Article defamed Weaver, B.C. Court of Appeal rules
The B.C. Court of Appeal has found that climate scientist and former B.C. Green party leader Andrew Weaver was defamed in an 2011 article written by global warming skeptic Timothy Ball.
In a unanimous decision released on April 30, the Appeal Court set aside the trial judge’s dismissal of Weaver’s defamation lawsuit.
The case will now go back to the trial judge to decide the amount of damages, and whether the article was fair comment.
“An ordinary person, not unduly sensitive but reasonable, would read the article as an attack on Dr. Weaver’s professional competence and qualifications as an academic. These statements would tend to lower Dr. Weaver’s standing in the community and therefore meet the classic test for defamation,” the Appeal Court found.
The decision emphasized the impact of being defamed in the digital age, when a false statement damaging a person’s reputation can spread “widely and rapidly, instantly and often permanently available to anyone who uses an internet search engine.”
It found many internet publications purport to report news and information without employing standards of professional journalism.
The lawsuit arose in January 2011 when Ball, a retired University of Winnipeg geography professor, wrote an article connecting Weaver to the field of “corrupted” climate science.
At the time, Weaver was a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria. He has a PHD in applied mathematics from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in applied mathematics from Cambridge University, and is a leading advocate of the need to address climate change. Weaver was also a lead author on a number of reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the international scientific body established to study issues related to climate change. He taught university courses on climate modelling and atmospheric sciences.
Ball was a frequent speaker on climate change, giving public lectures and appearing on television and radio broadcasts. His article, Corruption of Climate Science has Created 30 Lost Years, appeared on the Canada Free Press website.
Weaver was upset when he read the article and found it had been republished on other websites. He hired a lawyer to write to Canada Free Press on Jan. 14, 2011, demanding a retraction and an apology, which happened four days later.
Weaver’s lawyer also demanded an apology from Ball. When Ball did not immediately issue an apology, Weaver filed a notice of civil claim against him.
Weaver claimed the article implied that he was incompetent and unqualified to teach climate science at the university level, and that he cheated Canadian taxpayers by accepting public funds for climate-science research.
In 2018, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald Skolrood dismissed Weaver’s claim. He found that while the article was derogatory, “it is not defamatory.”
Weaver appealed that decision and won.