FreeWilly, I did browse that site (http://www.sepp.org/pressrel/petition.html), and it's, for lack of a better word, hokeyness made me suspicious. Along with the claim of "15,000" scientist having signed the petition, lol. Geez, I effing hate liars, but I'm a better liar than that. It's almost like Dr. Evil asking for a ....a... a million (!) dollars.
So, I plugged Frederick Seitz' (who I am not argueing doesn't have the credentials, but he certainly doesn't seem to be engaging in current, honest debate) name into source watch, and came up with this (some of which is downright comical):
Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change
From SourceWatch
The Leipzig Declaration on Global Climate Change claims to be a petition from "scientists concerned with atmospheric and climate problems" who deny that human greenhouse gas emissions are causing global climate change. According to the declaration, "there does not exist today a general scientific consensus about the importance of greenhouse warming from rising levels of carbon dioxide. In fact, most climate specialists now agree that actual observations from both weather satellites and balloon-borne radiosondes show no current warming whatsoever."[1] (http://www.sepp.org/leipzig.html)
The Leipzig Declaration emerged from a November 1995 conference, "The Greenhouse Controversy," cosponsored by S. Fred Singer's Science and Environmental Policy Project and the European Academy for Environmental Affairs in Leipzig, German. It has been widely cited by conservative voices in the "sound science" movement and is regarded in some circles as the gold standard of scientific expertise on the issue. It has been cited by Singer himself in editorial columns appearing in hundreds of conservative websites and major publications, including the Wall Street Journal, Miami Herald, Detroit News, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Memphis Commercial-Appeal, Seattle Times, and Orange County Register. Jeff Jacoby, a columnist with the Boston Globe, describes the signers of the Leipzig Declaration as "prominent scholars." The Heritage Foundation calls them "noted scientists," as do conservative think tanks such as Citizens for a Sound Economy, the Heartland Institute, and Australia's Institute of Public Affairs. Both the Leipzig Declaration and Frederick Seitz's Oregon Petition have been quoted as authoritative sources during deliberations in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
When journalist David Olinger of the St. Petersburg Times investigated the Leipzig Declaration, however, he discovered that most of its signers have not dealt with climate issues at all and none of them is an acknowledged leading expert. Twenty-five of the signers were TV weathermen - a profession that requires no in-depth knowledge of climate research. Some did not even have a college degree, such as Dick Groeber of Dick's Weather Service in Springfield, Ohio. Did Groeber regard himself as a scientist? "I sort of consider myself so," he said when asked. "I had two or three years of college training in the scientific area, and 30 or 40 years of self-study." Other signers included a dentist, a medical laboratory researcher, a civil engineer, and an amateur meteorologist. Some were not even found to reside at the addresses they had given.
A journalist with the Danish Broadcasting Company attempted to contact the declaration's 33 European signers and found that four of them could not be located, 12 denied ever having signed, and some had not even heard of the Leipzig Declaration. Those who did admit signing included a medical doctor, a nuclear scientist, and an expert on flying insects. After discounting the signers whose credentials were inflated, irrelevant, false, or unverifiable, it turned out that only 20 of the names on the list had any scientific connection with the study of climate change, and some of those names were known to have obtained grants from the oil and fuel industry, including the German coal industry and the government of Kuwait (a major oil exporter).[2]
