Timothy F. Ball on Global warming on Alex jones

[Mech]

Timothy F. Ball on Global warming on the Alex jones Show


Video:

www.prisonplanet.com/articles/may2008/020508Ball.htm

[Swamp Gas]

Tim Ball.........Well, I will let real scientists and climatologists comment on him. He has ZERO credibility. Funded by Exxon Mobil and the same groups that advocated "safe" tobacco, and "safe" GMO Foods.


www.desmogblog.com/dr-tim-ball-the-lie-that-just-wont-die


Dr. Tim Ball: The Lie that Just Won't Die

5 Feb 07

The deathless and - in many specific respects - completely fictional meanderings of Dr. Tim Ball have begun appearing again on right-wing blogs all over the net. At City Troll, at Convenient Untruth and at New Orleans Lady, the same tired and retreaded old climate rant paints Dr. Ball as the courageous victim of a plot to silence a well-meaning skeptic.

But Ball can't even tell the truth about his own resume. His claim to be the first Climatology Ph.D. in Canada is a total falsehood; his degree was in historical geography - not climatology - and it was nowhere near the first ever granted to someone writing vaguely in the field. It also was granted by the university as a doctor of philosophy, not the more prestigious "doctor of science" that Ball claims in these articles.

He claims as well to have been a professor (again of climatology) at the University of Winnipeg for 32 years, while he confirmed in his own Statement of Claim in a pending lawsuit (look here ) that he was a professor (of geography, never climatology) for just eight years.

Dr. Ball claims never to have been paid by oil and gas interests, but if you look here , you'll find a Globe and Mail story in which Dr. Barry Cooper, the man behind Ball's former industry front group, the Friends of Science , offers this clumsy admission: "[The money's] not exclusively from the oil and gas industry," says Prof. Cooper. "It's also from foundations and individuals. I can't tell you the names of those companies, or the foundations for that matter, or the individuals."

Here you'll find a podcast of Dr. Ball talking to the Ottawa Citizen , saying that he goes out of his way to ignore who might be paying his bills, but crediting the energy industry lobby firm, the High Park Group . And here, you'll find High Park Group veteran Tom Harris, telling the Toronto Star that his new industry front group, the Natural Resources Stewardship Project , was created at the suggestion of High Park Group president Timothy Egan.

Tom Harris, executive director of the NRSP, is credited by New Orleans Lady for passing along this version of the Ball tirade, also printed Monday on the right-wingy website, Canada Free Press. Yet all of these factual inconsistencies have been brought to Harris's attention on previous occasions.

It is inevitable that this post will be criticized as an ad hominem attack on dear Dr. Ball (and perhaps on Harris, as well). But how can you argue science with someone who doesn't feel bound by the limits of truth?

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just endured an unprecedented process of vetting and peer-review to produce a document, the veracity of which has been double-checked and endorsed by thousands of the best scientists in the world. It must be soul-destroying to see a long-retired geographer who rarely published during his colorless academic career and who never conducted any research in atmospheric science dismiss that effort without a shred of evidence or a hint of good conscience.

[Swamp Gas]

www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-finding-new-ways-to-fudge-his-credentials


Tim Ball: Finding New Ways to Fudge His Credentials

11 Oct 06


In a September 26, 2006 letter to the Royal Society, Dr. Tim Ball, the leading signatory, identifies himself as "Professor of Climatology, University of Winnipeg."

Not quite. From 1988 until his retirement in 1996, Dr. Ball was a Professor of Geography at that university. He has not, since, had any official position at U of W or at any university. So, he is not now a Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg and, arguably, never was.

It raises the question: if he is this cavalier about the factual accuracy of his own record of employment and credentials, how could he expect us to believe any of the rest of what he says?

[Swamp Gas]

www.desmogblog.com/tim-ball-deceptions-prevarications-and-arguments-with-no-evidence


Tim Ball: Deceptions, Prevarications and Arguments with no Evidence

19 Feb 07

The following article, (with my own annotations in boldfaced italics), popped up last week on a right-wing website called HumanEvents .

A Skeptic's Take on Global Warming

by Bill Steigerwald

Posted: 02/14/2007

Timothy Ball is no wishy-washy skeptic of global warming. The Canadian climatologist, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years says that the widely propagated “fact” that humans are contributing to global warming is the “greatest deception in the history of science.”

