Obama Science Advisor a Home Run

There is a wave of elation now pulsing through the climate policy world with the announcement that President-elect Obama will appoint John Holdren to be his science adviser. 

Holdren will run the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and he brings an impressive set of credentials. He's Professor of Environmental Science and Policy at Harvard University in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences; simultaneously a Professor of Environmental Policy at the Kennedy School of Government; and President and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center. And believe it or not, lots more.

For example, from 1987 to 1997 he served as chair of the executive committee of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, and in 1995 he delivered the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to the Pugwash organization. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Joe Romm comments:

He probably has more combined expertise on both climate science and clean energy technology than any other person who could plausibly have been named science adviser.

Holdren's appointment also brings another big plus. He has no patience for the climate denial machine that has so befouled national discourse, and under his watch as science advisor, we can expect the dishonest naysayers will have a harder go of fooling the public. Here's what Holdren had to say about them in a summary he shared with attendees of a recent conference:

The few climate-change “skeptics” with any sort of scientific credentials continue to receive attention in the media out of all proportion to their numbers, their qualifications, or the merit of their arguments. The attention and credence they receive are a menace, of course, insofar as this delays the development of the political consensus that will be needed before society embraces remedies that are commensurate with the magnitude of the climate-change challenge.....

Members of the public who are tempted to be swayed by this vocal fringe should ask themselves how it could be, if human-caused climate change is just a hoax, that the leaderships of the national academies of sciences of every country in the world that has one are repeatedly on record saying that global climate change is real, dangerous, caused mainly by humans, and reason for early and concerted action to reduce those causes;  that this is also the overwhelming consensus view among the faculty members of the earth sciences departments at every major university in the world; and that all three of holders of the one Nobel prize in science that has been awarded for environmental science (Crutzen, Rowland, and Molina, in 1995, for figuring out what was happening to stratospheric ozone) are all leaders in the climate-change scientific mainstream. 

The fact is that anybody who could believe that the cream of the part of the world scientific community that has actually studied this phenomenon could be co-opted by hoaxers or suffering from mass hysteria is just not thinking clearly.

The deniers recently made another attempt at scientific misinformation out of the UN climate conference in Poznan, and Senator Inhofe continues to be their mouthpiece in the Senate.

Good luck with more of that when Holdren comes to town.

See Also

A John Holdren Reader

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