UCI gets $1.2 million for climate-change research

By Gary Robbins

May 19, 2003

A prominent Chicago businessman concerned about global warming is giving the University of California, Irvine, $1.2 million to broadly expand the school's study of climate change, an area in which the campus has already won the Nobel Prize.

Gary Comer, founder of the Lands' End mail-order clothing retail company, quietly agreed to spend the money to fund eight postdoctoral researchers in UCI's departments of chemistry and earth systems science.

The researchers will be subsidized for three years, performing such tasks as analyzing greenhouse gases collected over China and studying how carbon moves between the air, sea, land and plants. The gift is the result of serendipity and yachting.

A mutual friend introduced Comer to F. Sherwood Rowland, the UCI chemist who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering that chlorofluorocarbons are damaging the ozone layer. Comer hosted Rowland on a yacht trip last year, during which time the men became friends and began discussing Comer's concerns about such things as melting glaciers in the Arctic.

Comer later visited UCI's world-renowned climate-change program and decided to fund the research. "It'll be interesting to see what we can find out by setting another eight `postdocs' loose on the problem," said Rowland, who helped advise President George W. Bush on climate change last year.

Four of the researchers will work in UCI's Department of Earth Systems Science, which is ranked 19th in the world and sixth nationally in the quality of its research.