The Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) is a non-profit educational group founded by atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer. The chair of SEPP's board of directors is university president emeritus Frederick Seitz, formerly president of the National Academy of Sciences.
The project, based in Arlington, Virginia, has since 1990 presented arguments against the "environmentalist" positions on ozone depletion and global warming theory. Its website regularly reports and analyzes the recent scientific results and presents what it claims is evidence that the media and other institutions have shown bias in reporting on the global warming controversy.
SEPP claims that the United Nations panel on climate change (IPCC) has produced misleading summaries of the work of scientists whose results did not support the IPCC's preordained conclusions. It strongly rejects the claim frequently voiced by the UN panel and the Democratic Party of the US, that a "scientific consensus" exists regarding the global warming hypothesis, contending that supporters of the Kyoto Protocol vastly overstate the degree of scientific certainty on climate change.
The SEPP site appears to be becoming out of date: it lists three science advisors [1] who are dead (William Mitchell, William Nierenberg and Michael J. Higatsberger); the "key issues" page [2] says that "weather satellites and balloon instruments show no warming whatsoever" - this has not been true for some years (see satellite temperature measurements). The "New on the web" and "The Week That Was" links are kept up to date. For reports and analyses of particular publications, it is probably best to search the site on one of the authors.
Of SEPP's board of directors and advisers, three are also on the board of the George C. Marshall Institute.
Views and criticisms of the SEPP
The SEPP has emerged as one of the chief opponents of the global warming hypothesis, dismissing it as an unvalidated theory. The SEPP's position on global warming is summed up in these quotes from its web site:
- ". . . at least two-thirds of the warming in this century occurred before 1940, i.e., before most of the increase in greenhouse gases. The period, 1940-1975, showed a cooling. More important perhaps, the highly accurate global temperature data from weather satellites show no warming whatsoever in the last 18 years, while the climate models predict a warming of 0.4 to 0.6 C. Clearly, the theoretical models have not been validated by actual observations. Why then should we trust them to predict a future warming?" (August 26, 1996) [3].
- Note that the claim about "at least 2/3 of the warming" does not appear to be supported by the temperature record http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-1.htm, unless one picks the period from 1902 to 1939. Further, the claim about no warming from the satellite record is currently wrong: the rise to-date (mid 2003) is 0.07-0.26 °C/decade, depending on which satellite record is used (see satellite temperature record); and climate models reproduce past temperature history quite accurately [4] (contrary to SEPPs claim here, (point 4)), although as of the SEPP statement in 1996 the warming that was claimed to have occurred did not appeared in the sattelite record, and even some of the current sattelite temperature reconstructions still do not show warming in the period up to 1996.
- "The possibility that global temperatures could rise because of an increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a concern that needs to be monitored," says Singer. "But there has been no indication in the last century that we've seen anything other than natural climate fluctuations. Both greenhouse theory and computer models predict that global warming should be more rapid in the polar regions than anywhere else," he says, "but in July the Antarctic experienced the coldest weather on record." (Sept. 2, 1997) [5]
- The claim that there is "no indication" of anything other than natural fluctuations is odd: most recent research (see anthropogenic climate change) suggests that recent warming is anthropogenic. Even Patrick Michaels, a well-known "skeptic", has said: it is "proven humans are warming the atmosphere" [6]. Attempting to refute warming by quoting cooling in any one year is to confuse weather with climate.
SEPP was the author of the Leipzig Declaration, which it says was based on the conclusions drawn from a November 1995 conference in Leipzig, Germany, which SEPP organized with the European Academy for Environmental Affairs.
The SEPP's position on ozone depletion is that the causal links between CFCs, ozone depletion, and resulting skin cancer are insufficiently established, and that policy is rushing ahead of solid conclusions [7]. SEPP (or Fred Singer) claims that the statement "CFCs with lifetimes of decades and longer become well-mixed in the atmosphere, percolate into the stratosphere, and there release chlorine." is, or at least was, controversial [8]. However, SEPP fails to clarify which part of this complex statement it claims to be untrue.
- Singer points out that even if CFCs do deplete ozone, the effect of the projected losses in ozone only amount to the risk equivalent of someone from a mid-latitude region moving 100 kilometers (60 miles) closer to the equator.
Criticism of SEPP centers on attempts to discredit the organization or its founder by linking it to religion and free-market capitalism, implying that its science is tinged by lunacy or a profit motive. Scientific criticism of SEPP is more rare (although for one example, see Gary Taubes' article "The Ozone Backlash," Science, New Series, Vol. 260, No. 5114, pp. 1580-1583, June 11, 1993).
- SEPP's views are either self-published or appear in the mainstream press rather than in peer-reviewed scientific journals. As a result, scientists who publish in the peer-reviewed literature have had little comment about SEPP's claims. Since "views" and "comments" are more easily published elsewhere this is not surprising.
- In 2004 Singer was coauthor of two papers published in Geophysical Research Letters:
- Douglass, D. H., B. D. Pearson, and S. F. Singer (2004), Altitude dependence of atmospheric temperature trends: Climate models versus observation, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L13208, doi:10.1029/2004GL020103.
- Douglass, D. H., B. D. Pearson, S. F. Singer, P. C. Knappenberger, and P. J. Michaels (2004), Disparity of tropospheric and surface temperature trends: New evidence, Geophys. Res. Lett., 31, L13207, doi:10.1029/2004GL020212.
- SEPP reports that they are following up on these findings and expects to publish more papers.[9]
See also
External links
