Fred Singer

S. Fred Singer
Born	(1924-09-27) September 27, 1924 Vienna, Austria
Nationality	Austrian, American
Education	B.E.E in electrical engineering (1943) A.M. in physics (1944) Ph.D. in physics (1948)
Alma mater	Ohio State University, Princeton University
Occupation	Atmospheric physicist
Organization(s)	Professor emeritus of environmental science, University of Virginia Founder and president, Science & Environmental Policy Project
Known for	Early space research; first director of the U.S. National Weather Satellite Service (1962–1964); involvement in global warming controversy
Awards	Honorary doctorate, University of Ohio, 1970; Special Commendation from President Eisenhower for the early design of satellites; Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Federal Service

Siegfried Fred Singer (born September 27, 1924 in Vienna) is a retired American atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. He has worked in space research and atmospheric pollution. Singer is a prominent global warming sceptic and and has written several books on the topic, including Global Climate Change (1989), Hot Talk, Cold Science (1997), Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years (2007 with Dennis Avery), and Climate Change Reconsidered (2009 with Craig Idso).

Singer has had a varied career in government, academia, and the military. After obtaining his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1948, he worked as a scientific liaison officer in the U.S. Embassy in London, and designed mines for the Navy. He became a leading figure in early space research, was involved in the development of earth observation satellites, served as special adviser on space development to President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and in 1962 established the National Weather Bureau's Satellite Service Center. He was the founding dean of the University of Miami's School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences in 1964, deputy assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, and chief scientist for the Department of Transportation. He held a professorship with the University of Virginia from 1971 until 1994, and with George Mason University until 2000. In 1990 he founded the Science & Environmental Policy Project, a non-profit research institute.

Singer has been involved since the late 1980s as a skeptic in the global warming controversy. CBC named him in 2006 as one of a small group of scientists creating a stand-off that is undermining the global response to climate change. Singer argues there is no evidence that increases in carbon dioxide produced by human beings cause global warming, that the temperature of the planet has always varied, and that if temperatures rise it will be good for humankind. He is an outspoken opponent of the Kyoto Protocol, and has said of the climate models that scientists use to predict future trends that "models are very nice, but they are not reality and they are not evidence."

Education

Singer emigrated to the United States from Vienna in 1940, fleeing from the Nazis, and was naturalized in 1944. He received a B.E.E. in electrical engineering from Ohio State University in 1943, and an A.M. in physics from Princeton in 1944. He taught physics at Princeton from 1943 to 1944 as a doctoral candidate, and obtained his Ph.D. there in 1948; his supervisor was John Archibald Wheeler, and his thesis committee included J. Robert Oppenheimer and Niels Bohr.

Career

Singer's MOUSE satellite, which he designed in 1951 or 1952.

Singer worked for the United States Navy on mine warfare from 1944 until 1946, then joined the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Program at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Silver Spring, Maryland, working there until 1950. He designed the first instruments used in satellites to measure cosmic radiation and ozone, including the MOUSE—the Minimal Orbital Unmanned Satellite, Earth—in 1951. It weighed 100 pounds, and according to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum contained Geiger counters for measuring cosmic rays, photo cells for scanning the earth, telemetry electronics for sending data back to earth, a magnetic data storage device, and rudimentary solar energy cells. The Baltimore News Post reported in 1957 that had Singer's design been heeded, the U.S. could have beaten Russia by launching the first Earth satellite. He also invented the backscatter photometer ozone-monitoring instrument for early versions of U.S. weather satellites.

From 1950 to 1953, he was attached to the U.S. Embassy in London as a scientific liaison officer with the Office of Naval Research, where he studied research programs in Europe into cosmic radiation and nuclear physics. While there, he was one of eight delegates with a background in guided weapons projects to address the Fourth International Congress of Astronautics in Zurich in August 1953, at a time when, as The New York Times reported, most scientists saw space flight as thinly disguised science fiction.

Singer moved back to the United States that year to serve as director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics. He became one of 12 board members of the American Astronautical Society, an organization formed in 1954 to represent the country's 300 leading scientists and engineers in the area of guided missiles—he was one of seven members of the board to resign in December 1956 after a series of disputes about the direction and control of the group.

He joined the University of Maryland as an associate professor, then from 1959 as a full professor, and was chosen that year by the United States Junior Chamber of Commerce as one of the country's ten outstanding young men. In January 1960 The New York Times reported a presentation of his to the American Physical Society, where he sketched out his vision of what the environment around the earth might consist of, extending up to 40,000 miles into space. By this time Singer was a leading figure in the development of earth observation satellites, and he became a special adviser on space developments to President Eisenhower. In 1962, he left the University of Maryland to establish and direct the National Weather Bureau's Satellite Service Center, serving as its director until 1964. He told Time magazine that he enjoyed the moves. "Each move gave me a completely new perspective," he said. "If I had sat still, I'd probably still be measuring cosmic rays, the subject of my thesis at Princeton. That's what happens to most scientists."

