Timothy Ball

Timothy Francis "Tim" Ball (born November 5, 1938) is a public speaker and climate change skeptic. A retired professor, he taught in the department of geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 until 1996, when he became a public speaker on climate change. Ball has worked with Friends of Science and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, organizations funded by the fossil-fuel industry which advocate against taking action to combat climate change.

Education
Ball received a bachelor's degree with honors from the University of Manitoba in 1970, followed by an M.A. from the University of Manitoba in 1971 and a PhD from Queen Mary University of London in England in 1983.

Professional career
Ball became an instructor at the University of Winnipeg in 1971, and a lecturer the following year. He then served in the latter capacity for 10 years. In 1982 he became an assistant professor there, and was promoted to associate professor in 1984 and full professor in 1988.

Research and books
Ball founded the Rupert's Land Research Centre, a historical society dedicated to promoting the history of the area formerly known as Rupert's Land, in 1984. He also served as its director from then until 1996. The society placed a particular emphasis on the use of the Hudson's Bay Company Archives. Ball has published a number of peer-reviewed papers in the field of historical climatology, most of which pertain to reconstructing temperatures in Canada during the past several centuries. In 2003, Ball co-authored a book entitled "Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay," which was reviewed in the American Indian Quarterly by Theodore Binnema of the University of Northern British Columbia in 2005, as well as by Fred Cooke in the Auk in 2004. In 2007, Ball, along with Willie Soon, David Legates, and Sallie Baliunas, was a co-author on a paper which contented that "spring air temperatures around the Hudson Bay basin for the past 70 years (1932–2002) show no significant warming trend," and that, as a result, "the extrapolation of polar bear disappearance is highly premature." This paper was cited by Sarah Palin to justify opposition to listing polar bears on the endangered species list. However, critics have observed that the authors of the paper also thanked ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute for their financial backing of the research, and that the paper was just a viewpoint and as such was not peer-reviewed. The paper was also criticized by the National Snow and Ice Data Center's Walt Meier, who wrote that it "doesn't measure up scientifically." Ball was one of several authors of Slaying the Sky Dragon: Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory. Most recently, however, Ball wrote a book entitled "The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science," published by Stairway Press.

Beginning of anti-climate change activism (1990s-2011)
Ball has expressed skepticism of anthropogenic global warming since the mid 1990's. In 2007, Ball appeared in the Great Global Warming Swindle, where he was identified onscreen as a professor in the department of climatology at the University of Winnipeg, and he is also identified as such on the Heartland Institute's website; he has spoken twice at Heartland's International Conference on Climate Change. However, critics have observed that, in fact, Ball was a professor of geography there, has been retired since 1996, and that, in fact, the University of Winnipeg does not have, nor has it ever had, a climatology department.

Ball has also claimed, in an article written for the Calgary Herald, to be the first person to receive a PhD in climatology in Canada, and that he had been a professor for 28 years, claims he also made in a letter to the then-prime minister of Canada, Paul Martin. However, on April 23, 2006, Dan Johnson, a professor of environmental science at the University of Lethbridge, wrote a letter to the Herald in which he stated that at the time Ball received his PhD in 1983, "Canada already had PhDs in climatology," and that Ball had only been a professor for eight years, rather than 28 as he had claimed. In the letter, Johnson also wrote that Ball “did not show any evidence of research regarding climate and atmosphere.”

In response, Ball filed a lawsuit against Johnson. Ball's representation in the case was provided by Fraser Milner Casgrain. Johnson's statement of defense was provided by the Calgary Herald, which stated that Ball "...never had a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming," and that he "...is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practicing scientist." In the ensuing court case, Ball acknowledged that he had only been a professor for eight years, and that his doctorate was not in climatology but rather in geography, and subsequently withdrew the lawsuit on June 8, 2007.

More recent writings (2011-present)
From 2002 to 2012, Ball gave over 600 public talks about global warming and various environmental issues, and from 2002 to 2007, he wrote 39 opinion pieces and 32 letters to the editor in 24 different Canadian newspapers. He has been called "perhaps the most prominent climate change denier in Canada."

In February 2011, it was reported that climate scientist Andrew J. Weaver had sued Ball over an article Ball wrote for the Canada Free Press, an article which was later retracted. In the article, Ball described Weaver as lacking a basic understanding of climate science and stated, incorrectly, that Weaver would not be involved in the production of the IPCC's next report because he had concerns about his credibility. Ball contended that the lawsuit was nothing more than an attempt to silence him because of his skeptical position on global warming, despite Ball having used the same law to sue an environmental scientist.

Ball found himself at the center of controversy again later that year, when he told an anonymous interviewer that Michael E. Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, "should be in the State Pen, not Penn State," due to Mann's role in the Climatic Research Unit email controversy. Mann then sued Ball for libel, and stated that he was seeking punitive damages and for the article to be removed from the Frontier Centre for Public Policy's website, on which it was originally published. James M. Taylor, senior fellow of the Heartland Institute, defended Ball, arguing that what he had said about Mann was merely a "humorous insult." Fred Singer made a similar argument in a 2012 article, saying that what Ball had written was written as a joke and that Mann's decision to sue him was "improvident." After Mann instigated this lawsuit, Andrew A. Skolnick filed two affidavits in which he showed that one of Ball's associates, John O'Sullivan (who co-authored "Slaying the Sky Dragon" with him), had himself engaged in misrepresentation of his credentials. Skolnick also claimed that Ball knew this "almost from the start", and had long been trying to distance himself from O'Sullivan.

Climate change skepticism
Ball's said he opposes the mainstream scientific community and has stated that he believes global warming is occurring but he believes that human production of carbon dioxide is not the cause.

He claimed to National Geographic that carbon dioxide causing warming was just a hypothesis, but had been treated as fact "because it fit a political agenda and the views of the environmentalists." He reiterated th view that man-made global warming was fabricated by the environmental movement, particularly Environment Canada, in a presentation he gave in June 2006 to the Comox Valley Probos Club.

He has also been a frequent guest on conspiracy-theorist radio show Coast to Coast AM. When he appeared on one show on July 21, 2011, he said that "To suggest that CO2's a pollutant when it's an extremely important gas in the atmosphere for all plant life and therefore for the oxygen that's produced, is just nonsense." He is also one of the signatories of the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, Ball has also, along with Tom Harris, argued that the National Climatic Data Center misleads the public by announcing premature results from their temperature datasets based on incomplete data, and then quietly updating the data when they gain access to all of it, usually diminishing the warming trend in doing so. He has also written about ocean acidification from a similarly skeptical point of view, arguing that "Even if CO2 increases to 560 ppm by 2050, as the IPCC predict, this would only result in a 0.2 unit reduction of pH. This is still within the error of the estimate of global average [which is 0.3 units]." Ball has also said that since he became a vocal opponent of the consensus position on global warming, he has received five death threats.

Funding sources
Some of Ball's critics have claimed that he has received funding from the fossil fuel industry, especially through the organization Friends of Science, which Ball co-founded and whose scientific advisory board he sits upon. For example, Kevin Chong has pointed out that Friends of Science's president "admitted to the Toronto Star that it received a third of its funding from the oil industry." Ball himself has publicly denied these claims, as has his wife, Marty Ball, and by The Toronto Sun's Michael Coren, who has written that Ball, "unlike so many global warming advocates, is not in the pay of anybody.