S. Fred Singer Character Analysis

Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger.

Over the next half century, the industry did what Hill and Knowlton advised. They created the “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” to challenge the mounting scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco. They funded alternative research to cast doubt on the tobacco-cancer link. They conducted polls to gauge public opinion and used the results to guide campaigns to sway it. They distributed pamphlets and booklets to doctors, the media, policy makers, and the general public insisting there was no cause for alarm.

The industry’s position was that there was “no proof” that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it.

So now there were two different versions of the problem. One, written by the panel, acknowledged the uncertainties but insisted that the weight of evidence justified significant action. The other, written by Singer (perhaps with help from the White House), suggested that the problem was not so grave, and that the best thing was to make only small adjustments and see if they helped before considering anything more serious. These were not the same view at all. Which one would prevail?

Whether or not the House Committee chairman believed Singer’s claims, his letter certainly would have had at least one effect: to make it appear that the committee was divided and there was real and serious scientific disagreement. The committee was divided, but it was divided 8–1, with the dissenter appointed by the Reagan White House.

Likens tried to set the record straight with an article in Environmental Science and Technology entitled “Red Herrings in Acid Rain Research.” But in a pattern that was becoming familiar, the scientific facts were published in a place where few ordinary people would see them, whereas the unscientific claims—that acid rain was not a problem, that it would cost hundreds of billions to fix—were published in mass circulation outlets. It was not a level playing field.

Singer alleged that scientists had rushed to judgment. There was a bit of serious illogic here, for if scientists wanted above all to keep their own research programs going, then they would have had no reason to rush to judgment. They would have been better off continuing to insist that more research was needed, rather than saying that there was now sufficient evidence to warrant regulations.

In short, Singer’s story had three major themes: the science is incomplete and uncertain; replacing CFCs will be difficult, dangerous, and expensive; and the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology. The first was true, but the adaptive structure of the Montreal Protocol had accounted for it. The second was baseless. As for the third, considering Singer’s ties to the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, and considering the venues in which he published, this was surely the pot calling the kettle black. And we now know what happened when CFCs were banned. Non-CFC refrigerants are now available that are more energy efficient—due to excellent engineering and stricter efficiency standards—than the materials they replaced, and they aren’t toxic, flammable, or corrosive.

Did all of Singer’s efforts to discredit mainstream science matter? When asked in 1995 where he got his assessments of ozone depletion, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, probably the most powerful man in Congress at the time, said, “my assessment is from reading people like Fred Singer.”

Scientists are confident they know bad science when they see it. It’s science that is obviously fraudulent—when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data have been cherry-picked—when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.

Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Schelling’s attempt to ignore the cause of global warming was pretty peculiar. It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad. But it was based on an ordinary economic principle—the same principle invoked by Fred Singer when discussing acid rain—namely, discounting. A dollar today is worth more to us than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar a century from now, so we can “discount” faraway costs. This is what Schelling was doing, presuming that the changes under consideration were “beyond the lifetimes of contemporary decision-makers.”

He concluded emphatically, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” This, of course, was precisely what he had said about acid rain. And ozone depletion. It was easy to see why many working scientists didn’t like Fred Singer. He routinely rejected their conclusions, suggesting that he knew better than they did.

Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it. Robert Jastrow spent the lion’s share of his career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—part of NASA. Frederick Seitz and Bill Nierenberg launched their careers in the atomic weapons programs, and expanded them at universities whose research activities were almost entirely funded by the federal government at taxpayer expense. Fred Singer worked directly for the government, first at the National Weather Satellite Service, later in the Department of Transportation. If government is bad and free markets are good, why did they not reject government support for their own research and professional positions and work in the private sector?

Millions of pages of documents released during tobacco litigation demonstrate these links. They show the crucial role that scientists played in sowing doubt about the links between smoking and health risks. These documents—which have scarcely been studied except by lawyers and a handful of academics—also show that the same strategy was applied not only to global warming, but to a laundry list of environmental and health concerns, including asbestos, secondhand smoke, acid rain, and the ozone hole.

Call it the “Tobacco Strategy.” Its target was science, and so it relied heavily on scientists—with guidance from industry lawyers and public relations experts—willing to hold the rifle and pull the trigger.

Over the next half century, the industry did what Hill and Knowlton advised. They created the “Tobacco Industry Research Committee” to challenge the mounting scientific evidence of the harms of tobacco. They funded alternative research to cast doubt on the tobacco-cancer link. They conducted polls to gauge public opinion and used the results to guide campaigns to sway it. They distributed pamphlets and booklets to doctors, the media, policy makers, and the general public insisting there was no cause for alarm.

