Timothy Ball

Education and professional career

Ball received a bachelor's degree with honors in geography from the University of Winnipeg in 1970, followed by an M.A. from the University of Manitoba in 1971 and a PhD in climatology from Queen Mary University of London in England in 1983. 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. He retired in 1996.

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 was one of seven co-authors of a paper arguing 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." The paper was a "Viewpoint" article and was not peer-reviewed. While the paper was cited by Sarah Palin to justify opposition to listing polar bears on the endangered-species list, its findings were contradicted by reports from the U.S. Geological Survey and other independent researchers, who concluded that man-made climate change was likely to devastate polar-bear populations by 2050. The paper was also criticized by an expert at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, 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, published in 2011. In 2014, Ball wrote a book entitled The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, published by Stairway Press.

Views on climate change

Ball has said he opposes the scientific opinion on climate change and has stated that he believes global warming is occurring but that human production of carbon dioxide is not the cause. Ball rejects not only greenhouse gas–induced climate change but the existence of the greenhouse effect itself.

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 the 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 Probus Club.

He has also been a frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM, an alternative media radio show. On July 21, 2011, while a guest on the show, he stated: "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.

Climate change-related activism

Michael E. Mann has called Ball "perhaps the most prominent climate change denier in Canada." The Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Canadian think tank, states that Ball has disputed anthropogenic global warming since the mid 1990s, and has asserted that global warming is due to natural variations. Ball has spoken twice at The Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change, where he was presented as a former climatology professor at the University of Winnipeg. However, critics point out that Ball was a professor of geography, not climatology, and that the University of Winnipeg has never had a climatology department. Ball rejoins that the climate program at The University of Winnipeg was part of the geography department in the early 1980s. He also asserts that websites such as DeSmogBlog have made false charges about his credentials and professional qualifications.

From 2002 to 2007, Ball wrote 39 opinion pieces and 32 letters to the editor in 24 different Canadian newspapers, and from 2002 to 2012, he gave over 600 public talks about global warming and various environmental issues. Friends of Science maintains a "Climate Digest" of articles written by Ball in 2008-09. Since then he has continued to advocate against governmental intervention to ameliorate climate change.

In 2007 Ball appeared on The Great Global Warming Swindle, an hour and a quarter-long British television documentary that aired on Channel 4. Also in 2007, he participated in Exposed: The Climate of Fear, a special presentation of the Glenn Beck Program, with Patrick Michaels, John Christy, and other climate sceptics. In 2010, he appeared on the Michael Coren Show.

Controversies and lawsuits

Ball claimed, in an article written for the Calgary Herald, that he was 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 then-prime minister of Canada, Paul Martin. Dan Johnson, a professor of environmental science at the University of Lethbridge, countered his claim on April 23, 2006, in a letter to the Herald stating that when 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. Johnson, however, counted only Ball's years as a full professor. 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. Johnson's statement of defence 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.

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 its 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's own 2006 defamation lawsuit against Dan Johnson.

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. Several global warming contrarians defended Ball, with James Taylor of the Heartland Institute arguing that the comment was merely a "humorous insult" and Fred Singer saying Ball's comment was written as a joke and that Mann was "improvidently" suing Ball.