What I learned today about S. Fred Singer.

So I'm writing up an answer sheet for my Reasoning class, and I see that the students were asked to analyze a long and fairly odd argument about building a manned base on the moons of Mars. The author is one S. Fred Singer, and I think "is that S. Fred Singer, the guy who runs around denying global warming?" And low and behold it is. He is allegedly paid by Exxon to do this although he denied this in a letter to the Washington Post.

But there's more. Before he was a global warming skeptic, he was paid by The Tobacco Institute to be a skeptic about the risks of second hand smoke. The Tobacco Institute, in turn, was run by the major cigarette manufacturers.

And then there's the really weird thing about him. In 1960, he apparantly claimed that the Martian moon Phobos was actually a giant space station, operated by Martians, perhaps used to "sweep up radiation in Mars' atmosphere." The link for this, though, is a google cached page by some UFO group that has "nutcase" written all over it. Wikipedia claims that the UFO group's source is an article in a magazine called Astronautics.

I believe that all of this evidence, put together, places S. Fred Singer squarely in the category "Crazy Whore"

In other news, I also wrote a page today, so I'm basically still good on my pledge.