The Happy Warrior Saves His Best Climate Writing for Last

S. Fred Singer, who died last year, was an emeritus Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, well-known for his written and spoken clarity. His last book, the Third Edition of Hot Talk, Cold Science: Global Warming’s Unfinished Debate, is the most lucid example of his communication talents.

This book is just like Fred, who was always smiling, had a good word for everyone, and was enthusiastic about his work. His attitude reminded me of Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey, famously known as the Happy Warrior.

How many of us can imagine doing our best writing at the age of 94? That’s what Singer accomplished in his final year. Buy it, read it, and treasure it.

And should you have curious or scientifically inclined children and friends, however woke they may be, get them a copy too. Even if they disagree with the book, it will teach them how to effectively communicate the complications of climate change and its effects without a single equation.

California’s Independent Institute is known for timely, cogent, peer-reviewed and readable books, and this is surely one of their best. Featuring a foreword by Princeton University physicist William Happer, this edition adds co-authors University of Delaware’s David Legates, a highly adept quantitative climatologist and Anthony Lupo, chairman of University of Missouri’s Soil, Environmental and Atmospheric Science Department, which greatly expands the Third Edition and ensures it the state-of-the-art for its niche.

Hot Talk, Cold Science joins the growing “lukewarm” synthesis of climate change, a paradigm that freely acknowledges humans’ capability to alter the atmosphere in climatically meaningful ways, and also recognizes that the large general circulation or earth system climate models are predicting about twice as much lower-atmosphere warming over the vast tropics as is being observed by satellites and weather balloons.

Fred’s previous edition was published in 1999, the exact time that surface temperatures stopped warming until mid-2014. Of course this oft-cited problem was partially erased by sudden and controversial changes in the data in 2015. Fred documents many of the problems with the surface thermometer networks that are constantly being molested, putting more warming in the same data or statistically infilling temperatures where there’s actually no data. Remember, if you torture the data long enough, it will confess.

Read the full article at Real Clear Energy.