(This typical appeal to authority - this positioning of Ball as an expert - is a grand fabircation. Tim Ball retired from UWinnipeg in 1995. In order to have taught for 28 years, he would have to have started in 1967, a couple of years BEFORE he enrolled in university himself. He first shows up as a sessional lecturer in 1973. But he didn't get his PhD - in Geography - for 10 more years. This could be dismissed as quibbling, except that Ball repeats this and more outrageous lies again and again. Look here , for example, for one of his recent claims to having been the first Canadian PhD in Climatology, and having been a professor for 32 years. For more background on his record of deception and his beligerence when being called on it, see the legal documents in a current court case on this matter.)

Ball has made no friends among global warming alarmists by saying that global warming is caused by the sun, that global warming will be good for us and that the Kyoto Protocol “is a political solution to a nonexistent problem without scientific justification."

Needless to say, Ball strongly disagrees with the findings of the latest report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which on Feb. 2 concluded that it is “very likely” that global warming is the result of human activity.
I talked to Ball by phone on Feb. 6 from his home on Victoria Island, British Columbia, which the good-humored scientist likes to point out was connected to the mainland 8,000 years ago when the sea level was 500 feet lower.

The mainstream media would have us believe that the science of global warming is now settled by the latest IPCC report. Is it true?

Timothy Ball: No. It’s absolutely false. (So, thousands of the world's best climate scientists, the most junior of whom has published five times as much as Ball published in his whole unspectacular career, gather and agree to a 90+ per cent likelihood that human activity is causing climate change. But for Ball, this is not just "overstated" or "inconclusive' but "asolutely false." And the evidence for his opinion? Don't hold your breath.) As soon as people start saying something’s settled, it’s usually that they don’t want to talk about it anymore. They don’t want anybody to dig any deeper. It’s very, very far from settled. In fact, that’s the real problem. We haven’t been able to get all of the facts on the table. The IPCC is a purely political setup. (Evidence???)

There was a large group of people, the political people, who wanted the report to be more harum-scarum than it actually is. (Evidence???) In fact, the report is quite a considerable step down from the previous reports. For example, they have reduced the potential temperature rise and they’ve reduced the sea level increase and a whole bunch of other things. (This is quite true. The models are becoming more exact, the ranges more limited.) Part of it is because they know so many people will be watching the report this time.

Why should we be leery of the IPCC’s report -- or the summary of the report?

Ball: Well, because the report is the end product of a political agenda, and it is the political agenda of both the extreme environmentalists who of course think we are destroying the world. (A wild-eyed conclusion that is agreed upon by the academies of science of every nation in the G8 .) But it’s also the political agenda of a group of people ... who believe that industrialization and development and capitalism and the Western way is a terrible system and they want to bring it down. (Oh yeah! Wouldn't it be great to wreck the world economy and shut down all the universities? That sounds like a goal that would really excite thousands of academics.)

They couldn’t do it by attacking energy because they know that would get the public’s back up very quickly. ... The vehicle they chose was CO2, because that’s the byproduct of industry and fossil-fuel burning, which of course drives the whole thing. They think, “If we can show that that is destroying the planet, then it allows us to control.” Unfortunately, you’ve got a bunch of scientists who have this political agenda as well, and they have effectively controlled the IPCC process. (Evidence???)

You always hear the argument that the IPCC has several thousand scientists -- how can you not accept what they say?

Ball: The answer, first of all, is that consensus is not a scientific fact. The other thing is, you look at the degree to which they have controlled the whole IPCC process. For example, who are the lead authors? Who are the scientists who sit on the summary panel with the politicians to make sure that they get their view in? … You’ve got this incestuous little group that is controlling the whole process both through their publications and the IPCC. I’m not a conspiracy theorist and I hate being even pushed toward that (Here is a man, who published a negligible four (4) peer-reviewed journal articles in his entire career, slandering the best climatologists in the world. Ball is, in effect, accusing the IPCC's most admirable and accomplished scientists of falsifying the data to advance some mysterious, purportedly left-wing political agenda - an agenda, by the way, that is supported by that quintessential leftist conspirator, Wal-Mart ), but I think there is a consensus conspiracy that’s going on.

What is your strongest or best argument that GW is not “very likely” to be caused by SUVs and Al Gore’s private planes?

Ball: I guess the best argument is that global warming has occurred, but it began in 1680, if you want to take the latest long-term warming, and the climate changes all the time. It began in 1680, in the middle of what’s called “The Little Ice Age” when there was three feet of ice on the Thames River in London. And the demand for furs of course drove the fur trade. The world has warmed up until recently, and that warming trend doesn’t fit with the CO2 record at all; it fits with the sun-spot data. Of course they are ignoring the sun because they want to focus on CO2. (The sunspot theory has been conclusively refuted. Look here , for example, to the opinion of one of the world's foremost astrophysicists.)

