Some Good News In Spiegel Profile Of Arch-Liar Fred Singer - He's 86

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Singer is a traveling salesman of sorts for those who question climate change. On this year's summer tour, he gave speeches to politicians in Rome, Paris and the Israeli port city of Haifa. Paul Friedhoff, the economic policy spokesman of the FDP's parliamentary group, had invited him to Berlin. Singer and the FDP get along famously. The American scientist had already presented his contrary theories on the climate to FDP politicians at the Institute for Free Enterprise, a Berlin-based free-market think tank, last December.

Singer is one of the most influential deniers of climate change worldwide. In his world, respected climatologists are vilified as liars, people who are masquerading as environmentalists while, in reality, having only one goal in mind: to introduce socialism. Singer wants to save the world from this horror. For some, the fact that he made a name for himself as a brilliant atmospheric physicist after World War II lends weight to his words. Born in Vienna, Singer fled to the United States in 1940 and soon became part of an elite group fighting the Cold War on the science front. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Singer continued his struggle -- mostly against environmentalists, and always against any form of regulation.

Whether it was the hole in the ozone layer, acid rain or climate change, Singer always had something critical to say, and he always knew better than the experts in their respective fields. But in doing so he strayed far away from the disciplines in which he himself was trained. For example, his testimony aided the tobacco lobby in its battle with health policy experts.

'Science as the Enemy'

The Arlington, Virginia-based Marshall Institute took an approach very similar to Singer's. Founded in 1984, its initial mission was to champion then US President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), better known as "Star Wars." After the fall of the Iron Curtain, the founders abruptly transformed their institute into a stronghold for deniers of environmental problems. "The skeptics thought, if you give up economic freedom, it will lead to losing political freedom. That was the underlying ideological current," says Naomi Oreskes, a historian of science at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied Singer's methods. As scientists uncovered more and more environmental problems, the skeptics "began to see science as the enemy."

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http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,721846,00.html