The Science & Environmental Policy Project was founded in 1990 by atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer on the premise that sound, credible science must form the basis for health and environmental decisions that affect millions of people and cost tens of billions of dollars every year.

Bob Ryan (left), then President of the American Meteorological Society and popular Washington D.C. weather forecaster, with Professor Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia, at the SEPP/George Mason University Conference "Scientific Integrity in the Public Policy Process."

A non-profit, 501(c)3 educational group, its mission was to clarify the diverse problems facing the planet and, where necessary, arrive at effective, cost-conscious solutions.

Over the years, SEPP's authoritative critiques of UN documents used to shore up the Climate Treaty negotiated at the 1992 Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" have been widely quoted. Its debunking of NASA's announcement of "record" chlorine in the Arctic stratosphere (the "ozone hole over Kennebunkport") attracted the attention of the press and Congress. The Project has been tapped by both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill for objective, science-based information on global warming, ozone depletion, chemical risk, clean air standards, and other issues. The Project has been cited hundreds of times by the major news media. Articles and editorials by SEPP-affiliated scientists have been published in leading journals and newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Detroit News, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Memphis Commercial-Appeal, Seattle Times, Orange County Register, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, New Straits Times (Malaysia), and Finanz und Wirtschaft (Switzerland), among many others.

Today, with an expanded program of policy and research analysis, and with an international network of scientists working pro bono, SEPP has an impact far greater than its size might suggest. Not surprisingly, Outside magazine, a mainstream environment-oriented publication with some 350,000 subscribers, has lauded SEPP President S. Fred Singer as one of "The Ones to Watch."

Briefings, technical seminars, colloquia at universities, papers presented at scientific conferences, talks and debates at professional societies, ranged geographically from California to Europe. Highlights follow; a fuller account is found on website www.sepp.org.

1. Two research papers were published in Geophysical Research Letters (9 July 2004). We analyzed atmospheric temperature data (3 data sets) and concluded that they do not support the predictions of any of the leading climate models. In particular, models predict increased warming trends in the troposphere while observations show the opposite. We are following up on this finding and expect more papers to emerge.

This first paper eliminates one of the main IPCC arguments supporting an appreciable human contribution to observed warming. The second paper focused on the difference (models vs obs) in surface temperature trends vs latitude. We found the major disparity to be in the tropics and are developing hypotheses to explain this important result.

An additional effort is underway to demonstrate that the claimed agreement between the observed temperature history of the 20th century and theoretical climate models is likely the result of "curve-fitting" through the use of several arbitrarily chosen parameters.

2. Some two dozen seminar lectures and technical talks at universities, professional meetings (AMS, ASME, IASTED. They included lectures at Harvard, Imperial College (Univ of London), Oxford University, and at the British Antarctic Survey (Cambridge).

3. Numerous Letters to Editor (including the WSJ) and op-ed articles.

4. Briefings of Presidential Science Adviser Dr. John Marburger, NOAA chief Adm Conrad Lautenbacher, and influential Washington-based scientists (former govt agency administrators). About a dozen individual briefings to political, civic, professional and industrial groups, incl groups in Holland and Belgium.

5. Organization of an international scientific project to prepare a report on climate change to counter the forthcoming IPCC Fourth Assessment report.

6. SEPP acted as informal advisers to Michael Crichton, author of best-selling techno-thriller "State of Fear." The book demolishes the hype surrounding Global Warming and exposes the motives of some of the GW promoters.

Outreach: SEPP does not lobby on behalf of political candidates or legislation. We do provide scientific information upon request in testimony to Congress or to other groups.
We expanded our web site. Readers, including students, journalists, and lawmakers, find it a good source of sound scientific information. Our weekly bulletin "The Week That Was" reaches nearly 2000 addressees: scientists, policymakers, the media and the public. We spent much time replying to comments and questions and were guests at some dozen radio talk shows. TV interviews on CNN Headline News, Fox News, and BBC.

Financial: SEPP does not solicit support from government or industry. Major contributions came from several charitable foundations; contributions from individuals ranged up to $10,000. SEPP ended 2004 with a small surplus.

When the IPCC report, Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change (Cambridge University Press, May 1996) was finally printed in May, it was discovered that significant changes and deletions had been made to Chapter 8, a crucial part of the report dealing with the detection and attribution of global warming. Moreover, these changes had been made after the draft report had been approved by the government delegations. Dr. Frederick Seitz, chairman of the SEPP Board of Directors, brought the existence of these unannounced and unauthorized changes to the public's attention in a June 12, 1996, editorial in the Wall Street Journal. That essay sparked a heated exchange between Seitz, Singer, and the IPCC editors, which spilled over onto the pages of Nature, the Wall Street Journal, and Energy Daily.

Dr. Singer also alerted scientists who had contributed to the IPCC report and others via the Internet, prompting much backpeddling by IPCC editors. It has been a long-standing policy of The Science & Environmental Policy Project to inform the scientific community about bureaucratic activities that are, in effect, an attack on science itself--in this case, far-reaching alterations, by a few individuals, to a scientific report to which some hundreds of climate scientists had contributed. As a result of Dr. Singer's on-line correspondence, a letter reprimanding the IPCC, signed by a dozen climate scientists, was published in the January 1997 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society; a similar letter appears in August issue of Physics Today.

More serious than the clandestine alterations of the IPCC report has been the misuse of that report in advancing the political agenda of the global bureaucracy. The Policymakers Summary states the IPCC's primary conclusion as follows: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate" (from a scientific standpoint, a bland, catch-all statement). That same Summary also cites forecasts of future warming calculated by various computer climate models-- models which are still unreliable and inconsistent. At the July 1996 Conference of Parties (to the Climate Treaty) in Geneva, a Ministerial Declaration improperly linked these two items together as though the climate model forecasts could be readily accepted as evidence of future warming. In fact, the IPCC report itself specifically states that analysis of temperature patterns cannot be used to predict the magnitude of a future warming--hence, no support for the theory.