The other thing that you are seeing going on is that they have switched from talking about global warming to talking about climate change. The reason for that is since 1998 the global temperature has gone down -- only marginally, but it has gone down (This is one of Ball's most stunning acts of misdirection. It is true that 1998 was the warmest year in recorded history. It is also true that every year since 2000 has been warmer than any year before 1998. Look at this graph as ask yourself if Ball is telling even part of the "whole truth.") In the meantime, of course, CO2 has increased in the atmosphere and human production has increased. So you’ve got what Huxley called the great bane of science -- “a lovely hypothesis destroyed by an ugly fact.” So by switching to climate change, it allows them to point at any weather event -- whether it’s warming, cooling, hotter, dryer, wetter, windier, whatever -- and say it is due to humans. Of course, it’s absolutely rubbish.

What is the most exaggerated and unnecessary worry about global warming or climate change?

Ball: I think the fact that it is presented as all negative. Of course, it’s the one thing they focus on because the public, with the huge well of common sense that is out there, would sort of say, “Well, I don’t understand the science, but, gee, I wouldn’t mind a warmer world, especially if I was living in Canada or Russia.” They have to touch something in the warming that becomes a very big negative for the people, and so they focus on, “Oh, the glaciers are going to melt and the sea levels are going to rise.” In fact, there are an awful lot of positive things. (Sure. Look here to the Stern report for a little overview of how positive the most abrupt climate shift in human history might be.) For example, longer frost-free seasons across many of the northern countries, less energy used because you don’t need to keep your houses warm in the winter.
Is the globe warming and what is the cause?

Ball: Yeah, the world has been warming since 1680 and the cause is changes in the sun. But in their computer models they hardly talk about the sun at all and in the IPCC summary for policy-makers they don’t talk about the sun at all. And of course, if they put the sun into their formula in their computer models, it swamps out the human portion of CO2, (This, per the previous note on sunspots, is a fiction, and one offered with no effort at all to provide supporting evidence) so they can’t possibly do that.

Is the rising CO2 level the cause of global warming or the result of it?

Ball: That’s a very good question because in the theory the claim is that if CO2 goes up, temperature will go up. The ice core record of the last 420,000 years shows exactly the opposite. It shows that the temperature changes before the CO2. So the fundamental assumption of the theory is wrong. (Ball claims on one hand that the ice core records are imperfect - that the temperature shifts cannot be measured with this exactitude. Then he presumes to say that the records are so exact that you can tell which event occurred first - as between rising CO2 or rising temperatures. Either the records are solid, in which case he must concede some concern. Or they are not, in which case he can't use them to mislead about CO2 following temprature.) That means the theory is wrong. ... But the theory that human CO2 would lead to runaway global warming became a fact right away, and scientists like myself who dared to question it were immediately accused of being paid by the oil companies or didn’t care about the children or the future or anything else.

Have you ever accepted money from an oil company?

Ball: No. No. I wish I did get some. I wouldn’t have to drive a ’92 car and live in a leaky apartment bloc. (Tim Ball has quite willingly accepted speaker's fees, expenses and who-knows-what other payments from the Friends of Science , an organization he helped to found and that acknowledged the bulk of its funding came from oil and gas industries. He accepted similar funding from the High Park Group , an energy industry lobby firm, which he acknowledges himself in this podcast of an Ottawa Citizen editorial board meeting. And now he is the chair of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, an industry front group established by the High Park Group.

Why are sea levels rising and should we worry?

Ball: Sea levels have been rising for the last 10,000 years. In fact, 8,000 years ago, sea level was almost 500 feet lower than it is today. It’s been rising gradually over that time. It’s risen very slightly in the modern record, but it has risen no more rapidly than it has in the last 8,000 years. One of the factors that people forget is that most of the ice is already in the ocean, and so if you understand Archimedes’ Principle, when that ice melts it simply replaces the space that the ice occupied -- even if the ice caps melt completely. What they do is they say if we estimate the volume of water in Antarctica and Greenland, then we add that to the existing ocean level. But that's not the way it works at all. But it does work for panic and for sea-level rises of 20 feet, like Gore claims.

Why are the sea levels rising, just because we are in a warming period?

Ball: Yes. We are in an inter-glacial. Just 22,000 years ago, which is what some people can get their minds around, Canada and parts of the northern U.S. were covered with an ice sheet larger than the current Antarctic ice sheet. That ice sheet was over a mile thick in central Canada. All of that ice melted in 5,000 years. (Notice how consistently Ball jumps to talking about what happened 5,000 or 8,000 or 22,000 years ago, as if that were relevant to what might happen in the next 50 years.) There was another ice sheet over Europe and a couple more in Asia. As that ice has melted, it’s run back into the oceans and of course that’s what’s filled up the oceans. But if you drilled down in Antarctica, you go down almost 8,000 feet below sea level. That ice below sea level, if it melts, is not going to raise sea level.

