.Recently I interviewed professor Tim Ball on my TV show.

Climatology expert threatened for climate change views
By MICHAEL COREN, QMI Agency

Last Updated: 12th February 2010, 5:28pm


Toronto Sun|Web|Canoe|Canoe411
.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-organized 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. In fact, he is 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 shocking 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 last week, 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 professor Ball to Toronto from Victoria for our interview because he could not afford the flight. The money for the economy fare was donated by two friends of our program 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.”

And professor Ball continues to speak out, no matter what the cost. More e-mails condemning him? Yes indeed. They’re being written right now.