An Honest Climate Debate

A climate of fast money November 1, 2009

A climate of fast money

By Andrew Bolt
Herald Sun, October 30, 2009

PSST. Want a surefire way to get a grant – maybe $300,000, or even more – for your university research?

Then gather around, my dear professors, and say these magic words.

Climate change.

You scoff? You say it’s too crazy to work, given that your expertise is actually in Bible studies, Aboriginal history, ceramics or sorghum?

More fool you. Just check the 1136 grants of the Australian Research Council that were approved this week by Science Minister Senator Kim Carr.

That’s $392 million Carr has splashed out in this year’s funding round for university research into everything from history and anthropology to physics and genetic engineering.

Yet with so much to choose from, an astonishing 10 per cent of that entire budget for ARC Discovery and Linkage grants went on projects submitted by academics who’d squeezed in some reference to “climate change”, no matter how preposterous.

Ten per cent! Oh, those cunning academics. Those wind-sniffers.

How well they understand the far-Left Kim “Il” Carr’s fierce need to have all scientists sing the Rudd Government’s hymn of global warming doom. How closely they heeded his decision to make climate change research this year a “priority”.

Still, I must laugh at the inventiveness some showed to scramble on to this greatest of gravy trains.

My favourite? It’s the proposal from two Australian Catholic University academics to study “Crisis management in late antiquity: the evidence of Episcopal letters”.

Their plan is to read the letters of the bishops of the early Christian church to see how they dealt back then with massacres, turmoil, poverty, disasters and … yes, “climate change”. This, the academics added innocently, would help us form “appropriate responses to environmental and social crises” today.

Ker-ching! That’s $262,000 for you, dear priests of this new taxpayer-funded Church of Global Warming.

But some academics were as artless as they were brazen. Take the ones from Wollongong who plan to ask Australians what they know about their food, and then claimed “this research may also enable citizens to deal with the changes caused by climate change”.

You laugh, but it worked. They got $160,000.

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