A few days ago an op-ed appeared on FoxNews.com by a couple people from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, entitled, “Do We Really Need a National Weather Service?” I think it’s one of the more poorly-reasoned op-eds I’ve seen in quite some time. I’ll reproduce the op-ed here in italics, but interspersed with my own comments, Fire Joe Morgan-style. So here we go.
As Hurricane Irene bears down on the East Coast, news stations bombard our televisions with constant updates from the National Hurricane Center.
While Americans ought to prepare for the coming storm, federal dollars need not subsidize their preparations.
Providing weather forecasts for free is not the same thing as subsidizing storm preparations. If the NWS was buying plywood, bottled water, generators, or gas for the public, that would be subsidizing storm preparations.
Although it might sound outrageous, the truth is that the National Hurricane Center [NHC] and its parent agency, the National Weather Service [NWS], are relics from America’s past that have actually outlived their usefulness.
O RLY? This should be interesting.
The National Weather Service (NWS) was founded in 1870. Originally, the NWS was not a public information agency. It was a national security agency and placed under the Department of War. The Service’s national security function has long since disappeared, but as agencies often do, however, it stuck around and managed to increase its budget.
Apparently agencies should not adapt to changing user needs. The first name of the NWS, even when it was in the Department of War (which is now the Department of Defense), was “The Division of Telegrams and Reports for the Benefit of Commerce.” Clearly it was founded with the intent of benefitting commerce and private citizens. It was only in the Department of War because they wanted observations taken regularly, and the military was reliable with routine. By 1890 the Weather Bureau was moved to the Department of Agriculture, and in 1940 it was moved to the Department of Commerce, where it remains to this day (it was renamed the National Weather Service in 1967).
Today the NWS justifies itself on public interest grounds.
The NWS has been serving the public interest for almost their entire history.
It issues severe weather advisories and hijacks local radio and television stations to get the message out. It presumes that citizens do not pay attention to the weather and so it must force important, perhaps lifesaving, information upon them.
How dare these evil meteorologists advise people that a deadly tornado or flash flood is bearing down on their town! What nerve!
A few seconds’ thought reveals how silly this is.
Ummm… What?
The weather might be the subject people care most about on a daily basis. There is a very successful private TV channel dedicated to it, 24 hours a day, as well as any number of phone and PC apps. Americans need not be forced to turn over part of their earnings to support weather reporting.
And guess where almost ALL the information that all these private weather companies comes from? That’s right, the National Weather Service! The NWS (and its parent organization NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) is mandated by law to provide all its data to the public for FREE. That includes in situ observations like the surface observation network, radiosondes (weather balloons), dropsondes, and aircraft observations. It includes remotely sensed observations from a host of multi-million-dollar satellites that observe the entire globe. It also includes data from numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, and ensembles of these NWP models (and I can tell you from personal experience with my research and experience that NWP ensembles are incredibly expensive to run in terms of computing power). If private companies had to build and maintain all this on their own, there wouldn’t be any such thing as free public forecast data.
Also, the annual budget of the NWS is currently about $1 billion. That works out to about $3/year per person. I think everyone nationwide gets more than $3/year of benefit out of the NWS. I think we get more bang for our buck from the NWS than we do from almost any other government agency.
The NWS claims that it supports industries like aviation and shipping, but if they provide a valuable contribution to business, it stands to reason business would willingly support their services. If that is the case, the Service is just corporate welfare. If they would not, it is just a waste.
Many private companies do sell their forecast products to businesses, if the businesses decide they want products that are more specialized to their needs than the free information they can already obtain from the NWS. There is a tremendous market for niche specialization of forecasts. The NWS does not cater its forecast products to each specific users’ needs for a reason, and that’s because it’s outside the scope of its mission. The NWS is not corporate welfare.
As for hurricanes, the insurance industry has a compelling interest in understanding them. In a world without a National Weather Service, the insurance industry would probably have sponsored something very like the National Hurricane Center at one or more universities. Those replacements would also not be exploited for political purposes.
Are you kidding me?!? Do these people want to admit they have no critical thinking skills? The insurance industry is only interested in hurricane climatologies, not in better forecasting any individual storm. They’d try to guess at the total number of tropical storms and hurricanes over the course of the season, but that’s about it. Being able to forecast the track or intensity of an individual storm would not do anything to help mitigate their losses or increase their profits. The only way it would is if they allowed people to buy hurricane insurance when it becomes clear a hurricane’s heading their way, but then it wouldn’t be insurance. (You can’t buy homeowners insurance if a forest fire is bearing down on your property, and you can’t buy health insurance after you get sick and expect to be covered — oh wait, Obamacare redefined the meaning of health “insurance,” but that’s a whole ‘nother post.)
