More Whoppers from Fred Singer

Kaustabh at Paleowave catches Fred Singer in yet another fabrication: a claim that proxies show no warming since 1940. Kaustabh debunks this nicely with a long list of just a few of the proxy studies that do show warming -- and notes that his very own PhD research on marine sediments show a large 20th-century warming signal.

The UT student newspaper covered the talk here. It's well-balanced (not on the noncontrarian-contrarian scale, but, properly, on the science-nonscience scale), and includes this from a UT faculty member:

However, Charles Jackson, a research scientist for the Institute of Geophysics and part of the UT faculty at the Jackson school of Geosciences, says that much of the evidence Singer refers to is less of an alternative opinion and more bad science.

“ A lot of these points that are being made [by climate change skeptics] aren’t even of interest to science because they don’t hold much merit,” said Jackson, who attended a Singer lecture with colleagues on campus two years ago. “It was clear to us he didn’t understand how climate records are made and when these things were pointed out to him he just changed the topic.”

Contrary to Singer’s view, Jackson said that the planet is warming and that the rate of effects like sea ice melting and sea level rising are consistent with CO2 being the causative agent.

“We know the rate of effects of the greenhouse gasses, so if we didn’t see a warming we would be wondering why, “ said Jackson. “...It would be astonishing not to see it."

Of course, this is hardly the first time Singer has presented fictional science (see here, here, and here, and expand outward), but it should be the last.