Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming (19 page)

Four days later the
Herald
printed a letter to the editor from an Alberta academic named Dan Johnson under the headline “Vital Statistics.” It began, “Whatever one may feel about Tim Ball’s denial of climate-change science, newspapers ought to report factual summaries of authors’ credentials.” Johnson, a professor of environmental science and a Canada Research Chair at the University of Lethbridge, went on to name several esteemed Canadians who received climatology Ph.D.s before Ball, and he added that “it is important to recognize them and their research.” Johnson also noted that Ball was
not
a climatol-ogy professor at the University of Winnipeg for twenty-eight years (Ball later confirmed that the correct number was eight). Johnson then concluded that Ball’s work “does not show any evidence of research regarding climate and atmosphere and the few papers he has published concern other matters. There are great gains to be made in science from conjectures and refutations, but sometimes denial is nothing more than denial.”

There followed a series of threats and arguments between Ball and the
Calgary Herald,
culminating on September 1, 2006, with a thumping great lawsuit, Tim Ball railing against the perfidious conduct of the newspaper and castigating Dan Johnson for impugning Ball’s character and reputation. Ball demanded C$325,000 in general and punitive damages, plus costs and damages for lost income in an amount to be set at trial.

Given the weight of evidence supporting Johnson’s position, this might have been passed off as a minor nuisance, except for this: defending yourself against such a lawsuit can be prohibitively expensive. At the time the suit arrived, Dan Johnson’s new wife, Julie, had just delivered twins, one of whom had a congenital malformation of his foot that required a long series of surgeries in the first six months and a painful and restricting leg brace. Julie was also trying to complete her own Ph.D., leaving the family to wrestle with enough stress—even aside from the threat of a $325,000 judgment.

Yet everything that Johnson had said was easily subject to the libel defense of truth. There really was a long parade of highly respected climatology Ph.D.’s before Ball came along, and Ball had not been a professor for twenty-eight years. In fact, twenty-eight years before his retirement in 1996, Ball was still pursuing his bachelor’s degree at another university. Yet the Friends of Science front man had been advertising himself hither and yon as the first climatology Ph.D. in the country and had said in public and on Web site biographies that became part of Johnson’s statement of defense that he had been “for 32 years a Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg.” Ball even wrote a letter to then Canadian prime minister Paul Martin in which he said, “I was one of the first climatology Ph.D.s
in the world
” (my emphasis). He signed that letter, “Dr. Tim Ball, Environmental Consultant, Victoria, British Columbia, 28 Years Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg.” (And no, the “32 years” reference was not a typographical error, at least not here. Ball used different years in different biographies.)

You would think someone who had been so casual in remembering the details of his career would be reticent to pick a fight over those details. But perhaps Tim Ball thought that Dan Johnson would, like Justin Lancaster, look at the cost of defending himself and choose instead to apologize and retract his criticism. There was certainly pressure to do so. The administration at the University of Lethbridge made it clear that they would offer no assistance with Johnson’s defense, and his colleagues were silent while he took the heat.

But Dan Johnson chose to stand and fight. Ultimately even the
Calgary Herald
did the right thing, commissioning a statement of defense that was nearly as devastating as Johnson’s own. One of the best parts was the
Herald
’s answer to whether Johnson had damaged Ball’s reputation: “The Plaintiff [Ball] never had a reputation in the scientific community as a noted climatologist and authority on global warming . . . The Plaintiff is viewed as a paid promoter of the agenda of the oil and gas industry, rather than as a practicing scientist.” It is unfortunate that this strident criticism was never reported in the news pages of the
Calgary Herald.

Under the weight of the evidence Ball capitulated the following year, withdrawing his suit quietly and without comment. But there was no justice to be had for Dan Johnson. The
Herald,
which had been righteous in its defense about having a “moral or social duty to present both sides of the global warming debate to its readership,” has forgotten that duty, failing even to report that Ball had withdrawn his suit and that Dan Johnson was exonerated.