For Hurricane Irene, the NHC’s track forecast was excellent. Five days out they predicted landfall somewhere near the NC/SC border, and by one day out their track error was down to 10 miles. That’s phenomenal. 20-30 years ago, the typical one-day track error was what the five-day track error was with Irene last week. Their intensity forecast was a bit off, but hurricane intensity has been a bugaboo for decades because there are still great mysteries with hurricanes that we haven’t yet figured out. The reason why a stronger hurricane was predicted was that the hurricane looked like it was going through another eyewall replacement cycle a day or two before landfall, except a new eyewall never formed. We don’t know why. Many good scientists have been and continue to research this area, but more funding is necessary before we’ll unlock the secret to making good intensity forecasts (and figuring out how to predict eyewall replacement cycles is a huge part of that).
As it stands today, the public is forced to pay more than $1 billion per year for the NWS. With the federal deficit exceeding a trillion dollars, the NWS is easily overlooked, but it shouldn’t be.
True, the government spends way, WAY too much money. The government has a huge spending problem. I think that government spending ought to return to about the long-term normal 18-20% of GDP from the 25% that it’s skyrocketed to under President Obama (it was about 21% or 22% of GDP when he took office). But that doesn’t mean that everything should be cut. I think that every single government expenditure ought to be rated on a scale ranging from “vital” to “important” to “useful” to “luxury/unnecessary” to “waste” (or similar). On such a scale, I would place the NWS somewhere on the “vital” part of the scale. The NWS is one of the LAST agencies that should be up for drastic cuts or elimination.
It may actually be dangerous.
You know what else can be dangerous? Faulty reasoning fueling incendiary rhetoric by people who don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
Relying on inaccurate government reports can endanger lives. Last year the Service failed to predict major flooding in Nashville because it miscalculated the rate at which water was releasing from dams there. The NWS continued to rely on bad information, even after forecasters knew the data were inaccurate. The flooding resulted in 22 deaths.
It doesn’t matter if the report comes from government or private agencies, inaccurate forecasts can result in people not getting themselves out of harm’s way. As every single weather forecaster will tell you, everyone has busted forecasts from time to time. Less skilled forecasters have busted forecasts more frequently.
As for the Nashville flooding, the bad data came from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Check out the actual NWS internal report, or a more informative newspaper article than the one CEI linked to in their story. The NWS absolutely screwed up, as their report indicates. But a lot of the blame also lies at the feet of the U.S. Army CoE. Everyone has busted forecasts and makes mistakes, but this one unfortunately probably contributed to a few deaths. NWS is learning from this terrible mistake and correcting their procedures, you can be assured of that.
Furthermore, would any private company want the responsibility of issuing public severe weather watches, warnings, and advisories? There would be huge liability issues there. Also, would we have ten different companies each issuing their own competing warnings? Would there need to be legislation mandating that one company be in charge of warnings?
NWS has vastly improved warning times for tornadic thunderstorms, so that now the average warning time for a tornado is about 20 minutes. That’s phenomenal, and it’s going to be hard to do much better than that until we know why some thunderstorms become tornadic and why others don’t. People are working on that, but we need more research dollars for that.
Private weather services do exist, and unsurprisingly, they are better than the NWS. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the National Weather Service was twelve hours behind AccuWeather in predicting that New Orleans would be affected.
One case of AccuWeather being 12 hours quicker in predicting that a hurricane would hit New Orleans doesn’t make their case that NWS sucks at forecasting hurricanes. You can’t prove anything from one data point. Statistics FAIL. AccuWeather is also known for breathlessly overhyping countless storms, either into a monster category 5 roaring up the east coast, or into the blizzard of the century. Joe Bastardi was particularly guilty of this while he worked at AccuWeather. There’s a reason why my friends from Penn State and I call their forecasts “AccuMongering.”
Unlike the NWS, AccuWeather provides precise hour-by-hour storm predictions, one of the reasons private industry supports them.
Yes, some industries require hourly forecasts, such as the energy sector. That’s why NCAR (where I work) is under contract to help build a good wind forecasting system for Xcel Energy currently, for instance. Right or wrong forecasts for a single event can lead to savings or costs of millions of dollars. It’s big business. But the NWS doesn’t issue hourly forecasts because most of the public doesn’t need it. When companies want it, they pay for a source that will provide them with such info if it proves beneficial to them.
