>Best if I quote the following report from the Wall Street Journal, JULY
>25, 1997:
By the ubiquitous S. Fred Singer, of course. So it's 2,500 to 100 (if you include some uncredential backyard meterologists and round up to the nearest 100).
Doug
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The Leipzig Declaration
Copyright 1996 Times Publishing Company St. Petersburg Times July 29, 1996, Monday, South Pinellas Edition
Cool to the warnings of global warming's dangers By David Olinger
Maybe you haven't noticed it yet, but scientists are telling us global warming has arrived. They expect we'll start to feel the difference any decade now.
Many atmospheric scientists agree Earth's temperature is creeping upward, with potentially dangerous times ahead. Glaciers could melt, and sea levels rise. Rainfall might shift with temperatures, deluging deserts and parching forests.
About 2,500 researchers considered the threat serious enough to work together on a comprehensive global warming report. They expect average temperatures in the next century to rise at a rate unseen in at least 10,000 years.
The authors called this report a consensus of the world's climate scientists.
Now, along come 84 men and women in the United States and Europe who say that's not so. They signed a declaration of concerned scientists asserting there is no "scientific consensus" about the dangers of global warming.
Who are these rebels?
Some are scientists by anyone's definition, and some are scientists by their own definition.
One signatory is Tampa Bay's own Roy Leep, the weatherman at Channel 13.
Another runs Dick's Weather Service, where callers can get yesterday's temperature and rainfall in Springfield, Ohio. Another gives weather reports on Channel 5 in San Francisco.
Leep, who attended Florida State but never graduated, said he doesn't consider advanced academic training necessary to qualify as a scientist. "I've been a meteorologist for 45 years," he said. "I have a background in meteorology."
The declaration Leep signed - formally, the Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change - has been distributed to news organizations around the world as evidence that many scientists are skeptical about global warming and oppose constraints on oil and coal use.
Global warming is a complicated topic. Scientific discussions about it get terribly technical, burdened with caveats, reliant on climate models spun out by supercomputers - and fraught with immense political and economic consequences.
Overrate the risks of global climate change, and we could find ourselves pumping high-priced gas into tiny cars because an international treaty rationed fossil fuels for no good reason.
Understate them, and the price of inaction could range from drowned condos on the Florida coast to droughts in the farm belt and tropical diseases invading the world's temperate zones.
The Leipzig declaration grew out of a November 1995 meeting of scientists who say the risks are overrated.
"Contrary to conventional wisdom," it states, "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide." All who signed it are identified as scientists.
In the United States, this declaration was circulated by S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist known to buck the mainstream on environmental issues.
Global warming? Singer has called it a problem manufactured by activists. Ozone depletion? He doubts Freon and its chemical cousins are at fault, and criticized the Nobel Prize awarded to the scientists credited with discovering the problem as "political."
About 45 Americans signed his global warming declaration. Some have well-established national reputations. Former National Hurricane Center director Neil Frank. Frederick Seitz, a former president of the National Academy of Sciences. David Aubrey, a coastal research scientist at the prestigious Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
"One of my concerns has been the one-sided nature of at least a portion of the government's discussions about global climate change," Aubrey said.
Many other names on the Leipzig list are unrecognizable to leading climate researchers. Several are scientists whose daily bread has been buttered by industries that produce greenhouse gases.
Chauncey Starr of the Electrical Power Research Institute endorsed the declaration. So did Patrick Michaels, the global warming critic whose newsletter is financed by the Western Fuels Association. So did Robert Balling, the Arizona State University climate scientist whose research has been supported by coal companies and Kuwait.
So did Richard F. Groeber, whose scientific credentials do not include a college degree.
In Springfield, Ohio, Groeber is better known as the operator of Dick's Weather Service. He tracks weather data at his private station, but avoids the trickier job of forecasting. A long-time observer of Ohio weather, he suspects global climate trends are related to sunspots, not greenhouse gases.
Is Groeber a scientist?
"I sorta consider myself so," he said. "I had two or three years of college training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study."
At WTVT in Tampa, Roy Leep has a sophisticated array of meteorological equipment, a longstanding reputation for reliable forecasts and a seal of approval from the American Meteorological Society. A brief version of his forecast appears each day in the Times.
What Leep doesn't have is a Ph.D. in any scientific field, or for that matter, a bachelor's degree. He was taking meteorology courses at Florida State University and broadcasting radio weather reports when WTVT hired him in 1957.
Leep signed the Leipzig declaration partly because he thinks government money invested in global warming research would be better spent on other things, such as hurricane research. "As a taxpayer, I can see a lot more pressing areas of interest," he said.
In San Francisco, the "scientist" who signed the declaration is KPIX weatherman Brian Sussman, who thinks "the jury is still out" on global warming. He has a bachelor's degree in meteorology.
The latest round in the global warming debate began with a thick report from the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was supposed to achieve a global consensus among climate scientists.
Its authors found evidence of "a discernible human influence" on today's climate. They expect this influence to grow with the buildup of greenhouse gases, potentially changing coastlines, agricultural areas and infectious disease rates.
Fred Singer's Science & Environmental Policy Project responded with a list of scientists who find "drastic control policies - lacking credible support from the underlying science - to be ill-advised, premature" and perilous to a world that runs on coal and oil.
"What we're trying to do is bring to the attention of the American public that there is strong scientific disagreement about the conclusion of this U.N. report," Singer said. "The people who run this business are trying to marginalize us. Calling us a tiny minority."
Singer solicited signatures from scientists by sending the declaration to members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union.
In fact, membership in the American Meteorological Society is open to people without any degree; all you need is substantial experience in the weather field and 20 semester hours of college science classes.
Does it bother Singer that people without a scientific degree would sign a declaration that begins, "As scientists . . ."?
Not greatly. "To me, that is not as important as the fact that we can demonstrate that 100 or so scientists would put their names down" as dissenters from the U.N. report.
Singer contends that more scientists wanted to sign his declaration, but feared they could jeopardize their government jobs or federal research grants.
One government scientist who signed is Nathaniel Guttman at the National Climatic Data Center in North Carolina. He said he signed it as a private citizen who doubts weather records are adequate to reach conclusions about global warming. As a federal employee, "I'd prefer not to comment."
Some names on the Leipzig list baffle climate researchers. Even scientists in the same town can't place them.
Take Boulder, Colo., for example. It's the headquarters of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a leading institution of global climate research.
It's also the home of two signers of the Leipzig declaration - John E. Gaynor and J.P. Lodge. A third, George E. McVehil, is in nearby Englewood.
Kevin Trenberth, the climate analysis chief at the Boulder center, doesn't recognize any of them.
"None of them is known professionally at all in climate research," he said. "They are nonentities."
- Times researcher John Martin contributed to this report.