White House eyes nuclear weapons expert to lead challenge to climate science

[jpak]

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/white-house-eyes-nuclear-weapons-expert-lead-climate-review

A controversial plan by the White House to review the connections between climate change and national security might be led by a former official with the Department of Energy (DOE) who oversaw talks about nuclear weapons tests with the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Former Ambassador C. Paul Robinson, who served as chief negotiator for the Geneva nuclear testing talks from 1988 to 1990, is favored to lead the review panel, according to two sources involved in the talks. Robinson also directed DOE's Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, from 1995 to 2005 and was head of the nuclear weapons and national security programs at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

Robinson has been quietly recruiting researchers outside the government to participate in the review panel, the sources said. He has been working with Steven Koonin, a New York University professor and former undersecretary for science at DOE during the Obama administration, to find participants.

They have focused their recruitment efforts on a small number of climate skeptics with academic credentials, including Judith Curry, a former professor at Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences in Atlanta; Richard Lindzen, a retired Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who has called those worried about global warming a "cult"; and John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a newly installed member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) Science Advisory Board.

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