It is not just random mistakes in crises either. Forecast Watch has found that the National Weather Service predictions of snow and rain have an error rate 20 percent higher than their private alternatives. “All private forecasting companies did much better than the National Weather Service,” their report concludes.
What the CEI authors didn’t disclose was that the Forecast Watch study compared NWS to only three private companies: The Weather Channel, DTN Meteorologix, and CustomWeather, so saying that NWS is poorer than “all” private companies is an overstatement. Also, the study was done over just a nine-month period, Oct 2006-Jun 2007. There is value in this study, to be sure, but it would be better to do these comparisons at least over an entire calendar year, and preferably more than one year. It would also be interesting to find out if certain WFOs (weather forecast offices) in the NWS were better than others at predicting probability of precipitation, and if there were any regions in which NWS outperformed those private companies. NWS certainly has room to improve in predicting probabilities of precipitation, however, as does everyone.
In 2008, they found that the NWS’s temperature predictions were worse than every private-sector competitor including the Weather Channel, Intellicast, and Weather Underground.
The CEI authors did not link to an actual study, so I can’t evaluate their claim. I will note, however, that the extended forecast product for Weather Underground is the verbatim NWS zone forecast. If NWS sucked, then why is Weather Underground using NWS forecasts? Also, The Weather Channel so frequently had terrible temperature forecasts by relying on MOS that my Penn State friends and I called it “The Weather Channel Slot Machine.”
Even NWS’s online ZIP code search for weather reports is in some cases totally inaccurate, giving reports for areas hundreds of miles away.
No examples were given. I have never encountered this problem, for what it’s worth. I haven’t even heard of this problem before, so I really wish they would’ve given concrete examples.
NWS claims to spread information, but when the topic of budget cuts came up earlier this year, all they spread was fear. “There is a very heightened risk for loss of life if these cuts go through,” NWS forecasters said, “The inability for warnings to be disseminated to the public, whether due to staffing inadequacies, radar maintenance problems or weather radio transmitter difficulties, would be disastrous.”
I happen to agree with NWS here. One of the contributing factors to the blown forecasts of the Nashville floods (which CEI brought up earlier) was that the forecasters were overwhelmed. Fewer staff and fewer resources will help prevent history from repeating itself?
Disastrous? The $126 million in cuts would still have left the Service with a larger budget than it had a decade ago.
How about in inflation-adjusted dollars? Also, there are more observing networks to maintain, and more expensive modeling systems to run. Sure, we could go back to the models of a decade ago, but the public would not like the resultant degradation in forecast skill. The private sector wouldn’t, either, because the quality of their forecasts is dependent on that NWS data.
The massive bloat in government should not get a pass just because it’s wrapped in good-of-the-community clothing.
The authors haven’t done anything to show that there’s massive bloat in NWS. That would’ve required actual examination of the NWS budget items.
NWS services can and are better provided by the private sector.
Except that the private sector relies almost entirely on the free data and services provided by the NWS and other governmental agencies from around the world.
Americans will invest in weather forecasting because if there is one thing we can be certain of, people will want to protect their property and their lives.
And that’s exactly why NWS exists and why our government invests in it, to protect life and property! Argh!
In closing, the authors might be worth listening to if they actually made a good argument that didn’t rely on misrepresentation of facts, omission of facts, or ridiculous arguments. When they can’t even treat their argument knowledgeably or honestly, they deserve to be exposed for it. I’m not saying this just because it’s “close to home” as a meteorologist. But because it’s “close to home” I can show their arguments to be downright silly. For an additional take on it, check out this article from another PhD meteorologist.
Today was a hard day. Today marks three years since my brother Aaron was killed in a jet ski accident. It’s been three years, but I still miss Aaron terribly. I can take comfort that he was a strong Christian, though, so I will see him again in heaven. It’s good to remember the words that my Dad read at his funeral, a personalization of Ephesians 1:3-14:
“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed Aaron in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as He chose Aaron in Him before the foundation of the world, that Aaron should be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined Aaron for adoption as a son through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of His will, to the praise of His glorious grace, with which He has blessed Aaron in the Beloved. In Him Aaron has redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace, which He lavished upon Aaron, in all wisdom and insight making known to Aaron the mystery of His will, according to His purpose, which He set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Him, things in heaven and things on earth.
