Tom Segalstad

Tom Victor Segalstad (born 1949) is a Norwegian geologist. He has taught geology and geophysics at the University of Oslo, Norway, and at Pennsylvania State University, United States.

Positions

He is the past head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo (a position he held for 12 years) and the past head of the Natural History Museums and Botanical Garden of the University of Oslo.

He currently holds a position as Associate Professor of the largest university of Norway, UiO, University of Oslo, in Resource and Environmental Geology.

In 2008, he served as one of two conveners for the "Metallogeny of the Arctic Region" symposium at the 33rd International Geological Congress.

Climate change

Speaking at the 2nd International Conference on Climate Change hosted by the conservative think tank Heartland Institute on March 8, 2009, Segalstad discussed ice core samples used to explain climate change, saying that he believed there were a multitude of errors made in their collection, which "contaminated" the results. He also stated that the "composition of ocean water...can act as a buffering agent in the alleged acidification of the oceans".

Segalstad was a reviewer of the IPCC Third Assessment Report, acting as one out of sixteen reviewers from Norway in the Working Group 1 of the IPCCbut disagreed with the mainstream scientific view of global warming from the assessment. He believes that human-released carbon dioxide (CO2) won't have a large effect on the Earth's climate, claiming that it produces only a small percent of the greenhouse effect, and that most CO2 would be absorbed by the ocean through geological processes. According to his own account, after the results of the assessment were published, he resigned from the IPCC.

He explained later in regards to the report that the summary of the report had been released first, which attracted a large amount of media attention. He then claimed that the leader of the team making the IPCC report then stated that the information in the report had to match what had been stated in the summary, even though the summary had been written by government representatives and members of environmental organizations, not by scientists in the field of study.

He was one of 100 signatories of a letter directed to the Secretary-General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon describing the perceived mistakes in how the IPCC report was made.

Researchers Richard Bellerby, Are Olsen, and Gisle Nondal wrote a series of articles in Norwegian newspaper Forskning about Segalstad's stated beliefs and research on human CO2 emissions and how they do not affect climate change. The researchers went through Segalstad's points and gave counterarguments, concluding that he had used "incorrect interpretations of laws and geochemical data, in addition to a complete neglect of published measurements". They also repeatedly mentioned that Segalstad has yet to publish his CO2 research in any "recognized scientific journal".