Global Warming Skeptic May Get French Ministry Post: AGW Devotees Upset

French President Sarkozy has reportedly decided to appoint France’s most outspoken global warming skeptic to head the nation’s super-ministry of industry and innovation.

Dr. Claude Allegre, a former and early believer in manmade global warming, reversed his views in recent years and mocked climate change alarmist Al Gore’s Nobel Prize as “a political gimmick.”

Allegre is a former French Socialist Party leader, a member of both the French Academy of Sciences and the United States National Academy of Sciences, and the recipient of numerous scientific awards.

Twenty years ago he became one of the first scientists to warn about manmade global warming, but he now argues that the cause of climate change is “unknown.”

Allegre’s appointment to the high post “would send political earthquakes through Europe and the rest of the world,” Climate Depot’s Web site observes.

His possible appointment has drawn strong protests from environmentalists, according to the Financial Times.

Putting Allegre in charge of scientific research would be tantamount to “giving the finger” to scientists, Nicolas Hulot, France’s best-known environmental activist, told the Times.

Allegre has been harsh in his attacks on global warming alarmists. “The ecology of helpless protesting has become a very lucrative business for some people,” he told a French publication. He also criticized the “nonsense” in Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” calling it “scandalous” and “all politics.”

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee and Capitol Hill’s leading global warming skeptic, has said in a speech on the Senate floor: “I find it ironic that a free market conservative capitalist in the U.S. Senate and a French socialist scientist both apparently agree that sound science is not what is driving this debate, but greed by those who would use this issue to line their own pockets.”