Is there any aspect of global warming alarmism that you are worried about?

Ball: There are a couple of very minor things. I’m interested in and need more research done on commercial jet aircraft flying in the stratosphere. The research that’s been done so far says no, it’s not an issue, but I think the jury is out on that still. The other concern I have is that we’re totally preparing for warming. The whole world is preparing for warming, but I mentioned that we have been cooling since 1998 (Saying that 1998 was the warmest year is correct. Saying that we have been cooling since 1998 is so misleading as to justify the term lie. Again, have a look at the NOAA graph .) and the climate scientists that I respected -- particularly the Russians and Chinese -- are predicting that we’re going to be much, much cooler by 2030. So we’ve got completely the wrong adaptive strategy.

Is it not inevitable that we will have another ice age?

Ball: Yes, I think there is another ice age coming, because the major causes of the ice ages are changes in the orbit of the Earth around the sun and changes in the tilt of the Earth. (Inevitable? Probably. Perhaps even likely, within the next 50,000 years) Those are things we’ve known about for 150 years.

If someone asked you where he should go to get a good antidote on the mainstream media’s spin on global warming, where should he go?

Ball: There are three Web sites I have some respect for. One is the one I helped set up by a group of very frustrated professional scientists who are retired. That’s called Friendsofscience.org . It has deliberately tried to focus on the science only. (Friends of Science reports no scientific work whatsoever. It has concentrated its efforts purely on politics, using all its resources to lobby the government and influence the public.) The second site that I think provides the science side of it very, very well is CO2Science.org, and that’s run by Sherwood Idso , who is the world expert on the relationship between plant growth and CO2 (and whose Exxon connections can be seen here ). The third, which is a little more irreverent and maybe still slightly on the technical side for the general public, is JunkScience.com (an organization that was founded at the behest of Philip Morris to advocate for the safety of second-hand smoke, and that has also accepted large payments from ExxonMobil) .

If you had to calm the fears of a small grandchild or a student about the threat of global warming, what would you tell him?

Ball: First of all, I probably wouldn’t tell him anything. As I tell audiences, the minute somebody starts saying “Oh, the children are going to die and the grandchildren are going to have no future,” they have now played the emotional and fear card. Just like in the U.S., it’s almost like the race card. It’s not to say that it isn’t valid in some cases. But the minute you play that card, you are now taking the issues and the debates out of the rational and logical and reasonable and sensible and calm into the emotional and hysterical.

To give you an example, I was talking to a group in Saskatoon and a woman came up after and she said, “I agree with you totally. We were having a party for my 7-year-old. I went into the kitchen and there was a bang in the living room. I went back and a balloon had exploded. The kids were crying and I said, ‘Why are you crying?’ And they said, ‘There’s going to be another hole in the ozone.’”

It’s completely false. There never were holes in the ozone, by the way. (Another casual and outrageous variation from factual evidence) But when we start laying those kinds of problems onto shoulders that are very narrow, that is criminal. My comment to her was, I said, “Look, let the kids get on with the party. Give them another beer (He's kidding, here, isn't he? He presumably knows that seven-year-olds don't generally party it up with beer. This is surely nothing more than evidence of his failure to pay attention to detail.) Let 'em enjoy themselves.”

So I wouldn’t raise these kinds of fear with the children. What I would do with my children and grandchildren is what I’m trying to do with the public and say, “Look, here’s the other side of the story. Make sure you get all of the information before you start running off and screaming ‘wolf, wolf, wolf.’”

(But, as the little boy learned - too late - "wolf" is exactly the right thing to cry when you are staring into one's eyes.)

[Swamp Gas]

www.straight.com/node/67107

Trust us, we're the media

By Mitchell Anderson

Global warming is an unproven theory. Trying to stop it will cost the economy dearly and accomplish nothing. It is being promoted by envi­onmentalists as a cynical ploy to raise money.

Reading statements like these, does it seem like you are looking at a Canadian daily newspaper?

It should.

Like many North American media outlets, Canadian newspapers have been supplying the public with such a steady diet of misinformation and skewed science on the critical issue of global warming that it might best be described as journalistic malpractice.

Hyperbole? Hardly.

Consider this: would it be ethical for a news editor today to publish an opinion piece by a tobacco-industry-funded “expert”, now long inactive within the scientific community, stating that there is no proven link between tobacco and cancer?

Such journalistic mischief went on for many years, clouding the public debate and probably costing many lives. However, the days when such “balanced reporting” would be considered acceptable have long passed.

