Quote:
Originally Posted by Turtle
|
You should also check your sources:
Tim Ball - SourceWatch
Quote:
Dr. Timothy Ball is Chairman and Chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP). Two of the three directors of the NRSP - Timothy Egan and Julio Lagos - are executives with the PR and lobbying company, the High Park Group (HPG). Both HPG and Egan and Lagos work for energy industry clients and companies on energy policy.
Ball is a Canadian climate change skeptic and was previously a "scientific advisor" to the oil industry-backed organization, Friends of Science. Ball is a member of the Board of Research Advisors of the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Canadian free-market think tank which is predominantly funded by foundations and corporations.
<...>
The website of Friends of Science quotes Ball stating that "the Kyoto Protocol is a political solution to a non-existent problem without scientific justification." Ball has has even argued that climate change and global warming would be good for us. "A warmer Canada would improve our lives in these and other ways too numerous to list. Global warming? Let's hope so," he wrote in June 2006.
In January 2007 in a column on the Canadian website, Straight.com, Mitchell Anderson wrote of Ball that "Over the past five years, he has published no less than 39 opinion pieces and 32 letters to the editor in 24 Canadian newspapers. Fifty of these pieces ran in papers owned by CanWest MediaWorks. These efforts totalled an incredible 44,500 words."
Among his unorthodox views, published as recently as last month in the Calgary Sun:
- Global temperatures have declined since 1998 in direct contradiction to computer models on which the Kyoto Accord is based.
- Ice-core records show that temperature rises before CO2 rises, not because of it.
- Evidence is mounting that pre-industrial levels of CO2 may have been much higher than the 280 parts per million assumed by environmentalists to have existed at that time.
- New research shows that changes in the energy output of the sun account for most of the recent warming and cooling of our planet.
- The primary evidence of human influence on climate, the famous 'hockey stick' temperature-trends graph of climatologist Michael Mann, has been debunked as manipulated and wrong."
|
This work directly rebuts the claims of Tim Ball:
RealClimate » The lag between temperature and CO2. (Gore’s got it right.)
...as does this:
Limits on climate sensitivity derived from recent satellite and surface observations
... but, I like this one the best:
Tim Ball Rewrites the "Truth" Once More | DeSmogBlog
Quote:
Ball says that the whole theory of climate change - a theory endorsed by everyone from the Royal Society and the American Academies of Science to ExxonMobil - is part of a left-wing plot to de-industrialize society. Well, it's interesting to see Alcoa Inc. (AA), BP America Inc. (BP), DuPont Co. (DD), Caterpillar Inc. (CAT), General Electric Co. (GE), and Duke Energy Corp. joining the "socialist plot" by calling for mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions .
It is difficult to address the nature of Ball's arguments without straying into something that looks like an ad hominem attack. But when someone says things that are bizarre (the anti-industrial plot), misleading (the temperature decline) or demonstrably false (the normality of current weather or the details of Ball's own academic credentials), it seems that someone should rise to shout him off the stage.
|
There's always someone who is going to say what you want to hear. It's a good idea to check their data before cowering to it.
Andrew Kantor's Place:* Timothy Ball: Opinion without evidence
