timball
tlambert | January 22, 2008Via Big City Lib, I find this, from Tim Ball and Tom Harris:
Like all philosophies that come to dominate society, climate hysteria is part of an evolution of ideas and needs an historical context. The current western view of the World essentially evolved from the Darwinian view. Even though it is still just a theory and not a law 148 years after it was first proposed, Darwinian evolution is the only view allowed in schools. Why? Such censorship suggests fear of other ideas, a measure of indefensibility.
Looks like he's joining with Ross McKitrick and Roy Spencer.
tlambert | January 18, 2008Richard Littlemore has the latest on Tim Ball's antics. Check out this bit from Ball:
The point I made was with regard to the Antarctic and Greenland ice
sheets. I posed the question about what happens to the water level
when an ice cube is placed in a glass which is then filled to the brim
and the ice melts. The correct answer is the water level drops because
the space occupied by the ice is greater than that occupied by the
water it contains. Water expands when it freezes.
But the ice is floating in the water. The extra space that the frozen water takes up is, by Archimedes principle,…
tlambert | October 24, 2007John Stossel is his usual misleading self with a piece denying anthropogenic warming. Video here and summarized here. Tamino details the way Stossel deceives his viewers:
Probably the most irritating aspect of Stossel's "report" is a brief clip from An Inconvenient Truth of Al Gore saying, "... sea levels will rise 20 feet." What's irritating is that I've seen AIT often enough to know that this quote is taken out of context -- so much so that Stossel doesn't even have the honesty to play Al Gore's entire sentence. What Gore says is that IF the Greenland ice sheet, or the West Antarctic ice…
tlambert | October 16, 2007David Appell tells of his correspondence with Tim Ball
The other day I challenged Tim Ball's assertion that "the world is cooling." I showed temperatures plots for the last several years, and of course it depends on how you want to define "climate" -- do you consider it the last one year of temperatures, the last five years, the last ten years, etc.? Of course, none is inherently correct -- there is no fundamental definition -- but all are meaningful to consider.
As I noted, all moving averages over the last 25 years are increasing, though there is perhaps a small flattening in the last few…
tlambert | October 6, 2007Tim Ball and Tom Harris tell us:
The world is cooling. Global temperatures have declined since 1998 and a growing number of climate experts expect this trend to continue until at least 2030.
Do you think that Ball or Harris or any of these "growing number" of climate experts would be willing to bet on cooling?
tlambert | June 15, 2007At DeSmogBlog, Richard Littlemore reports:
The self-styled Canadian climate change expert, Dr. Tim Ball, has abandoned his libel suit against University of Lethbridge Professor of Environmental Science Dan Johnson. Ball dropped the suit without conditions, but also without acknowledging that Johnson's original comments were accurate and were reported in good faith.
"This is great news," Dr. Johnson said today, "but it still leaves a cloud over my name that I would like removed. Even though I can now demand that Ball pay what the court calls 'taxed costs,' that won't begin to cover the actual…
tlambert | February 6, 2007Tim Ball has written another silly article, declaring:
Believe it or not, Global Warming is not due to human contribution of Carbon Dioxide (CO2). This in fact is the greatest deception in the history of science.
He provides no evidence at all in support of his claim, so apparently we are supposed to rely on his authority as "the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology" and because "for 32 years I was a Professor of Climatology". Ball is, however, lying about his qualifications.
After his article was posted Ball edited to remove his false claim to have a been a professor for 32 years. However…
tlambert | January 10, 2007Richard Littlemore has the Calgary Herald'sStatement of Defence against Tim Ball's lawsuit.
Best bit:
The Defendants (the Calgary Herald) state that the Plaintiff (Ball) never held a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming. The particulars of the Plaintiff's reputation are as follows:
(a) The Plaintiff has never published any research in any peer-reviewed scientific journal which addressed the topic of human contributions to greenhouse gas emissions and global warming;
(b) The Plaintiff has published no papers on climatology in…
tlambert | November 18, 2006The CBC's Fifth Estate has produced a documentary on the global warming denial industry:
The documentary shows how fossil fuel corporations have kept the global warming debate alive long after most scientists believed that global warming was real and had potentially catastrophic consequences. It shows that companies such as Exxon Mobil are working with top public relations firms and using many of the same tactics and personnel as those employed by Phillip Morris and RJ Reynolds to dispute the cigarette-cancer link in the 1990s. Exxon Mobil sought out those willing to question the science…
tlambert | October 14, 2006DeSmogBlog has Dan Johnson's statement of Defence against Tim Ball's lawsuit.
Johnson has uncovered more examples of Ball embellishing his academic record. For example, Ball claimed he was an Emeritus Professor when he wasn't. Part of his defence is that Ball had no reputation to be damaged:
Prior to the publication of the words complained of: a) The plaintiff had become notorious, to those that knew of him, as a climate change denier who held unorthodox and scientifically unsupportable statements about climate and the weather.
