Fred Singer

Who he is: Fred Singer (Siegfried Fred Singer) is an American atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia and president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project, which he founded in 1990.

Fred Singer is an outspoken critic of what he considers inadequately rigorous or inaccurately analyzed scientific study. Singer has been particularly outspoken about the scientific assessment of anthropomorphic global warming/climate change as reported in mainstream sources. He has said, "I feel that scientific criticism is the most responsible sort of thing, both from the point of view of science and from the point of view of national policy. ... My skepticism about global warming is purely based on the observed evidence − which shows no appreciable warming while there had been large increases in greenhouse gases." He is a critic of the Kyoto Protocol as well as the Intergovernmental Pane on Climate Change (IPCC).

Dr. Singer is a prolific author, having published more than 200 technical papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals and editorial essays and articles that have appeared in such publications as Cosmos, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New Republic, Newsweek, Journal of Commerce, Washington Times and the Washington Post. Front-cover stories appearing in Time, Life, and US News & World Report have featured his accomplishments. Dr. Singer is author, coauthor or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs.

An elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Geophysical Union, American Physical Society, and American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics, Dr. Singer was presented a commendation and cash award "for important contributions to space research" by NASA in 1997.

Dr. Singer has given hundreds of lectures and seminars on global warming, including to the science faculties at Stanford University, University of California-Berkeley, California Institute of Technology, State University of New York-Stony Brook, University of South Florida-St. Petersburg, University of Connecticut, University of Colorado, Imperial College-London, Copenhagen University, University of Rome, and Tel Aviv University. He has also given invited seminars at Brookhaven National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Extra-Terrestrial Physics in Munich, the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg and the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

Dr. Singer calculated the anthropogenic contribution to atmospheric methane, an important greenhouse gas, in 1971 and predicted that methane, once reaching the stratosphere, would transform into water vapor, which could then deplete stratospheric ozone. Methane levels were indeed found to be rising, a few years later, and the increase in stratospheric water vapor was confirmed in 1995.

Background: Siegfried Fred Singer was born 27 September 1924 in Austria. Fred fled to Northumberland, England from Austria, crossing the border into Holland on 15 March 1939, the day Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia. He continued to England and worked as a teenage optician in Northumberland. In 1940 Fred joined his parents in Ohio, in the United States, shortly after the London Blitz had started and after the evacuation of British troops from Dunkirk.

Fred Singer attended Ohio State University, earning a Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering (B.E.E.) in 1943, and then earned an A.M. in physics from Princeton in 1944, the same year he became an American citizen. While working toward his master and doctorate degrees at Princeton, Singer taught physics, and received his Ph.D. in 1948 with a doctoral thesis entitled, "The density spectrum and latitude dependence of extensive cosmic ray air showers." Members of his thesis committee included Niels Bohr and J. Robert Oppenheimer, supervised by John Archibald Wheeler.

During the time he was studying at Princeton Fred Singer joined the US Navy and worked on mine warfare and countermeasures from 1944-46. During this time, Singer developed an "electronic brain," an element of an early computer. Following discharge from the Navy, Singer joined the Upper Atmosphere Rocket Program at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory where he worked until 1950, measuring ozone, the ionosphere and cosmic rays, or high-energy physics, with balloons and rockets. Dr. Singer received a Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Federal Service granted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower for his work on the early design of satellites.

During his career Fred Singer has worked in both academia and government as professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA (1971-94); distinguished research professor at the Institute for Space Science and Technology, Gainesville, FL, where he was principal investigator for the Cosmic Dust/Orbital Debris Project (1989-94); chief scientist, U.S. Department of Transportation (1987- 89); vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA) (1981-86); deputy assistant administrator for policy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (1970-71); deputy assistant secretary for water quality and research, U.S. Department of the Interior (1967- 70); founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences, University of Miami (1964-67); first director of the National Weather Satellite Service (1962-64); and director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Maryland (1953-62).

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