. He poses the question--is there a better way to serve the poor and mankind with that money? Clean water, perhaps? He reminds us that the climate has been warming since 1850 (cooling since 1998), but not since 1000, and for awhile in the 1970s there was a consensus on global cooling. He agrees that concentrations of C02 is going up, but we don't know why--it increases as the temperature increases, but temps go up first. He also ponders: Do we know what the optimum climate is? Why do we think what we've experienced in our lifetimes is what is best in the future, when it wasn't that way in the past? Since the CWC appears to actually be concerned about water quality (I'm glad someone is), perhaps they need to also take on a few economists--I didn't see any on the list of cooperating faculty looking for grant money, but they could be there.

And what about President Bush's new goals for 2050? According to Steven Hayward in Monday's WSJ, "the average residence in the U.S. uses about 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 11.4 tons of CO2 per year. [To meet the adjusted goals,] the average household emissions will have to fall to no more than 1.5 tons per year. In our current electricity infrastructure, this would mean using no more than about 2,500 KwH per year." This is not enough to run the computers and lights for the CWC program at Ohio State. "The clear implication is that we shall have to replace virtually the entire fossil fuel electricity infrastructure over the next four decades with CO2-free sources – a multitrillion dollar proposition, if it can be done at all."

Oh yes, Dr. Richards says that predicitions of global disasters are always wrong, and if I heard him correctly, he also includes in that various predicitions of end-times by Christians.