Tales From Bizarro Land

So, the Washington Post today reports on a conservative seminar at the CATO Institute in which Bruce Bartlett and Andrew Sullivan let loose on the Bush Administration for everything from economic policy to the war in Iraq to the expansion of executive power to the treatment of detainees. The White House, naturally, refused to send anyone to rebut their charges - which the Washington Post somehow regards as surprising. This administration never engages any of its critics head on in an uncontrolled setting, and in any case, it's tiresome to defend the indefensible.

All by way of getting to my point, which is that -- bizarrely -- Fred Singer was the only Bush defender who spoke up at the seminar:

At Conservative Forum on Bush, Everybody's a Critic: "The only man who came close to defending Bush, environmental conservative Fred Singer, said he was 'willing to overlook' the faults because of the president's Supreme Court nominations."

Fred Singer, who the WaPo describes as a "environmental conservative" but is more precisely described as an atmospheric physicist who is skeptical of climate change, said that he would "overlook" all of Bush's mistakes just for his Supreme Court nominations. Reactions:

1) Why didn't he take the opportunity to mention what he must see as the inherent wisdom of Bush's inaction on climate change?

2) What makes him so fixated on the courts that he believes Sam Alito and John Roberts somehow compensate for all the other atrocities this administration has committed?

Fred Singer is really a very sad and curious little man. I saw him speak on his climate change research at Oxford in 2005, and found him singularly unimpressive and unconvincing. He spent his entire lecture smugly showing us slides with data that were at least a decade old - bringing up all the familiar straw men such as the inconsistency of satellite measurements, of older measurements of ocean temperatures, etc. as if no one else had thought of this and no corrections for those data errors were possible. Afterwards some of the climate scientists present began questioning him about newer findings, and rebutting his assertions about their models (for example, he claimed that hemispheric climate models were being run with different sets of parameter values, and that he would only be convinced by global air ocean models that ran with uniform parameters, only to be told that the Oxford group had already done that and come up with the same conclusions). He responded, and I am not making this up, by pretending he couldn't hear the questions or lamely refusing to address the merits because he hadn't read their papers. And remember, this is a leading climate skeptic and a supposedly eminent physicist.

But, if there's one thing to be said for Fred Singer, it's that he's not afraid to bowl alone. Not on climate science, and not in his defense of the worst administration in history.