Climategate, and the power of metaphors

Metaphors are a great way of quickly getting your message across!

In the last few weeks, there has been concern about Climategate, - using the 'gate' as in Watergate, which has become a metaphor for 'scandal/deception'.

On December 5, 2009, Avner Mandelman, reported in the Globe and Mail, about "Climategate - how thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists revealed that they colluded to fudge their conclusions about global warming, told each other to destroy incriminating e-mails and perhaps even dumped raw data to mask the fraud'. He then provided investment advice based on avoiding the 'madness of the crowds', when it comes to global warming, with such metaphors as:

- 'the global cooling in the 1970s'
- the Club of Rome's fear that we are running out of resources
- the Internet dot-com bubble
- Nortel's share collapse
- Madoff's ponzi schemes
- windmills supported by tax credits
- modern portfolio theory

In contrast, this weekend, the British Prime Minister Gordon Brown responded used a metaphor from the classical world - saying that we must not be distracted by 'flat-earth' sceptics.

For our own part at Haddock Research, we have been searching for a metaphor for the innovation opportunities of the low carbon economy. The one we used was of how Henry Ford's car was able to transform New York City so quickly, away from the environmental problems of horse transport, in the early years of the 20th Century.

But whilst metaphors are great for communication, they should not be a substitute for considering the facts. Indeed, metaphors can often be very misleading. We should know more about 'Climategate' after the investigation headed by Sir Muir Russell. In the meantime, I am guided by Elizabeth May's reading of the emails, and my general view is that these climate scientists are tremendous public servants and working very hard for the public good.


PS. I intend to add links to official investigations about 'Climategate' as they become available:
Feb 3, 2010 - New York Times 'Researcher on Climate is Cleared in Inquiry' - about Michael Mann


Feb, 19, 2010 - Jeffrey D. Sachs's view.