Weaver prevails over climate critic
Oil industry advocate spread bogus ideas across the globe, Richard Littlemore writes.
As former B.C. Green party leader Andrew Weaver edges from politics back to the halls of academia, it must be a comfort that the B.C. Court of Appeal has finally vindicated him in a nine-year-old libel action against one of his most trenchant and careless critics. Equally, however, it must rankle to have been harassed for so long by someone with the comparatively thin academic veneer and the history of prevarication — about climate science and about his own resume — of Tim Ball.
Weaver and Ball are both “doctors,” but they are hardly equals. With a PHD in applied mathematics, Andrew Weaver is a full professor at the University of Victoria, where he earned international academic acclaim (and a share of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize) for developing one of the foremost climate models in the world. However you view his politics, Weaver’s scientific credentials are unassailable.
As we know from a 2006 action in the Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench, in which Ball flagrantly overstated his academic credentials and then sued an Alberta academic for pointing it out, Ball once was a popular but little-published geography professor at the University of Winnipeg, where, despite his claims to have worked for “28 years,” he taught for just eight, retiring in 1996. As lawyers for the Calgary Herald said in a statement of defence in that case, Ball was “viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry rather than as a practising scientist.”
Indeed, while Weaver was penning chapters for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Ball was on the speaker circuit, upselling his credentials and telling people that: the ozone hole was never a problem; the Y2K threat was overblown; and that emissions behind global warming are actually a good thing. He has even proposed gathering “all green plants” in a class-action suit against those campaigning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, because plants use carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.
Ball flagrantly overstated his academic credentials and then sued an Alberta academic for pointing it out.
Ball’s earliest known attacks on Weaver date to 1997 and continued for years. Ball derided Weaver’s command of climatology and suggested that Nobel Prize-winning scientists were really frauds — or dupes of a United Nationsbacked conspiracy to form one world government.
Weaver apparently ran out of patience and sued in 2011, after Ball wrote all these accusations in an article on the populist website Canada Free Press.
Stunningly, the suit failed. In a 2018 judgment, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Ronald Skolrood condemned Ball’s writing as “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.”
Further, Skolrood said, “the article presents as poorly written and it provides little in the way of credible support for Dr. Ball’s thesis.”
Still, the judge couldn’t take Ball seriously. The article, he said, “is not defamatory, in that the impugned words do not genuinely threaten Dr. Weaver’s reputation in the minds of reasonably thoughtful and informed readers.”
Having thus been dismissed as incompetent and indifferent to the truth, Ball celebrated the result as “a victory for free speech.”
The B.C. Court of Appeal reversed that verdict at the end of April, suggesting that Skolrood, who had heard Ball’s blather first-hand, had based his decision “on evidence known to the Court, but not to the ordinary and reasonable reader.”
Given Ball’s globe-trotting success as climate-change denier — he has been published or interviewed from Australia to Romania and he claims to have briefed the Trump transition team in 2016 — the appeal court found that he should be held accountable for his words.
If Weaver is gloating, he’s keeping it offline. And the case is still going back to the B.C. Supreme Court to settle other issues and damages.
Belatedly, however, it seems that one of Canada’s most prolific climate contrarians has been dismissed, if not silenced.