In Him Aaron has obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of Him who works all things according to the counsel of His will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of His glory. In Him Aaron also, when Aaron heard the word of truth, the gospel of his salvation, and believed in Him, was sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of Aaron’s inheritance until Aaron acquires possession of it, to the praise of His glory.”
And also, the words of Aaron’s favorite hymn, “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise,” bring comfort.
I remember when I was deciding whether to go to grad school at CU-Boulder or Penn State, Aaron told me that if I chose Colorado, he’d come visit me for sure because he & Eve already wanted to take a vacation to Colorado. And now I find myself living in Colorado, but he won’t be able to come visit me. That’s come to mind many times in the last year.
Please keep our whole family, but especially Aaron’s wife Eve and their kids Ella and Matthias in your prayers. Miss you, Aaron.
It’s been almost a month since I’ve blogged, but there’s good reason. August has been a very fun month so far, with friends visiting, more hiking in Rocky Mountain NP, climbing three 14ers, and even attending a concert at Red Rocks! And last weekend I didn’t even do anything.
Halls and the Rockies
At the beginning of the month Ryan & Sarah Hall came through Colorado at the end of their nearly four-week west coast road trip from Chicago. On Sunday the 31st (of July) we went hiking in the Wild Basin area of Rocky Mountain National Park. The trail we took followed North Saint Vrain Creek past Copeland Falls, the Calypso Cascades, and Ouzel Falls. It was nice to hear running water and waterfalls through most of the hike!
And then the following night I joined them at Coors Field for the Phillies-Rockies game. It’s neat when you can see the mountains from your seat! We were one row below the “purple row” in the upper deck (row 20), which is at elevation 5,280 feet. There were a lot of Phillies fans at the game, and I even saw one girl with a green “State Patty’s Day” shirt on (ugh). Phillies fans were making themselves heard, by (of course) lustily booing every time the Rockies catcher went out to the mound to talk to the pitcher. It was an entertaining game too, but unfortunately for the Rockies, a Phillies pinch-hitter tied the game on a home run with two out in the top of the 9th, and then another home run in the 10th won it for the red-hot Phillies, 4-3. Anyway, it was great to see Ryan & Sarah again!
Mount Bierstadt – 14er #1
On Saturday the 6th I checked off an item from my “Colorado bucket list”: I hiked up a 14er! Five of us (me, Amy, Tim, Richard, Richard’s friend Anthony) got up really early in the morning to go hike Mt Bierstadt. Mt Bierstadt is rated as the easiest 14er to climb, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy hike.
The hike started at Guanella Pass (11,669 feet), a few miles away from Georgetown, CO. The trail dips down about 200 feet to Scott Gomer Creek before rising all the rest of the way to the summit at 14,060 feet. I have to say it’s kind of annoying to start a hike up a 14er by going downhill for awhile — because that means the end of the hike is uphill as well. Anyway, I was trucking along until about 13,000 feet, when the trail became much steeper. I started lagging the rest of the way up to the top, but I made it!
It was pretty chilly up at the summit, about 40-45 degrees and quite windy. But the view from the top of Mt Bierstadt (14,060 feet) was spectacular! Here’s a video from the summit:
Here’s the view looking west (in the very center of the photo are two neighboring peaks, Grays Peak (14,270 feet) and Torreys Peak (14,267 feet)):
And here’s the view looking northeast, toward the nearby Mt Evans (14,264 feet):
My first 14er! It was exhilarating!
Here’s a final look at Mt Bierstadt from the trailhead, at the conclusion of our hike (to the left of Mt Bierstadt is The Sawtooth, the narrow, exposed path over to Mt Evans):
Concert at Red Rocks
Another item on my Colorado bucket list was attending a concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre just west of Denver. At the beginning of the summer I looked up their concert schedule, and had the 12th of August circled for a concert with The John Butler Trio. Unfortunately I couldn’t convince any friends to join me (concerts are expensive after all), so I wound up going by myself. I wanted to buy a ticket in advance, but Ticketmaster had an outrageous extortion fee — they were charging $55 for a $38.50 ticket. So instead I showed up at the box office on the day of the show, and got one for $40. Denying Ticketmaster their extortion fee is definitely a win.