In 1964, he became the first dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences at the University of Miami, the first school of its kind in the country, dedicated to space-age research. In December 1965, The New York Times reported on a conference Singer hosted in Miami Beach during which five groups of scientists, working independently, presented research identifying what they believed was the remains of a primordial flash that occurred when the universe was born.

Time magazine wrote in 1969 that Singer had had a lifelong fascination with Mars's two moons, Phobos and Deimos. He told Time it might be possible to pull Deimos into the earth's orbit so it could be examined. During an international space symposium in May 1966, attended by space scientists from the United States and Soviet Union, he proposed that manned landings on the moons would be a logical step after a manned landing on the earth's moon. He argued that the size of Phobos and Deimos—thought to be around five and ten miles in diameter and therefore with almost no gravity—would make it easier for a spacecraft to land and take off again.

In 1967 Singer accepted the position of Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water Quality and Research, U.S. Department of the Interior (1967-1970), and Deputy Assistant Administrator for Policy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970-1971). He then accepted a professorship in Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, a position he held from 1971 until 1994, when he came Distinguished Research Professor at the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University until 2000. He held a number of other government positions during this period, including Chief Scientist for the United States Department of Transportation (1987-1989).

Consultancies

Singer has worked as a consultant for several government agencies, including the House Select Committee on Space, NASA, the Government Accountability Office, the National Science Foundation, the United States Atomic Energy Commission, National Research Council, the Department of Defense Strategic Defense Initiative, Department of Energy Nuclear Waste Panel, and the Department of the Treasury. Other clients have included the states of Virginia, Alaska, and Pennsylvania. In the private sector he has worked for Mitre Corp., GE, Ford, General Motors; Exxon, Shell, Unocal Sun Oil, and ARCO on oil pricing; and Lockheed Martin, Martin-Marietta, McDonnell-Douglas, ANSER, and IBM on space research. He has also advised the Independent Institute, the American Council on Science and Health, and Frontiers of Freedom.

Awards

He received an honorary doctorate from Ohio State University in 1970, and was recognized by President Eisenhower for his contribution to the early design of satellites, receiving a Special Commendation. When he stepped down as the first director of the National Weather Bureau's Satellite Service Center he received a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Federal Service.

Public debates

Singer has taken part in the public debate about a number of scientific issues. His views include that there is no evidence that increases in carbon dioxide produced by human beings is causing global warming and that the temperature of the Earth has always varied. He has questioned the link between secondhand smoke and lung cancer. He has said there is a connection between UV-A and melanoma, as well as between the shorter-wavelength UV-B radiation and basal and squamous cell skin cancers, but argues there is no clear relation between UV-B and melanoma rates. He has suggested there is no connection between CFCs and stratospheric ozone loss.

Kuwait oil fires

During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, Singer debated Carl Sagan on the impact of the Kuwaiti petroleum fires on the ABC News program Nightline. Sagan argued that, based on the nuclear winter investigation, the smoke from the fires could loft into the upper atmosphere and that the effects could be similar to the explosion of the Indonesian volcano Tambora in 1815—which resulted in the year 1816 being known as the year without a summer—in massive agricultural failures, and in serious human suffering, including starvation. Sagan predicted the same for south Asia, and perhaps for a significant fraction of the northern hemisphere. Singer, on the other hand, argued that calculations showed the smoke would go to an altitude of about 3,000 feet then be rained out after about three to five days, and thus the lifetime of the smoke would be limited. The fires had little environmental or climatic effect beyond the Gulf region and no measurable ill effects globally. Sagan conceded in his The Demon-Haunted World that this prediction did not turn out to be correct: "it was pitch black at noon," he wrote, "and temperatures dropped 4°-6°C over the Persian Gulf, but not much smoke reached stratospheric altitudes and Asia was spared." Several sources concluded that lack of predicted and modeled global climatic cooling indicates that Singer was correct in his hypothesis.

Passive smoking

In 1994 Singer was an author of the first draft and principal reviewer of a report by Kent Jeffreys called "Science, economics, and environmental policy: a critical examination," published by the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, of which he was a senior fellow. The report attacked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for their 1993 study about the cancer risks of passive smoking and called it "junk science". Singer also appeared on a tobacco industry list of people who could write op-ed pieces defending the industry’s views, according to Derek Yacht and Stella Aguinaga Bialous.

British journalist George Monbiot wrote in The Guardian in 2006 that in 1993 APCO, a public relations firm, sent a memo to Ellen Merlo, vice-president of Philip Morris USA, the tobacco company, which mentioned Singer. Philip Morris had just commissioned APCO to fight the EPA. The memo said: "As you know, we have been working with Singer and Dr. Dwight Lee, who have authored articles on junk science and indoor air quality (IAQ) respectively ..." Monbiot writes that Singer's article, "Junk Science at the EPA," said: "the latest 'crisis'—environmental tobacco smoke—has been widely criticized as the most shocking distortion of scientific evidence yet," and alleged that the EPA had had to rig the numbers in its report on passive smoking. It was this report, according to Monbiot, that Philip Morris and APCO had wanted to discredit. Monbiot added that he had no evidence that Singer had been paid by Philip Morris.

