U.Va. professor noses out 'Flat Earth' competitors
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By ED BARNA Correspondent - Published: April 24, 2005
MIDDLEBURY — Winning something called the Flat Earth Award is supposed to be a mark of shame. But another rule says there's no such thing as bad publicity.
A college professor has happily won the inaugural Flat Earth Award after vying for it. The lead for the award changed twice, during two months of online voting for the chief opponent of global warming theory, but S. Fred Singer, an emeritus professor at the University of Virginia, was declared the winner Friday.
Novelist Michael Crichton, who had suggested in his best seller "State of Fear" and its footnotes that global warming is an environmentalist conspiracy, took the early lead in the contest set up by Middlebury College students and sponsored by the Oregon-based Green House Network. Then popular radio commentator Rush Limbaugh surged ahead.
But Singer began actively campaigning. In the end, he had 42 percent of the 5,554 votes compared with 32 percent for Limbaugh and 26 percent for Crichton.
Singer has been a much-cited opponent of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consensus that greenhouse gas emissions will raise atmospheric temperatures between 2 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit in the next century.
On Friday, the Christian Science Monitor published Singer's "acceptance speech," in which he said that global warming is "minute, insignificant and very difficult to detect," that "competent economists conclude that a modest global warming is good for you" and "agriculturists know that more CO2 is good for crops and forest growth." He announced that his Science and the Environment Policy Project will sponsor a Chicken Little Award for global warming doomsayers.
Singer's critics allege that his views have been influenced by consulting work he has done for Arco, Exxon-Mobil, Ford, General Motors and Shell.
Singer wrote that he could not believe in computer models that show substantial global warming "as long as weather satellites show that the atmosphere is not warming." The Green House Network's online release includes an Internet link to a NASA article last May about an atmospheric scientist's finding that the weather balloons measuring temperature had been getting readings both from the lower atmosphere, which was warming, and the upper stratosphere, which was cooling because the ozone layer is eroding and there are more greenhouse gases.
Correcting for this flaw, "What remained indicated that the troposphere has been warming at about two-tenths of a degree Celsius per decade, or nearly one-third of a degree Fahrenheit per decade," said Qiang Fu of Washington University, whose study was published in Nature. The findings were consistent with calculations predicting the climatic effects of human activity, he said.
"I think this could convince not just scientists but the public as well."
Eban Goodstein, executive director of the Green House Network, said Friday that "Singer has, as usual, staked out an extremist position — even among the climate naysayers — by making claims that can't be supported by the scientific evidence. So we have to say the award went to the right person."
Singer also attacked the veracity of a University of California review last December of all the peer-reviewed scientific articles between 1993 and 2003 that included the term "climate change." Naomi Oreskes found that not one of the 928 studies contradicted the U.N. panel's conclusion.
The name "Flat Earth Award" was explained on the contest Web site as follows: "Remember when scientists were attacked for believing that the earth was round? That same denial of scientific fact is now plaguing the world's understanding of global warming." The three Middlebury College students who had teamed up with the Oregon-based Green House Network to create the mock honor originally expected to bestow it each year on one of the small minority of disbelievers in global warming. But thanks to findings like Fu's, Goodstein said, "there simply aren't enough real Flat Earthers left to provide a decent slate of candidates for next year."
Goodstein, who teaches economics at Lewis and Clark College, said the Flat Earth Award resulted from knowing Middlebury College economist Jonathan Isham professionally. Isham developed an undergraduate service learning program involving the environment, and through it the Green House Network brought in senior John Hanley of Scarsdale, N.Y.; and sophomores Minna Brown and Makely Lyon of Portland, Ore.
The warm public reception for Crichton's novel, with its added commentary showing he was using fiction to express a real belief that global warming theory is a hoax, led Isham and Goodstein to think it would be good to have some sort of counterpublicity to Crichton's "big megaphone," as Goodstein put it. The students came up with the Flat Earth Award idea, and added Limbaugh as a candidate.
"I suggested Singer," Goodstein said. There is a legitimate scientific point of view that global warming won't be severe and won't be that big a problem, he said, but there is a big difference between Singer's theorizing and that of people like Richard Lindzen of MIT and Pat Michaels of the Cato Institute.
Isham said of the contest Web site (www.flatearthaward.org), "It got the word out about how multi-dimensional and bipartisan the support is for (the theory of) global warming." Business and religious groups, as Web site links show, are both concerned, he said.
For Isham, occurrences like Alaskan villages struggling to survive because the permafrost is melting, or the Pacific nation of Tuvalu planning to evacuate its nine low-lying islands due to rising water levels, suggest that we should be shifting away from a fossil-fuel-based economy now rather than waiting for bigger catastrophes. It isn't possible to say global warming "caused" four hurricanes in one year in Florida, or a heat wave that killed 10,000 people in Europe, but it is possible to say that an overheated atmosphere will result in more, and more unpredictable, severe effects, he said.
In the worst case scenario, a 10-degree rise in average global temperatures would be as big a change as between now and the Ice Age, Isham said.
With little movement on the national level, it's important for states like Vermont to do what they can, Isham said. What he and many others are now emphasizing, he said, is the positive change that would come from shifting to an economy based on renewable energy: more local-scale jobs, fewer pollution-linked diseases like asthma, fish you could eat without fear of mercury from power plant emissions, and so on.
Lyon said that from her perspective as someone who might live another 70 years, she's very concerned about what global warming might do. "With every study that comes out," she said, "there's more and more evidence for it happening."
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