A two-hour, 32-minute audio tape of a Tim Ball lecture (finally available here) features one of Canada's most compromised climate change deniers (see especially here, here or here) making sweeping and silly pronouncements, getting caught out in misrepresenting data and, finally, attributing all climate science to a socialist plot by an aging Canadian businessman and United Nations supporter.

The audio, recorded April 7, 2010 at a meeting of the University of Victoria Young Conservatives Club, is crackly and begins badly (most people will want to start around the nine minute mark). It starts with Ball going on at length about his bona fides as an environmentalist and touting his life-time total of "peer-reviewed" publications at 23. (This, presumably, would include the four [4] publications listed on the ISI Web of science and 19 others that were, perhaps, checked over by Christopher Walter, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, before being typed up for printing in a journal, website or daily paper not generally read among diligent academics.)

Canadian denier-in-chief, the retired geographer Dr. Tim Ball, got seriously (though not physically) roughed up last week in a presentation to the University of Victoria Young Conservatives Club.

Apparently expecting a room full of docile Stephen Harper fans, Ball found himself instead in front of a group of burgeoning climate scientists - young people who were quick to challenge him when he said things that were pointedly untrue.

For example, after describing the effect of Milankovitch cycles on climate, Ball told the students (at 56:24) that these predictable changes in Earth's orbit and tilt are not included in modern climate models.

"None of this is included in the computer models that are used to tell you that the climate is changing. It’s not even included. The models they’re doing here on campus. They’re not in there. Sorry."

But at 1:01:25, a student responds: "We do include it, though. I am with the UVic climate lab and we do include it in our models. It’s a standard parameter."

Dr. Tim Ball, a man famous for lying about his resume, and for denying that he quite willingly works for oil-funded think tanks, nevertheless continues to find an audience, slandering actual climate scientists and misrepresenting - in the most manipulative way - the state of climate science.

His most recent attack is all the more stunning for having been launched during a week when the British House of Commons released a report exonerating one of Ball's targets, Dr. Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the East Anglia University.

In one of Ball's regular contributions to the conspiracy-theory website Canada Free Press, he begins with this:

"Few understand the extent of corrupted science produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Data was altered, or completely ignored and research deliberately directed to prove their claim that humans were causing global warming."

Ball's evidence for the charge of "corrupted science"? None, really. His proof that data were altered or ignored? Zero.

Koch Industries has “become a financial kingpin of climate science denial and clean energy opposition,” spending over $48.5 million since 1997 to fund the climate denial machine, according to an extensive report today by Greenpeace. 

The Greenpeace report reveals how Koch Industries and the foundations under its control spent far more than even ExxonMobil in recent years to fund industry front groups opposed to clean energy and climate policies.  Koch spent over half the total amount -nearly $25 million - funding climate denier groups from 2005 to 2008, a period in which Exxon only spent $8.9 million.

Greenpeace’s attempt to lift the veil of secrecy inherent to a private company like Koch Industries is no easy task.  Because it remains privately owned, Koch faces few of the disclosure requirements designed to increase transparency among publicly-traded companies.

Spurred on by a speech that Jim Hoggan gave to the Canadian Empire Club in Toronto (talking about our new book, Climate Cover-up), Canada's national newspaper, the Globe and Mail, started asking questions today about who is paying for the big Friends of Science radio ad campaign that has been annoying Canadians from coast to coast for the last week or so.

The Globe's Martin Mittelstaedt had no success finding a live representative from the Friends of Science to deny their oily connections, but Marty Ball told Mittelstaedt this about her infamous husband, the truth-challenged Tim Ball: “He's not paid by the oil companies. He's never had anything from them and neither [have] the Friends of Science."

Alas for the Balls' self-delusion, Mittelstaedt's own paper has reported quite the opposite in the past, quoting a Friends official, Albert Jacobs, as saying that the oil and gas industry is exactly where they got their money.

Pity poor Tim Ball.

Despite having a short (eight years as a professor) and undistinguished (five peer-reviewed publications in his lifetime) career as a geography professor at the University of Winnipeg, Dr. Ball was able in the last 10 years to elevate himself to the level of self-appointed climate change expert. By working with energy industry lobby firms, he was able to insinuate himself as a would-be advisor to committees of the Canadian House of Commons and the the U.S. Senate. At one point, he presumed to send a letter directly to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin, introducing himself as "one of the first climatology PhDs in the world," - a claim so far from accurate as to be laughable.

By his activism, his constant and so-often ill-informed criticism of scientists who were actually working in the field of climate change, Ball had, by 2006, established himself as Canada's pre-eminent global warming denier. The Globe and Mail called him "Mr. Cool," although the accompanying feature was anything but complimentary.

Still, at least he was getting attention.