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<div>=</div><div><a href="http://climateinsight.wordpress.com/editorial/merchant-of-doubt-s-fred-singer/">http://climateinsight.wordpress.com/editorial/merchant-of-doubt-s-fred-singer/</a></div><div>
</div><div><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; background: rgb(242, 247, 252);">Fred Singer at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1980s argued that ozone depletion is a natural phenomenon being cynically exploited by a corrupt, self-interested and extremist scientific community to get more money for their research.</p><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; background: rgb(242, 247, 252);">Now as Chief Scientist for the U.S. Department of Transportation, he protested what he called the “ozone scare” in an article published on page 1 of the Wall Street Journal. He admitted that depletion was observed but dismissed it as localized and temporary and insisted that there was no proof that CFCs were responsible. He also recycled the old tobacco tactic of “refutation by distraction” noting that skin cancers had many causes, not just those caused by increased ultraviolet light. He also erected a strawman argument, that water vapour from the supersonic transport (SST) would destroy ozone, a hypothesis that had already been discredited. He offered a counternarrative that scientists had overreacted before, were overreacting now and therefore couldn’t be trusted. He also argued that depletion was caused by natural stratospheric cooling as part of natural variability. Scientists had already shown that such cooling was a direct consequence of increased greenhouse gas absorption in the troposphere.</p><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; background: rgb(242, 247, 252);">Singer’s views went against the accumulated work of hundreds of experts and led to the conclusion that no regulation was needed. He alleged that they had “rushed to judgment” but how could he claim that if he was also inconsistently alleging that they were lobbying for more money to do more research?</p><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; background: rgb(242, 247, 252);">His story had 3 major themes – that the science is incomplete and uncertain, that replacing CFCs would be difficult, dangerous and expensive and that the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology. The first was true but the adaptive structure of the Montréal Protocol accounted for it. The second was baseless. The third was the pot calling the kettle black given his ties to the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation and the venues in which he published.</p><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; background: rgb(242, 247, 252);">Non-CFC refrigerants are now available that are more efficient and aren’t toxic, flammable or corrosive.</p><p style="border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 24px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-family: Georgia, 'Bitstream Charter', serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 24px; background: rgb(242, 247, 252);">In spite of broad acceptance of the science and adoption of amendments to the Montréal Protocol, Singer didn’t give up. In 1990 he established his own non-profit organization, the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) with funding assistance filtered through from the passionately anti-communist Unification Church of Syn Myung Moon. In 1995 he served as a star witness in hearings in the U.S. Congress, referring to the issue as “so-called” ozone depletion and that the scientific basis for concern was simply wrong. Following the award of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry a few weeks later to Sherry Rowland, Mario Moline and Paul Crutzen for their work in understanding stratospheric ozone chemistry, Singer then attacked the Nobel committee accusing them of making a political statement, saying that the country was in the throes of collective environmental hysteria.</p></div><div>
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</div><div><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">As the unworkable SDI inevitably faded, GMI turned to other ideological battles, including ozone depletion and global warming. Their adversaries saw these as scientific issues, not clashes of ideology, which gave GMI an advantage. Science recognizes the inevitability of uncertainty. The point isn’t to go for perfection but to continually refine models of how complex phenomena work. Science uses doubt as a tool, a prod to deepen understanding. <b>Seitz and his associates used doubt as a weapon against science.</b> They seized on inevitable uncertainties in scientific models as evidence that the models had no value, or worse. In 1987, for example, Singer, then working at the Department of Transportation, wrote an article published in The Wall Street Journal that was rife with inaccuracies and distortions minimizing the importance of the discovery of a hole in the ozone layer, a portion of the lower stratosphere that blocks most harmful ultraviolet rays from reaching the surface of the earth.</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">
</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#ff0000" size="4">“It was the beginning of a counternarrative,” write Oreskes and Conway, “that scientists had overreacted before, were overreacting now, and therefore couldn’t be trusted.”</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" color="#ff0000" size="4"></font></p></div>