UPDATED: David Evans has sent along his definition of a rocket scientist. See below for details.
This title grabbed our attention: Top Rocket Scientist: No evidence C02 causes global warming. And it should. It is a pretty bold statement and the implications would be pretty big news.
So we decided to compile a backgrounder on ‘The Top Rocket Scientist.”
Here’s the research database entry on David Evans:
No peer-reviewed articles on climate change
According to his own resume, Evans has not published a single peer-reviewed research paper on the subject of climate change. Evans published only a single paper in 1987 in his career and it is unrelated to climate change.
Evans has published an article for the Alabama-based Ludwig von Mises Instutute, a right-wing free-market think tank.
Evans also published a “background briefing” (pdf) document for the Australian chapter of the Lavoisier Group, a global warming “skeptic” organization with close ties to the mining industry.
“I am not a climate modeler”
From 1999 to 2006 Evans worked for the Australian Greenhouse Office designing a carbon accounting system that is used by the Australian Government to calculate its land-use carbon accounts for the Kyoto Protocol. While Evans says (pdf) that “[he] know[s] a heck of a lot about modeling and computers,” he states clearly that he is “not a climate modeler.”
Background
David Evans lives in Australia and gained media attention after an article he wrote titled, No Smoking Hot Spot was published in The Australian in June, 2008.The article claims that climate change is not caused by C02 emissions because there is no evidence of “a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.” Evan’s claim has been thoroughly debunked by Tim Lambert, a computer scientist at the University of New South Wales.
According to his bio, Evans claims to be a ‘Rocket Scientist’ and one article claims that he is a ‘Top Rocket Scientist.’ While Evans background does show that he has a PhD in electrical engineering, there is no evidence that he was ever employed as a rocket scientist.
Evans answered our inquiry about his claim to being a rocket scientist with the following explanation:
I did a PhD in electrical engineering at Stanford in the 1980s. Electrical engineering is your basic high tech degree, because most high technology spawned from electrical information technology. I specialized in signal processing, maths, and statistics.
The definition provided by Evans would appear to be at odds with the conventional use of the term ‘rocket scientist’ which according to various sources is “One specializing in the science or study of rockets and their design.” For example, here’s an entry on Answers.com about Hermann Oberth a famous Rocket Scientist who published a book about rocket travel into outer space in 1932 and is considered one of 3 founding fathers of modern rocketry and astronautics.
Evans also claims to be “building a word processor for Windows.” DeSmogBlog contacted Microsoft Corp. and they have confirmed that he does not work for Microsoft Corporation.