Even ExxonMobil, which funded climate-change deniers for years, finally admitted this month that global warming is real, even though it has been obvious to the scientific community for many years that humans were contributing to the problem through emissions of greenhouse gases.

Yet papers like the Vancouver Sun and the National Post published articles by such deniers as Patrick Michaels and S. Fred Singer, who some might remember from his previous efforts to allay public fears about the dangers of secondhand smoke. And the Province promoted right-wing columnist and environmentalist-bashing Jon Ferry to the position of editorial-pages editor.

And then there is the curious case of Tim Ball, a long-retired professor from the University of Winnipeg and a well-known climate-change denier who has not published a peer-reviewed scientific publication on climatology in more than a decade.

That’s not to say that Ball hasn’t been busy writing lately. Over the past five years, he has published no less than 39 opinion pieces and 32 letters to the editor in 24 Canadian newspapers. Fifty of these pieces ran in papers owned by CanWest MediaWorks. These efforts totalled an incredible 44,500 words.

This is even more surprising, given the monotony of his material. Virtually all of these articles were variations on a single theme: science does not support the idea that global warming is caused by humans. Invariably, the bylines of the opinion pieces characterized Ball as an expert on climatology. What is the public to think?

Among his unorthodox views, published as recently as last month in the Calgary Sun:

* Global temperatures have declined since 1998 in direct contradiction to computer models on which the Kyoto Accord is based (incorrect).
* Ice-core records show that temperature rises before CO2 rises, not because of it (misleading).
* Evidence is mounting that pre-industrial levels of CO2 may have been much higher than the 280 parts per million assumed by environmentalists to have existed at that time (again, misleading).
* New research shows that changes in the energy output of the sun account for most of the recent warming and cooling of our planet (wrong).
* The primary evidence of human influence on climate, the famous “hockey stick” temperature-trends graph of climatologist Michael Mann, has been debunked as manipulated and wrong (not so).

An essential component of journalism is fact-checking. Do these surprising assertions have any scientific basis?

When told of these claims, Richard Gammon, professor of oceanography and atmos­heric sciences at the University of Washington, somewhat exasperatedly refuted them as either scientifically baseless or misleading.

Strange.

Andrew Weaver is a leading Canadian researcher in the field of climate science who holds a Canada Research Chair in climate modelling and analysis at the University of Victoria. He is also the chief editor of Journal of Climate, the leading academic publication in this field, and a lead author with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme). This is the largest peer-review exercise in the history of science, involving more than 2,000 climate researchers from 100 countries, and its much-anticipated Fourth Assessment Report is due for worldwide release on February 2.

Weaver also quickly confirmed that those widely published views of Ball’s have little scientific basis.

What’s going on? Do news­aper editors not possess a phone? How can it be that Ball has managed to publish all those articles stating more or less the same thing if what he is saying has little scientific merit?

Here is what Gammon had to say concerning links between humans and climate change. “This is like asking, ‘Is the moon round?’ or ‘Does smoking cause cancer?’ We’re at a point now where there is no responsible position stating that humans are not responsible for climate change. That is just not where the science is.…For a long time, for at least five years and probably 10 years, the international scientific community has been very clear.”

In case there is any doubt, Gammon went on: “This is not the balance-of-evidence argument for a civil lawsuit; this is the criminal standard, beyond a reasonable doubt. We’ve been there for a long time and I think the media has really not presented that to the public.”

How does Gammon explain the climate holdouts? “You can always find somebody paid for by the Western Fuels Association or ExxonMobil to stir the pot and say that we don’t know yet or we are still confused and we need to listen to all sides, and ExxonMobil will take that point of view.” (Ball, in a Globe and Mail interview last summer, said he has not knowingly received any funding from oil companies.)

THE ROLE OF THE MEDIA in shaping the so-called climate debate is much larger, however, than merely providing space to industry actors. Consider the following from some major media outlets.

The National Review’s Jonah Goldberg in the Los Angeles Times last year: “Major news media have gone after scientists who argue there’s still time to study global warming rather than plunge into some half-baked environmental jihad that could waste possibly trillions of dollars.”

Vancouver Sun business columnist Michael Campbell (B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell’s brother) regularly holds forth on climate change. Last year, he scolded the scientific community for its slapdash work: “I see little evidence that proponents of man-made global warming know how damaging the shoddy science behind some of their claims has been to their cause. They don’t seem to understand that for many of us, global warming is not an article of faith, but rather of science. And when the science is faulty, it damages the credibility of their cause.”

We can only assume that Campbell is referring to those dullards at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its 2001 assessment report stated: “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

Or perhaps Campbell was referring to the various academies of sciences of 11 countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., that released a joint statement in 2005: “The scientific understanding of climate change is now sufficiently clear to justify nations taking prompt action.”

