Another top physicist has the ear of the new president

The US president-elect, Barack Obama, is putting his money where his mouth is and sending science sky rocketing to the top of the new US adminstration's agenda, this time by announcing that another physicist, John Holdren, will be joining his White House team as science advisor.

Holdren is no stranger to politics, having served as science and technology advisor to President Clinton. He is currently the director of the Science, Technology and Public Policy Program at Harvard University and at the Woods Hole Research Center in Falmouth, Massachusetts. If his nomination is approved by the senate, he will become the Assistant to the President for Science and Technology, Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Co-Chair of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

Like the nominee for Secretary of Energy, physicist Steven Chu, Holdren believes that climate change is caused by human activities and he campaigns for urgent action to prevent a crisis. He also speaks out against climate change sceptics, saying their views are held only by a small minority of scientists, but that their arguments are propagated by a large majority of amateurs who lack any scientific credentials. He contrasts this with the fact that, in the earth science departments of the world's top universities, the overwhelming view of faculty members is that climate change is real and is the result of human factors impacting on the environment.

If the new administration is as serious about science and the environment as it promises, perhaps we will witness a return of the days when the rest of the world could look up to the USA and marvel at their scientific and technological accomplishments. In their heyday, science and politics were closely intertwined, with the cold war driving much of the advances, such as nuclear weaponry and putting a man on the moon before the Soviet Union. The motivation behind the advances now are as much to do with economic prosperity as they are simply about the survival of our species. If the effects of climate change are as severe and as imminent as Obama and his team of advisors believe they are, there is no time like the present for such a re-emergence to occur.