The Project has alerted policymakers, climate scientists, and the public--via published articles-- about the misuse and distortion of the IPCC report. The U.S. delegation to the COP meeting, led by Undersecretary of State Timothy Wirth, used the IPCC report to argue for the imposition of legally binding mandatory emission targets for carbon dioxide. Such a move constituted a radical reversal of White House policy, which had previously been based on voluntary efforts to reduce emissions.

In response, members of the SEPP Board (Seitz, Linden, Nierenberg, Singer, Starr) wrote strongly worded letters to Undersecretary Wirth and to IPCC chairman Bert Bolin. They stated that, in their view, the conclusions of the IPCC had been deliberately distorted for political and ideological purposes. Several of them repeated this theme in articles published in the National Review, Washington Times, and other widely circulated publications. After Dr. Bolin responded in agreement, they urged him to inform Wirth directly that the IPCC report had been misinterpreted.

The Project again took steps to counter the misperception that there is a global warming "scientific consensus" by circulating a statement of opinion and asking climate experts to endorse it. That statement, the Leipzig Declaration (based on the conclusions drawn from a November 1995 conference in Leipzig, Germany, which SEPP organized with the European Academy for Environmental Affairs) expresses concern about hasty policy action based on inadequate science. It has already been endorsed by close to 100 climate scientists in the United States and Europe.

Journalists take questions from the audience during a panel discussion--"Health and Environment: No Easy Beat" with (L-R) Gregg Easterbrook of Newsweek, Keith Schneider of the New York Times, Boyce Rensberger (obscured) of the Washington Post, Michael Fumento of Investor's Business Daily, Ellis Rubinstein (partly obscured) of Science, and Robert Bidinotto of Reader's Digest.

It has been published in full in U.S. newspapers and journals, and widely quoted in news articles and editorials. (A similar statement, the Heidelberg Appeal, which was circulated at the 1992 Earth Summit, has since been signed by more than 4,000 scientists.) The number of concerned scientists is growing. While some are still fearful of career reprisals, more and more are calling to express their support.

The Project has had a powerful impact on the global climate change debate, as evidenced by the increasingly shrill attacks by Greenpeace and other pressure groups, part of the more than $1 billion-a-year environmental lobby. In 1992, Newsweek journalist Gregg Easterbrook reported in The New Republic ("Green Cassandras," July 6) that Albert Gore and biologist Paul Ehrlich, author of the thoroughly discredited book The Population Bomb, had "ventured into dangerous territory by suggesting that journalists quietly self-censor environmental evidence that is not alarming, because such reports, in Gore's words, undermine the effort to build a solid base of public support for the difficult actions we must soon take." Easterbrook wrote: "Skeptical debate is supposed to be one of the strengths of liberalism; it's eerie to hear liberal environmentalists asserting that views they disagree with ought not to be heard."

By 1996, the environmental lobby was doing more than "suggesting." Ehrlich and his wife, in a new book, wrote darkly of a "conspiracy" to sow "seeds of doubt among journalists, policymakers, and the public at large about the reality and importance of global climate change." A handful of reports by sympathetic members of the press, and one member of Congress, spoke of a "systematic campaign of disinformation."

In short, attacking the messenger has become the first line of defense. As Easterbrook noted in 1992, "the desire to be exempt from confronting the arguments against one's position traditionally is seen when a movement fears it is about to be discredited." With little more than unproven computer models to make the case for global warming, and with observations raising more and more doubts, that fear is very close to reality.

In the fall of 1997, the Project will publish, through the Independent Institute, Global Warming: Unfinished Business by Dr. S. Fred Singer. Among other things, Dr. Singer points out weaknesses and omissions in the IPCC report and presents a more balanced view of the climate change issue. Moreover, in the course of writing his book, Dr. Singer conducted original, soon-to-be published research on topics related to climate change, specifically an apparent anti-correlation between sea level rise and increased temperatures, and evidence of regional climate warming linked to commercial airline traffic. The Project plans an extensive book tour and other publicity to bring the book's message to as wide an audience as possible in the United States and abroad.

As always, the Project's work is reported to scientists as well as to the general public. Dr. Singer presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December 1996. He presented seminars at Oxford University, the University of Michigan, New York University, and Washington College, among others. He gave public lectures in London, Istanbul, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City. Singer and other Project-affiliated scientists have been interviewed numerous times on radio and television, and continue to publish editorials and other commentary in newspapers and magazines. One article, "Ten Things About Climate That People Ought to Know," was syndicated by Knight-Ridder and drew positive comments from readers across the nation.

Although global warming dominated SEPP's work in 1996, there was time for other articles and activities: an editorial on the 10th anniversary of Chernobyl; an editorial on the threat to human existence from an asteroid impact on the Earth; and initial preparation for a new book, "Zero Risk: An Impossible Goal," which builds on work laid down by the late Dr. Aaron Wildavsky, a founding director of SEPP.

In the coming year, The Science & Environmental Policy Project will continue to inform the scientific community, policymakers, and the public, both in the United States and abroad, of the policy impacts of environmental issues, enabling them to participate in the debate more effectively. The Project will also continue to promote effective, cost-conscious solutions to environmental problems, and scientific observations and published, peer-reviewed data as the most reliable basis for policy.

Background: S. Fred Singer
Background: Henry R. Linden
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