#zeeffword

[After the scorched earth tactic, @ShubClimate rediscovers moderation. UPDATE - Shub says "pussyfooting" triggered moderation.]

Nor is it true that I never use the word “fraud”. I’ve written from time to time at Climate Audit about major frauds e.g. Bre-X and Enron.

I’m not trying to make any magisterial pronouncements here; I’m just trying to draw attention to an interesting long record of climate change.

On the next day, at 9:55, he asks a question related to a geologist, while figuring out how to mention **24**:

As to the faked death: is life imitating art or vice versa? It made some sense that de Guzman might have been murdered, as he was the direct link between the physical fraud and any people that might have sponsored it. It makes sense that he might have pulled a Jack Bauer and faked his own death. But de Guzman’s suicide made no sense. It looks like there is a little more to come in this story.

http://climateaudit.org/2005/05/25/bre-x-is-de-guzman-alive/ Here is the moral that the Auditor infers from the story:

A moral to the Bre-X story, which I posted before and refresh again: I’m convinced that the Bre-X fraud originated not from the financiers, but by the field geologists. Incomes for field geologists in micro-cap companies are very hit and miss; it’s not like being a civil servant. If they sent good news to head office about better and better results, Bre-X could raise more money and keep the exploration funding going. The wheels fell off because, in mining businesses, you can objectively tell eventually whether there is ore or not. For some one on the business side of speculative exploration, even where there is no overt fraud, you have to be wary of your own geologists, who are unconsciously inclined to make the exploration seem more promising than it may actually be.

Here is the very next paragraph, and the punchline of the article:

The amount of money being spent on climate research is a big amount. So when UCAR (the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research), who receive a huge amount of federal funding for climate reasearch, issues a national press release announcing that Ammann and Wahl had merely submitted a paper supposedly showing that they had “confirmed” the hockey stick, do you think that there is a touch of self-interest in their behavior?

And interesting update, made around 12:39 on the same day:

Update (Wed. aft.) : [Junior], who knows the institution, suggests in a comment below quite reasonably that the press release probably originated from the self-interest of the individual scientists, rather than corporate self-interest. I don’t view self interest in these matters on behalf of individual scientists in exclusively monetary terms, since people fight over prestige as well as money.