While I agree that an ethics course isn’t going to make saints out of anyone, it’s obvious from the antics we see in the climategate emails that ethics is completely missing in non-insignificant areas of the field.
Even in the legal profession, if the prosecution hides evidence from the defense, this is a non-trivial offense. When a researcher deliberately tries to prevent opposing views from being published, this is not ethical behavior. Period. I also agree that there really needs to be some enforcement of the rules. A question that should be asked is “what transgression would it take to make a clear case for a sanction?” If this can’t be answered, there’s no point of going any further on the ethics path.
While I don’t think climate science is unique as far as ethics level, what IS unique about it is that it is one of the few fields that has the audacity to think it can predict with any precision what will happen 100 years from now. Economists don’t (a field that resembles climate science in scope). The only things I can think of where one can rightly make predictions that far in the future are phenomenon based on relatively simple physics (like orbital mechanics, radioactive decay…). Anything on complex mechanisms are just educated guesses and should not have any more weight that that. I think part of the problem is that someone didn’t say “this is a complicated process with many variables that function over large time frames, so we really don’t know enough to make concrete statements” early enough before people gave too much weight to arguments that are not strongly supported. If you raise expectations higher than what you can deliver, be ready to pay the piper…