The ‘ordinary citizen’ isn’t merely me, but is likely many other people who met and/or had the opportunity to correspond with the late atmospheric physicist Dr S Fred Singer. He died at 95 years old on April 6th, and many tributes to him are collected at his SEPP organization’s April 11 newsletter, while others are seen at AmericanThinker by Marc Sheppard and Michael Widlanski, and elsewhere such as at The Reference Frame and the American Council on Science and Health – my apologies for fine tributes I omit. In a technical sense, I owe a good part of my current situation to Dr Singer, since it was his initial kind response back in 2005 that corroborated what I thought was a fatal problem in the notion of man-caused global warming. I have little doubt that he offered the same kind of kind interaction with countless other common citizens – and that’s why the global warming issue is about more than just science.
The integrity of any given authoritative statement can be measured by how well it stands up in debate about it, and how open to discussion the person is who made the statement. Dr Singer readily made himself available for such discussions, even with ordinary citizens, and he set the standard for how people receiving his inquiries and challenges should react. A standard, I soon discovered, that was not held by people I posed questions to on the IPCC/Al Gore side of the issue.
