Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

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Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen bigraphy, stories - Geologist

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen : biography

1942 –

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen (Born 1942) is an Emeritus Reader in the Department of Geography at the University of Hull in Kingston-upon-Hull England, where she taught environmental policy, management and politics. She has been editor of the journal Energy & Environment since 1998 and an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC.

Selected publications

Career

Boehmer-Christiansen joined the Science and Technology Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of Sussex in 1985, working for a decade as a Research Fellow and then later as a Visiting Fellow. Since the mid-1990s she had taught environmental policy, management and politics in the Geography Department at the University of Hull. As an Emeritus Reader she still works from the University of Hull’s Geography Department.

She is a past member of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Stakeholder Forum for a Sustainable Future.

Views

Climate change

Boehmer-Christiansen has been a critic of climate models saying they are based on data that cannot be verified. She has also been critical of climate research funding, asserting that "Some university research units have almost become subsidiaries of Government Departments. Their survival, and the livelihoods of their employees, depends on delivering what policy makers think they want."

In 2006, she signed an open letter to Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper urging him to open the Kyoto Protocol to debate by holding balanced, comprehensive public-consultation sessions on the Canadian government’s climate change plans.

She holds an agnostic position on anthropogenic climate change and believes its negative aspects to be politically exaggerated.

Early life and education

Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen was born in Dresden, East Germany. In 1956, she moved to Adelaide, South Australia, where she obtained a B.A. with Honours in Geomorphology from Adelaide University while also studying climatology, geology, physical geography and German literature. She moved again to England in 1969 and later attended the University of Sussex where she first obtained an M.A. followed by a D.Phil. in International Relations in 1981. Her doctoral thesis was titled, Limits to the international control of marine pollution.

Third-party views

According to Fred Pearce, Boehmer-Christiansen is a sceptic about acid rain and global warming and calls the science reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change "political constructs."Pearce, Fred, The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth about Global Warming, (2010) Guardian Books, ISBN 978-0-85265-229-9, p. XIV.

The Guardian reported that Boehmer-Christiansen published — against the recommendations of a reviewer — a paper in Energy & Environment claiming that the Sun is made of iron.