Rob Bradley at the Master Resource has an interesting post on parallels between Enron and the IPCC Climategate players. Bradley’s list tracks very well with the stages of Climategate so far.
2) A lack of midcourse correction when developing problems were not properly addressed.
3) Old fashioned deceit when the core mission/vision was threatened (for Enron it was ‘to become the world’s leading company’–for Jones et al., it was there is a big warming and a climate problem developing)
4) The (despised) short sellers busted the Enron mirage. Ken Lay at the last employee meeting even likened the short sellers to ‘terrorists” (this was just a few months after 9/11). Question: does mainstream climate science regard Internet ‘peer review’ of Jones et al. like the Enron faithful regarded the short sellers who first discovered the problems of Enron?
5) Enron suffered from the “smartest guys in the room” problem. Does Climategate reveal arrogance and a lack of humility among “mainstream” climate scientists?
6) Denial: we employees were almost all in denial when the problems at Enron first surfaced. Have you and others who are close to the scientists of Climategate been slow to recognize the problem? Has Nature and Science also been slow? If so, What does this say about human nature.
7) Taking responsibility. Skilling and Lay never did and, in fact, they joined together in a legal cartel where the unstated strategy was to not blame each other for anything and sink or swim together. Has this happened, or is it still happening, with Climategate if you believe that scientific protocol and/or legal rules were violated?
As it happens, the seven Enron observations above are offered in the context of Bradley’s letter to one Gerald North, who was not only a climate advisor to Enron prior to the company’s collapse, but was part of a panel that seemed to be “circling the wagons” for climate cronies. Concern about uncovering Climategate improprieties, scientific or legal, has not been at the top of the scientific community’s agenda.
This should come as no surprise. As the late philosopher Richard Rorty once wrote of science, “Pragmatists would like to replace the desire for objectivity–the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more than some community with which we identify ourselves–with the desire for solidarity with that community.” Whether we agree with Rorty or not, climate science seems to have taken him up on his suggestion–and there are billions of reasons for them to have done so.
While the mainstream media plays the “move along, nothing to see here” role, people like Steven McIntyre and others have been functioning very effectively in the role of the “short sellers” in 4) above. (See also McIntyre’s elaboration on the Enron parallels.) We should not fail to mention those prestigious climate scientists who have been marginalized all along by the climate cabal — solid minds like Richard Lindzen, John Christie, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, Willie Soon and David Legates.
Of course, one big fat difference between Enron and Climategate is that Enron could, and did, go out of business. As long as the IPCC and governments think climate change hysteria can be a new source of state power and tax revenue, they will keep doubling down on the “science.” Of course, that is one reason I have suggested the separation of science and state. Otherwise, even if heads like Mann, Jones, and Wigley end up getting lopped off, the government hydra will sprout new heads.