The industry’s position was that there was “no proof” that tobacco was bad, and they fostered that position by manufacturing a “debate,” convincing the mass media that responsible journalists had an obligation to present “both sides” of it.

So now there were two different versions of the problem. One, written by the panel, acknowledged the uncertainties but insisted that the weight of evidence justified significant action. The other, written by Singer (perhaps with help from the White House), suggested that the problem was not so grave, and that the best thing was to make only small adjustments and see if they helped before considering anything more serious. These were not the same view at all. Which one would prevail?

Whether or not the House Committee chairman believed Singer’s claims, his letter certainly would have had at least one effect: to make it appear that the committee was divided and there was real and serious scientific disagreement. The committee was divided, but it was divided 8–1, with the dissenter appointed by the Reagan White House.

Likens tried to set the record straight with an article in Environmental Science and Technology entitled “Red Herrings in Acid Rain Research.” But in a pattern that was becoming familiar, the scientific facts were published in a place where few ordinary people would see them, whereas the unscientific claims—that acid rain was not a problem, that it would cost hundreds of billions to fix—were published in mass circulation outlets. It was not a level playing field.

Singer alleged that scientists had rushed to judgment. There was a bit of serious illogic here, for if scientists wanted above all to keep their own research programs going, then they would have had no reason to rush to judgment. They would have been better off continuing to insist that more research was needed, rather than saying that there was now sufficient evidence to warrant regulations.

In short, Singer’s story had three major themes: the science is incomplete and uncertain; replacing CFCs will be difficult, dangerous, and expensive; and the scientific community is corrupt and motivated by self-interest and political ideology. The first was true, but the adaptive structure of the Montreal Protocol had accounted for it. The second was baseless. As for the third, considering Singer’s ties to the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, and considering the venues in which he published, this was surely the pot calling the kettle black. And we now know what happened when CFCs were banned. Non-CFC refrigerants are now available that are more energy efficient—due to excellent engineering and stricter efficiency standards—than the materials they replaced, and they aren’t toxic, flammable, or corrosive.

Did all of Singer’s efforts to discredit mainstream science matter? When asked in 1995 where he got his assessments of ozone depletion, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, probably the most powerful man in Congress at the time, said, “my assessment is from reading people like Fred Singer.”

Scientists are confident they know bad science when they see it. It’s science that is obviously fraudulent—when data have been invented, fudged, or manipulated. Bad science is where data have been cherry-picked—when some data have been deliberately left out—or it’s impossible for the reader to understand the steps that were taken to produce or analyze the data. It is a set of claims that can’t be tested, claims that are based on samples that are too small, and claims that don’t follow from the evidence provided. And science is bad—or at least weak—when proponents of a position jump to conclusions on insufficient or inconsistent data.

Anti-Communism had launched the weapons and rocketry programs that launched the careers of Singer, Seitz, and Nierenberg, and anti-Communism had underlain their politics since the days of Sputnik. Their defense of freedom was a defense against Soviet Communism. But somehow, somewhere, defending America against the Soviet threat had transmogrified into defending the tobacco industry against the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Schelling’s attempt to ignore the cause of global warming was pretty peculiar. It was equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad. But it was based on an ordinary economic principle—the same principle invoked by Fred Singer when discussing acid rain—namely, discounting. A dollar today is worth more to us than a dollar tomorrow and a lot more than a dollar a century from now, so we can “discount” faraway costs. This is what Schelling was doing, presuming that the changes under consideration were “beyond the lifetimes of contemporary decision-makers.”

He concluded emphatically, “The scientific base for a greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.” This, of course, was precisely what he had said about acid rain. And ozone depletion. It was easy to see why many working scientists didn’t like Fred Singer. He routinely rejected their conclusions, suggesting that he knew better than they did.

Free market fundamentalists can perhaps hold to their views because often they have very little direct experience in commerce or industry. The men in our story all made their careers in programs and institutions that were either directly created by the federal government or largely funded by it. Robert Jastrow spent the lion’s share of his career at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies—part of NASA. Frederick Seitz and Bill Nierenberg launched their careers in the atomic weapons programs, and expanded them at universities whose research activities were almost entirely funded by the federal government at taxpayer expense. Fred Singer worked directly for the government, first at the National Weather Satellite Service, later in the Department of Transportation. If government is bad and free markets are good, why did they not reject government support for their own research and professional positions and work in the private sector?