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Professor S. Fred Singer is a professor emeritus of
environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and one of the
world's most widely quoted climate change sceptics. Rolling Stone
magazine has called Singer
"the granddaddy of fake 'science' designed to debunk global
warming."
Singer has given testimony
to the US senate on climate change science and appeared in the
Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. He has written
for the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New York
Times,
contributed to British newspapers and appeared on the
BBC. He also
speaks at conferences
organised by climate sceptics.
In 2009, he
told The Daily Telegraph, "We are certainly putting more carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere… However there is no evidence that this
high CO2 is making a detectable difference. It should in principle,
however the atmosphere is very complicated and one cannot simply
argue that just because CO2 is a greenhouse gas it causes
warming."
According to a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists,
Singer has worked for at least 11 ExxonMobil funded thinktanks including The
George C. Marshall Institute, The Cato Institute and The Heritage
Foundation. His organisation, SEPP, has received funding
from Exxon. The website
Climate Progress has called him an "unstoppable industry
gun-for-hire."
Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt
claims Singer is one of a loose-knit group of scientists which,
motivated by the ideology of the free market, have contributed to
disinformation campaigns about the science behind different issues
including the ozone hole, global warming, DDT and acid rain.
Singer was trained as an atmospheric physicist and received a
PhD from Princeton University in 1948. He has
designed weapons for the US military, was a pioneer
in the development of rocket and satellite technology and received
numerous awards. He became
professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia
in 1971. After his retirement in 1994 he became a professor at the
Institute of Humane Studies at Mason University and focused much of
his energy on opposing the scientific consensus on climate
change.
Singer set up the 'Science and
Environmental Policy Project' (SEPP) in 1990. SEPP concentrates
on arguing against the existence of climate change and against
measures intended to tackle climate change.
Singer has taken up positions contrary to mainstream thinking on
many different issues. He still
argues today that there is no link between CFCs and the
depletion of the ozone layer. In 1994 he was one of the authors of
a
report published by the
Alexis de Tocqueville Institution which questioned the links
between passive smoking and cancer.
Documents
available on the web show that the Institution asked for $20,000
from the Tobacco Institute for writing such a paper. In 2006 Singer
told
an American CBC documentary that he stood by the position that the
EPA had "cooked the data" to show that secondhand smoke causes lung
cancer.
In 1995 SEPP and Singer assisting in setting up the Leipzeg
Declaration which stated that there is no scientific consensus
on climate change. An investigation
by a Danish journalist in 1997 into the 33 European signatories of
the declaration found that four of them could not be located, 12
denied ehver having signed and some had not even heard of the
Leipzig Declaration. Signees included 25 television weathermen.
Those who did confirm they had signed included a medical doctor, a
nuclear scientist and an expert on flying insects.
The widely quoted assertion that "555 of all the 625 glaciers
under observation by the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Zurich
have been growing since 1980" was traced
to the SEPP website. SEPP had initially stated
that the figure was sourced from a Science paper in 1989. However
in response to enquiries Singer admitted that
the statement "appears to be incorrect and has been updated." The
statement was repeated in publications
around the world and was used in a letter
to New Scientist by British celebrity TV naturalist David Bellamy
to justify his climate sceptic views.
Singer is the author or editor of several books opposing the
mainstream view on climate change science including 'Global Effects
of Environmental Pollution' (1970), The 'Ocean in Human Affairs'
(1989), 'Global Climate Change' (1989), 'The Greenhouse Debate
Continued' (1992), and 'Hot Talk, Cold Science' (1997). He has also
co-authored 'Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years'
(2007).
Climate scientist
Dr David Archer from the University of Chicago has
rebutted some of Singer's more frequently used arguments on the
website RealClimate.org.
...