In his polysyllabic fashion, Rex Murphy also hectored the nation on the issue of climate science last month in his column in the Globe and Mail: “It is emphatically time for the most scrupulous and disinterested inquiry to determine the solid core of what is really known about the subject, separated from the great clouds of speculation, advocacy, geopolitics and calculated alarmism that overhang and shadow that core.”

It is as if these opinion writers and the scientific community exist on separate planets. Have the media never heard of the numerous, if pedantic, ways that the world’s scientific community has been trying to warn the world about global warming? When does it become unethical for the media to be used as a PR tool by a powerful corporate sector to delay meaningful regulation?

That was the question asked by the U.S.–based Union of Concerned Scientists in a report released this month called Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco’s Tactics to ‘Manufacture Uncertainty’ on Climate Change. The report draws the obvious parallel to the infamous and highly successful PR campaign by the tobacco industry to plant doubt in the minds of the public about the link between smoking and cancer.

Like oil companies today, Big Tobacco faced costly regulation due to mounting scientific evidence of the dangers of its product. However, it had a problem. It knew that no one would believe it if it told the public that cigarettes were safe.

The solution? Tobacco companies realized that they must instead fund phony scientists to speak on their behalf. These “skeptics” had two important advantages over real scientists.

First, they didn’t have to bother defending their positions in the scientific community, because the public was the target audience. Like washed-up boxers who only pick fights in bars, these skeptics, many of whom had impressive-sounding credentials, restricted their pugilism to the popular press rather than peer-reviewed scientific journals.

On this footing, it is a rather unfair fight. The rules of engagement in the media are very different than in the scientific community. The mastery of the sound bite rather than the possession of robust data almost always carries the day in the media minute. The notoriously bad communication skills of some active researchers do not help matters.

The second advantage is that “skeptics” do not have to win the public debate; they only need to cloud public opinion so as to delay regulation.

A now-famous 1969 internal memo from the Brown & Williamson tobacco company put it bluntly: “Doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”

Compare this with another internal memo—this one from the American Petroleum Institute in 1998—calling for a “campaign to recruit a cadre of scientists who share the industry’s views of climate science and to train them in public relations so they can help convince journalists, politicians and the public that the risk of global warming is too uncertain to justify”.

What was old is new again. Remarkably, this chilling plan by Big Oil to use the media to deceive the public was largely ignored by news outlets when it became public.

According to the UCS report, ExxonMobil “funnelled nearly $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a network of 43 advocacy organizations that seek to confuse the public on global warming science”.

If there is a significant difference between the PR efforts of the tobacco industry and the fossil-fuel industry, it is size. The oil, gas, and coal sectors make Big Tobacco seem positively puny by comparison.

Fossil fuels make up the largest industrial concern the world has ever known, currently worth $8 trillion to $9 trillion annually. This is four to five times larger than the next-largest industrial sector. By this yardstick, the amount of money invested in funding climate-change deniers is pocket change to Big Oil.

Has this campaign against climate science been successful? You bet. It may well go down as the most audacious, successful, and cynical campaign in public-relations history.

Consider a 2004 academic paper—published in Global Environmental Change and titled Balance as Bias: Global Warming and the U.S. Prestige Press—on the very subject of how climate-change science is distorted by the media. The authors analyzed media stories from the five most prestigious newspapers in the U.S.—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal—over a five-year period to see what relative weight was being given to mainstream scientists and so-called skeptics.

“From a total of 3,543 articles, we examined a random sample of 636 articles. Our results showed that the majority of these stories were, in fact, structured on the journalistic norm of balanced reporting, giving the impression that the scientific community was embroiled in a rip-roaring debate on whether or not humans were contributing to global warming.”

The report found that the “U.S. prestige-press coverage of global warming from 1988 to 2002 has contributed to a significant divergence of popular discourse from scientific discourse…that the prestige press’s adherence to balance actually leads to biased coverage of both anthropo­enic [human-caused] contributions to global warming and resultant action.”

Translation: the public is being misinformed on climate science by poor journalism that continues to tell both sides of the story even when there is no other side. The resultant political inaction might well kill the planet.

Returning to the original question, is it, then, ethical for an editor to provide space to industry-funded spokespeople claiming scientific credi­ility they don’t have?

“In my opinion, that is where the ethical problem lies,” said Eric Jandciu, research coordinator at the UBC school of journalism. “You are, in effect, providing misinformation to the public because there is no more [scientific] debate on this, and we seem to be very far behind in Canada and the U.S. In the European media for years now, they have stopped with this debate.”

