Got a problem with climate change theories?

Keep it to yourself unless you want to be called a lot of names

By Michael Coren

Recently I interviewed Professor Tim Ball on my TV show. Ball is a highly qualified and experienced academic with an expertise in historical climatology who rejects most of the current hysteria around climate change and global warming. He is a modest, gentle man who in spite of his enormous work in the field and the chairing of inquiries and commissions into environmental causes is now libelled, slandered, abused and threatened for his opinions.

"If people knew just how deep and dark this conspiracy is – yes, conspiracy – they’d be amazed," he explains. "More and more academics are standing up to refute climate change theories but it’s still dangerous to do so. It can mean the end of a career, the targeting of someone by well-organised fanatics."

I rather doubted this man who is arguably Canada’s leading scientific opponent of climate change fundamentalism until the e-mails poured in after his television appearance. People wrote that he was in the pay of big oil, was a simple high school geography teacher, was insane and worse. They threatened to physically harm him, to find out where he lived, to campaign against his appearing on other shows. The level and intensity of the hatred was shocking. And the accusations are dishonest. As to his academic qualifications, he is in fact a university academic with impressive graduate degrees and doctorates and, unlike so many global warming advocates, is not in the pay of anybody.

Because he took some of his degrees under a university department of geography an internet mythology has developed around him, and people who cannot spell, let alone define scientific concepts, try to silence him whenever he speaks. "I’ve rather got used to it by now," he says. "At first it was surprising that a climatologist with different ideas was treated like a Holocaust denier. Now I just move on and speak the truth."

Such aggression has become typical of climate change fanatics. When they lose arguments or are exposed as frauds they attack their critics’ reputations or, in the case of the UN Climate chief earlier this year, shout that opponents should have their faces rubbed in carcinogenic material. It’s a grander, better financed version of pushing someone off a stage and is as crass and nasty as any anti-Communist witch-hunt.

Usually I wouldn’t reveal this sort of information but in this case it’s necessary. We flew Dr. Ball in from Victoria to Toronto for our interview because he could not afford the flight. The money for the economy fare was donated by two friends of our programme with no connections to the climate change debate and there was no fee for Professor Ball. In other words, this man alleged to be in the pay of millionaires could not find anyone to subsidize even an entirely legitimate domestic flight for a major interview seen by 300,000 people!

"The believers are on increasingly thin ice – which is ironic because 400 years ago the ice on London’s River Thames was three feet thick!" he explains. "There has always been and always will be climate change but it has very little to do with human activity and has nothing at all to do with pollution of course. We’re being lied to and the lies started 40 years ago."

Yet the attacks are taking their toll. Tim Ball is close to simply giving up on his work, especially after a British government white-wash of the proven allegations that climate change zealots lied about their research, had opponents fired from their editorial positions on magazines and tried to silence anybody who would dare to take an opposing view.

"So much of the early work on climate was for the good of people, for genuine scientific knowledge and to make sure that the world was a better place," he explains. "That seems so long ago now, even though it was just a few decades. The entire discipline has been taken over by extremists who have an agenda, one that has nothing to do with the good of the planet and its population but all to do with control."

And Dr. Ball continues to speak out, no matter what the cost. More e-mails condemning him? "Yes indeed. They’re being written right now," he says. And he was right. Since he appeared I have received hundreds. Most were supportive but those that weren’t were universally abusive and threatening. Tell that to Gore, Suzuki and the rest of the media darlings.