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Website retracts Tim Ball’s BS

The website Canada Free Press has issued a retraction and apology (full text below) to University of Victoria climate modeller Dr. Andrew Weaver for the content of an article written by Dr. Tim Ball.

Ball, whose own unspectacular academic tenure ended with a fizzle in 1996, has found a second career pretending to be a world-renowned climatologist (he once wrote to then-Prime Minister Paul Martin that he was “one of the first climatology PhDs in the world” - a statement that is purest fiction). In addition to signing on as a “science advisor” to energy industry front groups such as the Friends of Science or the Natural Resources Stewardship Project, Ball has written and spoken extensively, seldom passing up the opportunity to libel real scientists. (Though, when the going gets tough, the dishonest get going.)

One of Ball’s favourite targets has been Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis at the University of Victoria in Ball’s B.C. hometown.

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Christopher Walter, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, attracts some pretty colorful criticism, but it’s a bit stunning to see someone at the climate-skeptical Telegraph* call Monckton “a fantasist, a blethering popinjay useful only for amusement.”

Unfortunately, you can’t read that quote on the Telegraph* website where blogger Tom Chivers wrote it in the first place. After a complaint from Monckton’s own noble self, his allies in self-delusion have had it deleted. But the original piece is still available to all at Tenney Naumer’s blog, Climate Change - the Next Generation. (Thank you, Tenney.)

Chiver’s position, convincingly rendered, is that Monckton has made himself a goof, a paragon of “utter scientific illiteracy,” and, as such, has become an embarrassment to the denier community.

That accords perfectly with the stuff that George Monbiot has been writing at the Guardian. Monbiot says,

“Lord Monckton is digging his hole ever deeper, and dragging down into it everyone stupid enough to follow him. Those of us who do battle with climate change deniers can’t inflict one tenth as much damage to their cause that Monckton wreaks every time he opens his mouth.”

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Dear Mr. President-Elect,

Greetings from Antarctica!

I'm about to begin my mission to become the first American in history to reach the South Pole, solo and unaided. I'll start walking November 8th from the edge of the ice pack and, if all goes according to plan, arrive at the Pole just after Christmas. If you have a minute around then, I'd love to hear from you, just ring my satellite phone.

It's the least you could do, I mean, I delivered the vote for you here in the Deep South (so to speak).

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A study in the journal Polar Biology concludes that two recently discovered species of Killer Whale inhabiting the Antarctic sea are at risk due to the effects of global warming at the South Pole.

These fish-eating Killer Whales rely on the ice where fish bunch up in schools in order to evade predators. Scientists are anticipating that as the ice patterns in the Antarctic continue to be altered by climate change, the Killer Whales may not be able to adapt to their new hunting grounds.

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If the 21 tourists evacuated from the Baffin Islands yesterday weren't convinced that we're near a climate change tipping point they are now.

According to a Canwest new service story out this morning the tourists were evacuated from the Auyuittuq National Park:

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Arctic scientists are reporting today that a four-square-kilometer chunk of the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf has broken off.

Northern explorers have used the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf as a launching point for expeditions for years. But much like the changes that I have witnessed in my expeditions to the Antarctic, things just aren't right at the other Pole either.