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Rob Bradley: Climategate from an Enron Perspective
...There was an extremely interesting blog post a few days ago by Rob Bradley, an old friend of North from Enron days – where North had been Bradley’s climate consultant – in which Bradley asked North very pointed questions in which he compared the present behavior of climate scientists to Climategate to their shared experience (as innocent parties not in the know) through the gradual revelation of Enron problems....

...Analogies are always treacherous, because, all too often, one gets drawn into debates about the analogy that are just as complex as the original issue. Or debates about the validity of the analogy. So one needs to take care in trying to go a bridge too far in this sort of comparison.

Nonetheless, as it happens, in the early days of Climate Audit, I posted on both Bre-X and Enron. Here are some relevant posts on Enron:

http://climateaudit.org/2005/06/28/consensus-two-examples/

http://climateaudit.org/2006/03/09/enron-trial-in-the-news/

http://climateaudit.org/2006/05/26/enron-verdict/

http://climateaudit.org/2008/09/17/lehman-bros-and-consensus/

In the first post, I observed ironically that there was a “consensus” in 2000 that Enron was the best-managed company in the US, seizing that honor from GE. Money managers and analysts are not stupid people – the intriguing question for me was (and this sort of question interested me before I was interested in climate) is how could so many smart analysts get it wrong? And at what point did it change from “shame on you” to “shame on me” i.e. at what point could an alert analyst have spotted inconsistencies and problems? And what were early warning bells? ...

...The comparison with Enron may also be helpful in placing Climategate into context. Obviously, corruption at Enron did not prove that all business enterprises were corrupt. Conversely, no defence lawyer for Ken Lay or Jeffrey Skillings or Andrew Fastow would have stood before a court and argued that, because no one had showed that all business enterprises were corrupt, corruption at Enron didn’t “matter”. It did matter. Honest businessmen did not discourage an investigation of Enron or try to sweep it under the carpet. The best way to restore confidence in the rest of the system was to do a proper investigation of Enron. ..