(Although it must be tempting for editors to publish material that runs counter to conventional beliefs, is there something else going on? Advertising revenue in Canadian newspapers was a whopping $2.6 billion in 2004, according to the Canadian Newspaper Association. Of the top 30 corporate advertisers in Canadian papers, 15 were car dealerships or auto manufacturers. Car ads represented fully 54 percent of those top-30 revenues, totalling $549 million.)

Has this systematically inaccurate coverage influenced public opinion?

Consider these numbers. A McAllister Opinion Research poll from the fall of last year showed that fully 50 percent of Canadians still believed that “most scientists disagreed with each other about whether global warming was happening.” In the U.S., the numbers are even worse. An ABC News poll last year showed that 64 percent of Americans believed the majority of scientists are still arguing about whether or not global warming was even happening.

And how important is public opinion in influencing politics? Perhaps Mark Twain said it best: “Its name is Public Opinion. It is held in reverence. It settles everything. Some think it is the voice of God.”

The Georgia Straight asked former federal Liberal environment minister (1999 to 2004) David Anderson whether or not skewed media coverage on climate science made his job more difficult.

“Of course,” Anderson said. “There was a very professional group of people who managed to get a large number of articles and letters to the editors [from climate skeptics] into Canadian media—they worked hard at it.

“If you look at the columnists in Canada, you will find a very surprising interest in the views of dissenters. Just about every columnist in the Globe and the Vancouver Sun recites this intellectually preprepared stuff on climate science. Where does it come from? In Canada, there has been a successful campaign to get the views of the deniers into the media, and it has been enormously successful. It has been very secretive, and someone has been funding it…”

When asked why Big Oil would care so much about little old Canada, Anderson was blunt: “Bush said restrictions on greenhouse gases will destroy the U.S. economy.” Therefore, Exxon Mobil and others “never wanted a North American economy—Canada, close to the U.S. in every respect—to succeed and prove him wrong. We were quite important to the American campaign. We succeed, and Bush looks as incorrect on climate and the effect on the American economy as he is looking on Iraq.

“They did not want Canada to succeed [in creating a green economy] because they knew that it wasn’t that hard. They knew the [economic] loss, especially in a growth economy such as ours, would be essentially imperceptible. No calculation suggested that this was going to be a severe dislocation to the Canadian economy.” So what, then, is Anderson’s explanation for the federal Liberals’ lack of greater progress on climate policy? “You had the official Opposition against you, had the provinces against you, you had business against you,” and, lastly, “you had a coherent campaign in the media against you.”

Anderson believes Canadian editors “were consistently getting under their noses the results of a sophisticated campaign of communications”, and that newspaper columnists “repeat some things in language and format which is so consistent across the board that it can only come from one source.…That’s the people to whom the communications experts were focusing on—they focused on media.”

That campaign didn’t make Anderson’s job any easier. Although the Liberals’ record on reducing greenhouse gases was, admittedly, abysmal, so was the public’s understanding of the issue. In 1999, when Anderson became environment minister, only two percent of Canadians believed global warming was the most important environmental issue.

The political importance of keeping the public confused about climate science was made clear in a remarkable 2003 memo by U.S. Republican spin doctor Frank Luntz to the Bush administration: “The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate.”

Perhaps the most compelling evidence that the North American public has been grossly misled by our news media comes this month from the biggest member of Big Oil , Exxon Mobil. While Tim Ball and Michael Campbell seem utterly steadfast about the need for greater scientific debate and research, ExxonMobil now seems not so sure.

This month, the world’s largest nonstate oil company executed a stunning flip-flop on global warming. Kenneth Cohen, Exxon’s vice president for public affairs, acknowledged: “We know enough now—or, society knows enough now—that the risk is serious and action should be taken.”

Exxon also took the opportunity to publicly announce that it was cutting support to such notorious climate-change deniers as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and “five or six” other groups active in the so-called climate-science debate. According to Cohen, “The issue has evolved.”

That is not to say that much precious time has not been wasted, but this development will, hopefully, begin to shift the public debate from arguing science to debating policy.

UVic’s Weaver agreed. “Debating the science is good, but it doesn’t happen in the opinion-editorial pages of newspapers; it happens in the scientific community.” At the same time, he feels that “debating the policy [of global warming] is crucial, and that is what has to happen in public discourse.”

The University of Washington’s Gammon thinks that media coverage is improving but has a long way to go. “It’s beginning to move to where we need to be, but not nearly fast enough. In my mind, people are not scared enough. It’s a funny issue because the scientists are more worried about it than the general public.