Ouch.
tlambert | October 13, 2006Jim Hoggan has the details on a brand new Canadian astroturf group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. The chairman is none another than Tim Ball, who is still puffing up his resume. The executive director is Tom Harris, whose other job is at a PR firm, High Park Group that works for the Kyoto-opposing Canadian Electricity Association.
The NSRP has a nicely done site -- looks like there's some money behind them.
tlambert | September 18, 2006Richard Littlemore has posted Ball's Statement of Claim. Here is the heart of it with my commments:
8 The letter to the editor contains the follow statements which contain inaccuracies and are defamatory of Ball:
"...newspapers ought to report factual summaries of authors' credentials. You note that he 'was the first Climatology PhD in Canada and worked as a Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years.'
Ball received a PhD in Geography in the UK in 1982, on a topic in historical climatology. Canada already had PhDs in climatology, and it is important to recognize…
tlambert | September 17, 2006Tim Ball's letter to Paul Martin starts:
I was one of the first climatology PhDs in the world.
He got his PhD in 1983.
Ball signs his letter with:
Dr. Tim Ball, Environmental Consultant
Victoria, British Columbia
28 Years Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg
Eli Rabbett has been checking the numbers on Ball's "28 years". They don't add up.
tlambert | September 14, 2006The Globe and Mail reports
CALGARY -- The skeptic at the centre of the heated debate about climate change that has been taking place in Canadian newspapers is moving the dispute to the courts, where Tim Ball is seeking $325,000 in damages for a letter to the editor that he says amounted to a "malicious attack" on his reputation.
Mr. Ball, who is the country's most well-known critic of global-warming theory, is suing the Calgary Herald and its editors, the University of Lethbridge and one if its professors, Dan Johnson, for defamation, according to documents filed this month with the Alberta…
tlambert | August 24, 2006Charles Montgomery's excellent expose of the so-called "Friends of Science" group must have really hit a nerve, because it has drawn an over-the-top response from Terence Corcoran in the National Post. It appears that Corcoran was so incensed by it that he didn't bother to check whether anything he wrote was true. Andrew Weaver lists a few of things that Corcoran got wrong, the most telling of which is this:
6) I never dismissed "the original hockey-stick research debunking research debunking the 1,000-year claim as "simply pure and unadulterated rubbish"
In fact your newspaper already…
tlambert | August 12, 2006Charles Montgomery has a detailed expose in the Globe and Mail on the activities of Tim Ball and the Friends of Science. It turns out that the University of Calgary has been used to launder oil company money to fund the Friends of Science:
There was plenty of money for the anti-Kyoto cause in the oil patch, but the Friends dared not take money directly from energy companies. The optics, Mr. Jacobs admits, would have been terrible.
This conundrum, he says, was solved by University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper, a well-known associate of Stephen Harper.
As his is privilege as a…
tlambert | July 5, 2006At 3:10 in a Tim Ball interview with the editorial board of the Ottawa Citizen, he says this:
To my knowledge I've never received a nickel from the oil and gas companies. I wish I did get some money -- I might be able to afford their product. If you ask my wife she says its cost me a lot of money to take the positions I've taken. Been a lot easier to be on the gravy train of Kyoto and the government handouts and all the rest of it. I'm not doing it for my pocket or my pleasure I assure you.
Certainly there is money available for climate research, but it is nonsense to argue that he could…
tlambert | June 30, 2006OK, this is from November 2004, but still...
Frontier Centre: We are all familiar with the modern theory that the world's climate is getting warmer. Is it?
Tim Ball: Yes, it warmed from 1680 up to 1940, but since 1940 it's been cooling down. The evidence for warming is because of distorted records. The satellite data, for example, shows cooling.
FC: Could you summarize the evidence that suggests the world is cooling slightly, not warming up?
TB: Yes, since 1940 and from 1940 until 1980, even the surface record shows cooling. The argument is that there has been warming since then but, in fact…
tlambert | June 23, 2006Tim Ball is suing Dan Johnson for defamation because of a letter to the editor published in the Calgary Herald (edited to add links):
Whatever one may feel about Tim Ball's denial of climate change science, newspapers ought to report factual summaries of authors' credentials. You note that he "was the first Climatology PhD in Canada and worked as a Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years". Ball received a PhD in Geography in the UK in 1982, on a topic in historical climatology. Canada already had PhDs in climatology, and it is important to recognize them and…
tlambert | May 2, 2006One favourite tactic of creationists is that of "quote-mining", using out-of-context quotes from scientists that appear to support the creationists' position. Global warming skeptics play this game as well and a recent Calgary Herald column Tim Ball is a good example of the practice. He quotes James Hansen, Stephen Schneider, Phil Jones, Tom Wigley, Kevin Trenberth all of whom apparently agree that we don't know enough about climate to justify something like Kyoto. He ends up this one:
Schneider told Discover Magazine: "We have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements…