Obama Announces Top Scientific Advisors

By Ben Trott

The Observer today heralded Barack Obama's appointment of his most senior scientific advisors a 'revolution on climate change'.

Obama's announcement came during his weekly YouTube address - oft lauded as the 21st Century version of FDR's radio addresses to the nation during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The Huffington Post reported,

'John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco are leading experts on climate change who have advocated forceful government action. Holdren will become Obama's science adviser as director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lubchenco will lead the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which oversees ocean and atmospheric studies and does much of the government's research on global warming.

Holdren also will direct the president's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology. Joining him as co-chairs will be Nobel Prize-winning scientist Harold Varmus, a former director of the National Institutes of Health, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Eric Lander, a specialist in human genome research.'

The New York Times commented,

'Like Steven Chu, the energy secretary-designate, Drs. Holdren and Lubchenco advocate mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions, which the Bush administration opposed. Both served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Holdren said last year that the world needed to undertake “a massive effort to slow the pace of global climatic disruption before intolerable consequences become inevitable.”'