Global warming is “undoubtedly one of the chief concerns facing the world today”. Not a surprising statement? Well, perhaps you’d look again, knowing that these are the words of one of the world’s best-known climate sceptics.

Bjørn Lomborg (pictured) is a statistician at the Copenhagen Business School and author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming. He has argued that climate change is a problem, but it’s often massively exaggerated. He has also widely criticised policies attempting to stop the problem.

But, in an interview with the Guardian yesterday, Lomborg appears to make a surprising about turn in his views. He says that his forthcoming book – Smart Solutions to Climate Change – argues for US$100 billion a year to be invested in tackling climate change. And he proposes that more money should be invested in climate engineering methods, such as cloud whitening (Time Blog).

But what caused Lomborg’s change of heart, and is it as drastic as it would first appear?

Lomborg told the Guardian that he reconsidered his stance after the Copenhagen Consensus in 2008, where a group of economists were asked to ponder the question:

“If the world is going to spend hundreds of millions to treat climate, where could you get the most bang for your buck?"

At the meeting, policies which could mitigate global warming, such as research and development investment and climate engineering came out on top.

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While simulating what happens when two galaxies merge, an astrophysics team cooked up something unexpected: a supermassive black hole forming directly from the collapse of a dense cloud of gas. Their model, presented today in Nature, offers a new explanation of how the objects form.

Lucio Mayer of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Zurich, and his colleagues, found in their numerical simulation that when massive galaxies collide, a giant central gas cloud forms and funnels gas into its centre. Eventually the cloud becomes dense enough for its gravity to be stronger than the outward pressure — at which point it collapses in on itself to form a supermassive back hole with a mass between a million and a billion times that of our Sun.

Co-author Andrés Escala, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Chile in Santiago, says there are two main schools of thought on the objects’ genesis. One proposes that smaller black holes merge to form a large one; the other, that black holes become supermassive by sucking in vast amounts of gas. The team’s results, however, demonstrate a potentially more plausible and direct process.

“In some senses it was a surprise,” says Escala, “I had some clues from previous work, but in reality I did not imagine this.”

Escala emphasises that their findings do not mean that other previous models are wrong. But, he says, they do rely on the assumption of a particular chemistry in the infant universe. Their model could occur in conditions common in the universe.

There are limitations to this model, however, says Escala. The simulation has some idealisations.

“Reality is much more complex than what we are able to model with current supercomputers,” he says, “So the next step is to refine these idealisations and relax the initial conditions to make it more general.”

The National Institutes of Health (NIH), along with the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), has announced a large-scale, $10 million, study to investigate the health effects of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

The study, which is scheduled to begin in late October 2010, will monitor around 50,000 workers and volunteers who were involved in the clean-up operation. It will involve blood tests, tests of lung function and cardiovascular health, amongst other things. Follow up tests will, for example, track reproductive health and mental health.

Looking at the long and short-term effects, researchers will compare ‘exposed’ people, who completed at least one day of clean-up work, and ‘unexposed’ people, such as those who underwent training but were not directly involved in the clean-up, or other members of the community.

This research will be the most thorough investigation to date of the health repercussions of an oil spill. Dale Sandler, an epidemiologist from the NIEHS, and principle investigator on the study, told The Scientist that in the last 50 years, of the 38 “supertanker” oil spills, just 8 have been subsequently investigated for their health effects. And these studies, she says, were not longer-term, far-reaching investigations like this one.