At any rate, Red Rocks Amphitheatre is an amazing concert venue, sitting between Ship Rock and Creation Rock, with the city of Denver visible a few miles beyond the stage. It was a perfect Colorado evening too, with temps in the upper 70s and a full moon rising. The concert itself was pretty awesome too, and The John Butler Trio played for over two and a half hours! The concert obviously would’ve been more fun with some friends, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit. I left at the start of the final encore song so that I wouldn’t be trapped in the parking lot forever, especially since I had to wake up in a few short hours to go hiking.
Grays & Torreys Peaks (14ers #2 and #3)
After three hours of sleep following the concert at Red Rocks (which included five hours of sitting on a bench without a seat-back), it was time to wake up to go climb two 14ers! This time it was me, Richard, Amy, and three of the Moxness sisters (Adelle, Melanie, and Mikaela), all friends from church.
First off, the road from I-70 up to the Grays Peak trailhead is TERRIBLE. I’d really only advise going up there with a 4WD vehicle. Even so, you can only go about 3 mph because it’s so ridiculously bumpy and unmaintained. Partway up the narrow, steep road we saw a bunch of cars parked along the side, so figured we’d better park too. A guy even said, “Oh yeah, the trailhead’s right here.” So we got out our stuff and started hiking up the steep road. A mile and a half later we finally came to the trailhead. Ugh. I think we might’ve done 800-1000 feet of climb in that 1.5 miles. I’m tellin’ ya, that road was relentlessly steep. And oh yeah, there was still some parking at the lot at the trailhead. So we were already a bit tired by the time we got to the actual start of the trail at 11,280 feet.
A bit over a mile into the hike, at elevation 12,100 feet, here’s a view of Grays Peak (14,270 feet, on the left) and Torreys Peak (14,267 feet, on the right). It looks like Torreys is taller, but it’s not. Grays Peak also happens to be the tallest peak along the Continental Divide, and the tallest in the Front Range.
The hike to the top of Grays and Torryes was noticeably more arduous than the hike up Mt Bierstadt, but it’s still among the easier 14er hikes, apparently. It’s just a longer, steeper hike than Bierstadt. There are also so many switchbacks on the trail to Grays that it often feels like you aren’t making progress. Anyway, I was doing well setting the pace until around 13,000 feet again, when I started lagging a bit at the back of the group, just like on Bierstadt. But after a break I decided to take the lead again, and I didn’t have exhaustion problems the rest of the way up, surprisingly. The mind is pretty powerful, even when it’s oxygen-deprived. And on the way up Grays Peak I even ran into a fellow Penn State Meteorology alum, Beth R.! We Are… everywhere! At last we made it to the top of Grays!
Below is a view from Grays Peak, looking west (toward Keystone Ski Resort, Silverthorne, Lake Dillon):
Below is a view from Grays Peak, looking north. From L to R: Torreys Peak (14,267 feet), Kelso Mountain (13,100-something), and Stevens Gulch. Our trail came up Stevens Gulch, winding around Kelso Mountain before scaling Grays.
Below is a view from Grays Peak, looking east. In the center of the photo are two 14ers, Mt Evans (14,264 feet, on the left), and Mt Bierstadt (14,060 feet, on the right).
Grays Peak was my second 14er, and I was feeling pretty good!
After a lunch break, it was time to head down to the Grays-Torreys saddle (13,700 feet), and then climb straight up Torreys. It was steep, and brutal after having taken a break atop Grays. My body did not like going back uphill at this point, especially such a steep hill, and I struggled making it up Torreys. But I did make it, and that wasn’t ever in question.
Here’s a view from Torreys Peak, southeast toward Mt Evans, Mt Bierstadt, and Grays Peak (notice all the switchbacks on Grays!):
14er number three, and the second of the day!
I ran out of water before I made it to the top of Torreys Peak (I had 3 liters in my Camelbak), leaving me with about 2/3 of a liter of Powerade to ration on the 3.5-hr hike back down. Highlights of the way down: several snowballs suddenly whizzing by my head, mountain goats, wishing my legs weren’t horribly sunburned (I forgot to put sunscreen on them, sigh), and putting on flip-flops when we were finally done.
Approx. 12 miles, approx. 4500 feet elevation gain, approx. 10.5 hours, and two 14ers conquered. We were all exhausted and sore, but felt very accomplished!
There are many truly beautiful places on this planet. Several of them are in Colorado in the Rocky Mountains. Last weekend I saw another one of these stunningly beautiful places: Lake Isabelle.
