Richard Littlemore's blog

Climate science denier and Trump transition team advisor Dr. Tim Ball, who a Canadian court earlier derided as incompetent, ill-intended, and apparently indifferent to the truth, has been further rebuffed in the British Columbia Court of Appeal and must now stand libel for a 9-year-old attack against prominent Canadian climate scientist (and outgoing BC Green Party leader) Dr. Andrew Weaver.

Ball, a retired geography professor who for almost two decades has been giving lectures and media interviews in Canada and around the world denying the science of climate change, actually “won” this case when it was decided in the British Columbia Supreme Court in 2018. In January 2011, Ball had attacked Weaver on the populist website, Canada Free Press, in an article that BC Supreme Court Justice Ronald Skolrood later described as “poorly written,” and “rife with errors and inaccuracies, which suggests a lack of attention to detail on Dr. Ball’s part, if not an indifference to the truth.”

A B.C. Supreme Court judge has dismissed a libel action against “climate change sceptic” Dr. Tim Ball on the basis that Ball’s writing is not sufficiently credible to inflict damage on the reputation of a professional climate scientist.

The libel suit was launched in 2011 by Canadian climate scientist (and now leader of the British Columbia Green Party) Andrew Weaver in protest against an article that Ball had written for a website called Canada Free Press (“Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years,” Jan 10, 2011). The article belittled Weaver’s credentials, challenged his competence as a scientist and Professor at the University of Victoria and accused him of being part of a politically corrupted campaign to overstate the dangers of climate change.

The once-authoritative Economist news magazine has set fire to its credibility, again, by reporting that global warming has slowed to the point where one columnist argues that we should wait “a decade or two” before instituting any policy measures to ameliorate the threat. At the same time, Google, a company that advertises its corporate philosophy as “Do No Evil,” has decided to snuggle up to the climate change denial community, splashing money at the likes of Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe and the “think” tank, the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

This kind of blithe disregard for fact or prudence was more in style a couple of years ago, when Denier-in-Chief George W. Bush was in the White House and Inhofe was Chair of the Republican-dominated Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works. But how can you account for so irresponsible and reactionary a performance - from theoretically credible sources - in 2013?

One potential explanation is the loveable naivety of the scientific and environmental community - the kind of people who are always willing, in good faith, to join a conversation about a “climate-change slowdown.” The very phrase is like red meat to the Anthony Watts types who deny climate science as part of their business plan. Looking, for example, at the current state of Arctic sea ice and the predictions for the $60-trillion time bomb that will detonate as that ice disappears, any talk of such an actual slowdown is absurd.

University of Lethbridge Prof Jim Byrnes weighs in with a short video with survey of numbers both frightening and reassuring. The conclusion is obvious. There's no question we can “afford” to fix the climate problem - only a more pressing question as to why we have not even begun …

Climate Change DO THE MATH! from Scientia Productions on Vimeo.

For compulsive watchers of Enbridge Inc., the spill-crazy pipeline company that wants to pipe tar sands crude to the Canadian West Coast - or just for students of the barefaced lie - this video can't be beaten.

It purports to show the pipeline route, including an open sea exodus where tankers will pass from the proposed Kitimat, British Columbia oil port.

But as this video documents, the Enbridge auteurs airbrushed out 1,000 square kilometres of islands and rocks within the exit channel.

Given the criticism, the company has added a note saying, “The animation is for illustrative purposes only. It is meant to be broadly representational, not to scale.”

Broadly representing a completely false image.