“You just can’t give up, though, because these guys [climate-change deniers] don’t give up. As long as they can plant the seed in the public mind that this is all controversial, they’ve won. That’s all they have to do. We need to keep strengthening the science and saying it as clearly as possible and working with the media so that the media gets the right message out.”

How much is at stake here? Do scientists think that dealing with global warming is urgent? “Incredibly urgent,” Weaver said. “On a scale of one to 10, how about 10? I don’t worry so much for me as a Canadian; I worry about the global instability that will result from it. An example I give is, ‘What are we going to do about 100 million people that are displaced from Bangladesh this century?’ ”

The possibility of tipping points are particularly troubling to Weaver. “Permafrost in the northern hemisphere is a massive reservoir of carbon.…If you look at the last time there were massive methane releases [which would result from melting permafrost], 94 percent of species of life on the planet died. If we don’t have this baby turned around by 2030, it’s game over for an awful lot of people.”

Weaver bristled at the notion that we need more research before we can act. “What bugs me most is that I have been criticized that the only reason I am doing this is that I want more research money. The irony is that [scientists] are saying we don’t need more research. What we need is action…we know what’s going on. We know what needs to be done. The thing that would get me more research money would be to say, ‘Yeah, there’s a lot of uncertainty and I really think before we do policy, we need to spend some money to figure this thing out.’ That would be the purely selfish thing to say, but that has not been the response from the [scientific] community.”

He also offered this advice to the media: “What newspaper editors have to realize is that there are people out there who are using them. People don’t like being used, but they have to realize that they are being used.…Rather than thinking that they are serving the public discourse, ask the question, ‘Am I being used to further an agenda?’ And the answer with the issue of climate change is ‘Yes.’ ”

There is irony in a career scientist like Weaver seeing so clearly what is wrong with how the media covers climate change when he has had to endure so many media commentators publicly lecturing him on science.

Lastly, there has been a twist to the Tim Ball story. In April of last year, one of his op-eds in the Calgary Herald slamming the science of climate change raised the ire of Dan Johnson, a professor of environmental science at the University of Lethbridge.

Johnson wrote a letter to the editor questioning Ball’s academic credentials and was quickly sued for defamation. Ball filed suit on September 1 against Johnson and four editors at the Herald for $325,000 for, among other things, “damages to his income earning capacity as a sought after speaker with respect to global warming”.

In the statement of defence filed by the Herald on December 7, the paper noted that Ball “is a member of the Friends of Science, a group dedicated to discrediting mainstream scientific beliefs and theories regarding the contribution of human sourced greenhouse gases to global warming”, and that “the Friends of Science and the plaintiff are, at least in part, supported and funded by members of the oil and gas industry who have a vested interest in limiting the impact of the Kyoto Accord on their business.”

The Herald also stated that Ball “has published few articles in academically recognized peer-reviewed scientific journals” and that he “has not conducted research regarding the relationship between climate and elements within the atmosphere”.

And here is how Herald editors characterized the man whose opinion pieces on climate change they had chosen to publish eight times in the past five years: “The plaintiff is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist.”

Strange. This was not how he was identified in his bylines. In an op-ed in April of last year, the Herald cited him as “a Victoria-based environmental consultant. He was the first climatology PhD in Canada and worked as a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years.”

Therein lies the crux of the matter. This is not about freedom of speech. No one is suggesting that a paper should not have the freedom to publish whatever it wants, as long as it is not violating any laws.

The question, instead, is one of properly identified sources—a foundation of good journalism.

Imagine if the next time Ball is cited in the popular press he is identified as “a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry” rather than as a scientist.

Not much chance of that, it seems. Incredibly, Ball’s controversial op-eds have been published an additional eight times in CanWest papers since Ball sued the Calgary Herald. In all of those cases, Ball was cited as a former professor at the University of Winnipeg.

What if we demanded more from our media on what is emerging as the leading issue of the 21st century? What if the mainstream media stopped being a big part of the problem and became part of the solution?

Does it seem strange, for instance, that although the environment is the number one issue of concern for Canadians that the Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun have no one writing a column on the environment? Arguably, both of these papers already have several commentators that regularly spill buckets of ink questioning our movement toward a greener world.

Or how about our venerable CBC?

Radio One has programs for business, sports, advertising, science, Quebec culture, pop culture, food, storytelling, spirituality, comedy, and theatre. There are three shows on writing and books and 11 programs on music. CBC’s three television networks air programs on fashion, gardening, antiques, and fly-fishing.

Amid this dizzying Can-Con diversity, however, there is one glaring omission. For now, at least, there is no dedicated CBC radio or television program on the number-one issue of concern to Canadians: the environment.

If any of these editors and producers need a writer, I’m available.