Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

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 was editor of the journal Energy & Environment from 1998 to 2017.

Early life and education Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen was born in Dresden, East Germany. She moved again to England in 1969 and later attended the University of Sussex where she first obtained an MA followed by a DPhil in International Relations in 1981. Her doctoral thesis was titled, Limits to the international control of marine pollution.

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.

Views on climate change When asked about the publication in the Spring of 2003 of a revised version of the paper at the center of the Soon and Baliunas controversy, Boehmer-Christiansen said, "I'm following my political agenda -- a bit, anyway. But isn't that the right of the editor?"

Boehmer-Christiansen has been a critic of climate models saying they are based on data that cannot be verified. 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 describes herself as agnostic on whether humans are causing global warming, and believes its negative aspects to be politically exaggerated.

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."

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.

Selected publications Books

Journal articles