On Saturday I went on a hike with a few friends from church, Richard, Tim, Andrew, Kyle, and Jenna (plus Andrew’s dog Jake and Jenna’s dog Buster). From the Brainard Lake Recreation Area, which is only about a 45-minute drive from Boulder, it’s only about an hour-long hike back to Lake Isabelle. The hike roughly follows the South Saint Vrain Creek a couple miles from Brainard Lake, up to Long Lake, and up to Lake Isabelle. It’s a relatively easy hike, with only about 500 or so feet of elevation gain along the way, up to Lake Isabelle and Isabelle Glacier at roughly 10,800 feet above sea level.
I intended to go swimming at some point during the day, too, but settled for wading in Lake Isabelle a couple of times. It was pretty chilly though, considering it was still being fed by snowmelt from an adjacent glacier, and that the lake still had some ice on it! After a few seconds it wasn’t so bad, especially when my feet and legs went numb! It made Lake Superior feel balmy, haha.
Now I’ll shut up and show a few photos from the hike:
Isn’t this gorgeous?! And yes I crossed over that somewhat-flimsy and unsturdy log “bridge” across the mouth of the creek in the photo above, very carefully. We proceeded to climb up on a rocky hill above the lake, which topped out just shy of 11,000 feet even (see photo below). This whole place is incredible!
What an amazing hike! If anyone comes to visit me in Colorado, I’d love to take you to see Lake Isabelle in person! As you can see, it’s absolutely stunning! I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface in my few months of living here so far. There surely are more hidden gems like Lake Isabelle, and I want to find them!
Some of you may be aware of a Christian ministry organization called Campus Crusade for Christ. I’ve had involvement with CCC for awhile, as it was the parent organization of Penn State Christian Grads, which I was a part of and helped lead for several years. They’re a good organization, and do a lot of good work to spread the gospel around the world.
I found out on Tuesday evening that Campus Crusade for Christ was planning a name change, when I saw some posts about it in my Facebook news feed from people who are at the CCC national conference that’s currently happening just up the road in Fort Collins. When I heard the new name was simply “Cru,” I thought, “Well, that was anticlimactic.” I say that largely because the organization has colloquially been known as Cru in many circles for a decade or two. I just didn’t think it was worth all the buildup and hype that CCC had given it. Other than that I didn’t think too much of it. My reaction to the name change wasn’t really positive or negative, just “meh.”
While the new name has generally been received well by Cru staff, some people have reacted quite negatively to it.
In a word, no. CCC has an FAQ page about their name change to Cru, where they address why they made the name change. They made the name change not because they think Christ is offensive, but because they’ve found that in the past decade or two, 20% of people they came in contact with were less willing to listen to what they had to say once they heard the word Crusade in their name (they found that Cru doesn’t generate a similar negative reaction, however). That was the primary motivation for the name change, a desire to remove unnecessary hindrances to the message of the gospel. They also changed the name because their ministry is not only focused on college campuses anymore. And yes, they ended up removing Christ from the name of the organization, but there are many ministries that don’t mention Christ in their title. Two other prominent and good student ministries, Navigators and InterVarsity, come to mind immediately, but the list really is quite long. Is a ministry exhibiting cowardice and unworthiness of support simply for not explicitly including Christ in their title? Hardly! One should look at the fruits of their ministry and their efforts, not just their name, before making judgements about the courage, worth, or value of an organization. Facts are better than assumptions.
I don’t know of anyone within Cru who is offended to be associated with Christ or to publicly proclaim Him. I mean, the whole point of their organization is to witness to people about the gospel of Jesus Christ. That hasn’t changed. Without any evidence to support it from within Cru, it’s reckless and irresponsible to ascribe the true motivation for the name change to admitting that Christ is offensive. Sure, there are many people who claim to be Christians who are ashamed of the name of Christ and are afraid to proclaim His name publicly for fear that it might offend someone, but where’s the evidence that that is the case within the Cru organization? To the best of my knowledge, it’s absent. (EDIT on 22 July at 8:30am MDT: Cru has issued another press release reaffirming their commitment to Christ.)
If people like Glenn Beck want to criticize the reasons for Campus Crusade for Christ changing their name to Cru, that’s fine. I realize some people aren’t a fan of the name change for one reason or another, including that Christ is no longer in the name. That’s okay, and it’s a perfectly valid reason not to like the name change. If they’re going to criticize Cru’s rationale for making the change, however, they should at least be criticizing the actual reasons behind the name change (especially when they’re published on the organization’s website!), not making up false reasons without any supporting evidence just to gin up controversy.
