It has been fascinating to observe how a multinational corporation that is so popular and trusted can be so flatfooted and incapable of responding to a crisis.
Like many of these crises it started small. The corporation seemed invincible and underwent major growth. Some worried the growth was too fast and retained doubts about the science and the technology. However, these warnings were on the fringe and were easily ignored…
… until three months ago, when the corporation suddenly found itself at the center of crisis after crisis, its science and technology revealed to be hopelessly flawed, shoddy even.
Inside the corporation denial took over, but eventually it became clear the problem was structural. In a rush for profits and market dominance, executives had ignored procedures, falsified data, and then covered up or tried to minimize their falsifications.
Compounding the problem — the head of the corporation remained silent until he was forced to respond to the concerns of the American people:
And so, this past Sunday, Al Gore finally emerged from hiding to do damage control of the deluge of scientific scandals, which had shattered public confidence in the Global Warming industry.
But unlike the President of Toyota, Mr. Gore offered no apologies or explanations.
Instead in a lengthy op/ed for the New York Times the former vice president either completely misrepresented or downplayed the unethical and illegal behavior of some of the most prominent climate scientists.
At the start Toyota tried a similar approach. They blamed a rogue floor mat for crashes that may have killed dozens, but eventually admitted the problems are deeper than a dodgy floor covering.
Last week, Toyota’s president apologized, took personal responsibility, and announced an overhaul of their entire way of working. Everything is being changed, he said.
The Global Warming industry has suffered a similar crisis. A series of scandals now means the public no longer trusts its product.
But it seems that Al Gore and his Global Warming executives are still at the “blaming the floor mat” stage.
And just like Toyota — they have a lot at stake. Carbon Trading is now a $300 billion industry. On a personal level Mr. Gore, as even the New York Times has noted, is “a businessman [who] is an investor in alternative energy companies.”
The e-mails leaked from the CRU showed Professor Phil Jones, one of the world’s most quoted Global Warming scientists, boasting about using a “trick to hide the decline” in temperatures whilst scientists publicly claimed no such Global Cooling existed.
Professor Jones even encouraged colleagues to delete data to stop skeptical scientists from undermining their very profitable Global Warming theory. The UK Information commissioner has since announced he broke the law by doing so.
Not satisfied they’d protected all their assets, climate scientists tried to rig the peer review process so that skeptical scientists would not be published.
But in a classic “floor mat defense” Mr. Gore says the crisis has arisen because scientists “may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British Freedom of Information law.”
Mr. Gore again uses a floor mat defense when downplaying the errors of the 2007 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Until recently the IPCC’s reports were seen as flawless, heavily peer reviewed, scientific distillations of the world’s top climate scientists.
Now, it has emerged the 2007 report is littered with significant errors while using dubious sources to make alarmist claims.
The IPCC admits the Himalayan Glaciers are not melting away any time soon, most of Holland will not flood and the Amazon rainforest is not in danger from Global Warming.
It is not surprising the IPCC got so much so wrong due to basing many of their “findings” on claims by environmental activist groups, casual conversations by scientists with journalists, and even anecdotes from mountaineering magazines.
But Floor Mat Al tries to pretend these IPCC retractions have never happened, ignoring some errors and labeling others as “overestimates” or “partially flawed”.
Similarly, according to Mr. Gore, the recent snowstorms are not proof of the flaws in the Global Warming theory, but are in fact proof that Global Warming exists.
It’s as if Toyota executives tried to claim that a sticking accelerator is not a sign of technology gone wrong, but actually a deliberate design initiative, and a sign that they are ahead of their time.
And so it is for Mr Gore — “the Floor Mat did it” and it is climate alarmism as usual.
Or as he put it in the New York Times op/ed, “[We] face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.”
Toyota will likely emerge from their scandal a better company because they have, eventually, admitted their problems and dealt with them in an open and transparent way. They say they will put safeguards in place to make sure these problems will not occur again.
Climate alarmists, such as Al Gore, have shown no such awareness or humility. For him it is business as usual.
But it remains to be seen if the business of Climate Alarmism will survive.
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