This was made worse by a “clarification” that the
Herald
had run at Ball’s request on August 20, 2006, a week before Ball launched his suit. Against Dan Johnson’s statement that Ball had not published on climate change, the
Herald
wrote, “According to Ball’s curriculum vitae, he has conducted research on climate and has published 51 papers—32 directly related to climate and atmosphere.” (That’s what they get for taking Ball’s CV at face value. A search of the ISI Web of Knowledge, the most exhaustive database available for recording peer-reviewed scientific papers, showed at the time that Johnson’s statement of defense was filed that Ball had a lifetime output of just four peer-reviewed papers, none touching even distantly on atmospheric science.)

If you go to the FPinfomart Web site, on which the
Calgary
Herald
’s stories are available (at a charge) for public viewing, you will find (as of April 30, 2009) that this erroneous correction is still attached to Dan Johnson’s letter, but nowhere will you find the resolution to the case, setting straight the facts that Johnson was correct and Ball, indefensibly, in the wrong. So in a fundamentally important way, Ball enjoyed a kind of victory. Dan Johnson wound up fighting for
his
reputation and, because of the
Herald
’s neglect in failing to set the record straight, appears to be the one whose reputation is still being—falsely— maligned. Ball, who should have been humiliated by the facts, continues to write antiscience diatribes and give lectures, relatively safe in Canwest Global’s cone of silence.

THE NEXT LEGAL target was Al Gore. In fact, the think tanks’ favorite target
always
seems to be Al Gore. When the Heartland Institute props up Christopher Monckton as a debating champion, the opponent they most dearly want to face is Al Gore. When Fred Singer suckers Roger Revelle and then sues Justin Lancaster, the person he really wants to discredit is Al Gore. Even if the Nobel committee had failed to honor the former vice president for his tireless efforts at climate science education, they might have accorded him a Peace Prize just for having survived the last ten years without getting into a physical fight with any of his legions of think tank detractors.

In the case at hand, Stuart Dimmock v The [U.K.] Secretary of State for Education and Skills, the U.K.
Telegraph
reported in September 2007 in “Lorry Driver in Challenge to Gore Film” that Dimmock, a truck driver and “school governor from Kent,” was taking the government to court over a decision to promote the showing of Al Gore’s film,
An Inconvenient Truth,
in U.K. high schools. The earnest Dimmock told the
Telegraph,
“I care about the environment as much as the next man. However, I am determined to prevent my [two teenaged] children from being subjected to political spin in the classroom.” There were no early reports as to who might be financing this putative act of sacrifice on Dimmock’s part.

The stated purpose of the court case was twofold. First, Dim-mock asked the court to ban
An Inconvenient Truth
from U.K. schools on the basis that it was scientifically flawed and politically motivated. Failing that, Dimmock’s lawyers argued (in the words of Justice Michael Burton) “that, if the political issues, as per the content of [the film], are to be brought to the attention of pupils, then there must be an equivalent and equal presentation of counter-balancing views.”

Which is to say, schools must be forced to match
An Inconvenient
Truth
with a denier film such as
The Great Global Warming
Swindle—
which was a swindle, indeed. While
An Inconvenient
Truth
has attracted a huge amount of very critical attention from Exxon-funded think tanks and the junk scientists they employ, the
Swindle,
composed by a controversial U.K. documentary filmmaker named Sean Durkin, has been criticized instead by the scientific community, including, and perhaps especially, scientists who were actually conned into participating in the film, only to have Durkin misuse or misrepresent their work.
¹

The court case itself moved quickly from science to theatre, with the plaintiffs calling expert witnesses such as Bob Carter, one of Australia’s most prominent deniers, to criticize several points in Gore’s film. Neither was it, as some of the later news coverage implied, a judicial testing of all the theories of climate change and global warming. Rather, it was a very specific argument over whether
An Inconvenient Truth
could be presented in U.K. schools—at all, and on its own. In the end the judge rejected both of Dimmock’s demands. Justice Burton first found no reason to ban the film from the classroom, saying that it is “substantially founded upon scientific research and fact.” He granted that Gore is “a talented politician and communicator, [trying] to make a political statement and to support a political programme [the mitigation of climate change],” but he said this about the film in general:

The Film advances four main scientific hypotheses, each of which is very well supported by research published in respected, peer-reviewed journals and accords with the latest conclusions of the IPCC:

1. global average temperatures have been rising significantly over the past half century and are likely to continue to rise (“climate change”);

2. climate change is mainly attributable to man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide (“greenhouse gases”);

3. climate change will, if unchecked, have significant adverse effects on the world and its populations; and

4. there are measures which individuals and governments can take which will help to reduce climate change or mitigate its effects.

