ClimateGate and the Enterprise of Big Science

I'm not even close to on top of the ClimateGate story (hell, I haven't even read Al Gore's book, but that is a different issue). But in the interim,the most useful thing I've seen so far is David Harsanyi's piece in Reason Magazine. The hed is "A Reason to be Skeptical," but it's not quite what you think. From Harsanyi I draw two lessons: one, any way you slice it, this is a megamess for the climate change global warming lobby. Even if the CCs win on points (which I am virtually certain they will, or have), they're truck in a PR swamp that they will never quite escape.

Second is a point we ought to have known,but I guess we need to be reminded. That is: big science is big in every way: money, power, prestige, and a support apparatus just as complex and byzantine and, oh yes, self-propelled as you might expect. Recall the old canard about law and sausages: you don't want to watch either one being made. The nominal butt of the joke is big government but you could apply it just as well to General Motors or the Catholic Church, or, well, to big science itself.

Like I say, this is hardly new: anyone who has read any of the excellent histories of the Manhattan Project understands the relationship between science and biography--and the Manhattan Project has to be counted by almost any measure as a "success" (unless you happened to be one of those unfortunates living in Hiroshimas or Nagasaki). The idea that it is propelled forward by (inter alia) greed, lust and blind ambition--plus an ample dollop of bureaucrtic weaseling--is just one more glorious facet of this great invention we call life.

Granted: we would so much love to turn the facet off (oh tee hee; couldn't help myself). Meanwhile, we are going to have to cope with things pretty much as they are. But we remind ourselves one more time: don't anybody, ever, not even once, write an email.