Singer told CBC's The Fifth Estate in 2006 that he stood by the position that the EPA had "cooked the data" to show that secondhand smoke causes lung cancer. CBC said that tobacco money had paid for Singer's research and for his promotion of it, and that it was organized by APCO. Singer told CBC that it made no difference where the money came from. "They don't carry a note on a dollar bill saying 'This comes from the tobacco industry.' In any case I was not aware of it, and I didn't ask APCO where they get their money. That's not my business."

Global warming

In the same 2006 CBC documentary, Singer was named as one of a small group of scientists who have created what CBC called a stand-off that is undermining the political response to global warming.

Singer argues there is no evidence that the increases in carbon dioxide produced by humans cause global warming, that the temperature of the planet has always varied, and that if temperatures do rise it will be good for humankind. "We are certainly putting more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," he told The Daily Telegraph in 2009. "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." He told CBC: "It was warmer a thousand years ago than it is today. Vikings settled Greenland. Is that good or bad? I think it's good. They grew wine in England, in northern England. I think that's good. At least some people think so."

Singer put forward similar arguments in March 2007 when he appeared in the polemic documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle. He writes that the urban heat island effect influences surface temperatures, and that the warming from surface thermometer data was contradicted by satellite and radiosonde data. Also in 2007 he collaborated on a study that found tropospheric temperature trends of 'Climate of the 20th Century' models differed from satellite observations by twice the model mean uncertainty.

In August 2007 a Newsweek cover story reported that in April 1998 a dozen people from what it called "the denial machine" met at the American Petroleum Institute's Washington headquarters. The group included the Marshall Institute, Fred Singer's group and ExxonMobil, the oil company. Newsweek writes that, according to an eight-page memo that was leaked, the meeting proposed a $5-million campaign to convince the public that the science of global warming was controversial and uncertain. The plan, according to Newsweek, was to question and undercut the "prevailing scientific wisdom" on climate change, but it was leaked to the press and never implemented. The week after the story, Newsweek published a contrary view from Robert Samuelson, one of its columnists, who characterized the story's conception of an industry-funded denial machine as contrived and fundamentally misleading.

ABC News reported in March 2008 that Singer insists he is not on the payroll of the energy industry, but he acknowledges that his organization once received an unsolicited charitable donation of $10,000 from ExxonMobil. Singer subsequently said that his connection to Exxon was more like being on their mailing list than holding a paid position, and that the $10,000 was a single donation, one percent of all donations received.

In 2009 Singer accused the scientists involved in the Climatic Research Unit email controversy ("Climategate") of suppressing data, smearing opponents, and misusing the peer review process. He argued that "Climategate exposed [the flawed IPCC process], and now it turns out that global warming might have been 'man made' after all."

NIPCC

According to The Heartland Institute, Singer conceived the idea of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The NIPCC calls itself an international coalition of scientists providing what they call an independent examination of the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature of the causes and consequences of climate change, which the NIPCC says it examines "without bias and selectivity." The group was set up in 2003 when a group of scientists met at a United Nations climate conference in Milan, and began in earnest in April 2007 after a workshop in Vienna.

Singer prepared an NIPCC report called "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate" that was published by The Heartland Institute in March 2008. Climate scientists from NASA, Stanford, and Princeton who were contacted by ABC News dismissed the report as "fabricated nonsense." Singer called the ABC News piece "an appalling display of bias, unfairness, journalistic misbehavior, and a breakdown of ethical standards," and said it used "prejudicial language, distorted facts, libelous insinuations, and anonymous smears."

Selected publications

• Global Effects of Environmental Pollution (Reidel, 1970)
• Manned Laboratories in Space (Reidel, 1970)
• Is There an Optimum Level of Population? (McGraw-Hill, 1971)
• The Changing Global Environment (Reidel, 1975)
• Arid Zone Development (Ballinger, 1977)
• Economic Effects of Demographic Changes (Joint Economic Committee, U.S. Congress, 1977)
• Cost-Benefit Analysis in Environmental Decisionmaking (Mitre Corp, 1979)
• Energy (W.H. Freeman, 1979)
• The Price of World Oil (Annual Reviews of Energy, Vol. 8, 1983)
• Free Market Energy (Universe Books, 1984)
• Oil Policy in a Changing Market (Annual Reviews of Energy, Vol. 12, 1987)
• The Ocean in Human Affairs (Paragon House, 1989)
• The Universe and Its Origin: From Ancient Myths to Present Reality and Future Fantasy (Paragon House, 1990)
• Global Climate Change: Human and Natural Influences (Paragon House, 1989)
• The Greenhouse Debate Continued (ICS Press, 1992)
• The Scientific Case Against the Global Climate Treaty (SEPP, 1997)
• Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming's Unfinished Debate (The Independent Institute, 1997)
• with Dennis Avery. Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years (Rowman & Littlefield, 2007)
• with Craig Idso. Climate Change Reconsidered: 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) (2009).

See also

• List of scientists opposing global warming consensus