Justice Burton found that these propositions, as put forth by the government’s lawyer, Martin, are supported by a vast quantity of research published in peer-reviewed journals worldwide and by the great majority of the world’s climate scientists.

As to the argument that students should have to endure a contrarian film such as the Durkin
Swindle,
Justice Burton said, “There is nothing to prevent (to take an extreme case) there being a strong preference for a theory—if it were a political one—that the moon is
not
made out of green cheese, and hence a minimal, but dispassionate, reference to the alternative theory. The balanced approach does not involve equality.” The language is tortured, but the message seems clear: letting Sean Durkin’s film into the school system would be tantamount to conscientiously exposing children to the view that the moon really is made of green cheese.

So the Dimmock case failed, right? Well, he lost on both points that he had originally pressed. Justice Burton approved the continued showing of
An Inconvenient Truth
in schools, albeit with a more specific set of accompanying notes, and he rejected out of hand Dimmock’s request to stick Durkin’s
Swindle
into the schoolchildren’s package.

But the supporters and financiers of Dimmock’s case created a stunning success from this apparent defeat. In contemplating the evidence, Justice Burton had accepted that there were nine instances in Gore’s film in which you could argue that he had erred on the science or overstated what was, at the time, the global scientific consensus. The judge advised that these potential overstatements be pointed out to students who are shown the video during school.

Armed with that part of the verdict, rather than slinking out in defeat, Dimmock and company left the courtroom with fist-pumping enthusiasm, claiming that the judge had condemned Gore’s film. The international media completely swallowed their spin, as these headlines that followed reveal:

“Judge Attacks Nine Errors in Al Gore’s ‘Alarmist’
Climate Change Film”
—
The Evening Standard,
October 11, 2007

“Al Gore’s Inconvenient Judgment”
—
The Times Online,
October 11, 2007

“Gore Climate Film’s ‘Nine Errors’ ”
—
BBC
News,
October 11, 2007

“An Inconvenient Verdict for Al Gore”
—
ABC
News,
October 12, 2007

In the most outrageous example, the Canadian newspaper the
National Post
carried two and a half pages of coverage on October 11, 2007, beginning with a headline that read, “U.K. judge rules Gore film ‘exaggerated,’” and nowhere in the whole paper did the
Post
mention that Justice Burton had categorically dismissed Dimmock’s principal complaints.

There it was, in virtually every newspaper and broadcast in the English-speaking world. Rather than being presented as an exoneration of
An Inconvenient Truth,
the court case was made into a condemnation—a humiliation for Gore and a repudiation of climate science.

Like the early Edward Bernays ploys from Chapter 3, this stands as another example that you can imagine a public relations class studying in the future—the professor pointing out the tactical skill of the Dimmock group at winning a huge victory in the court of public opinion, regardless of having been rebuffed in a court of law. What you can’t imagine is that anyone in the Dimmock party ever stopped to ask themselves whether what they were doing was right.

And who was in the “Dimmock party” anyway? Was this really a lone father, standing up for the rights of his 11- and 14-year-old sons? Were it not for vanity, we might never have known. But five months after the case was decided, Christopher Monckton turned up on March 4, 2008, on the
Glenn Beck Program
on Fox News, taking credit for the whole affair. Monckton told Beck that after viewing
An Inconvenient Truth
“with mounting horror,” he called an old friend who he thought might foot the bill “to fight back against this tide of unscientific freedom-destroying nonsense.”