A skeptic's take on man-made global warming
By Bill Steigerwald

Timothy Ball is no wishy-washy skeptic of global warming. The Canadian
climatologist, who has a Ph.D. in climatology from the University of London
and taught at the University of Winnipeg for 28 years, says that the widely
propagated "fact" that humans are contributing to global warming is the
"greatest deception in the history of science."

Ball has made no friends among global warming alarmists by saying that
global warming is caused by the sun, that global warming will be good for us
and that the Kyoto Protocol "is a political solution to a nonexistent
problem without scientific justification."

Needless to say, Ball strongly disagrees with the findings of the latest
report from the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,
which on Feb. 2 concluded that it is "very likely" that global warming is
the result of human activity.

I talked to Ball by phone on Feb. 6 from his home on Victoria Island,
British Columbia, which the good-humored scientist likes to point out was
connected to the mainland 8,000 years ago when the sea level was 500 feet
lower.

Q: The mainstream media would have us believe that the science of global
warming is now settled by the latest IPCC report. Is it true?

A: No. It's absolutely false. As soon as people start saying something's
settled, it's usually that they don't want to talk about it anymore. They
don't want anybody to dig any deeper. It's very, very far from settled. In
fact, that's the real problem. We haven't been able to get all of the facts
on the table. The IPCC is a purely political setup.

There was a large group of people, the political people, who wanted the
report to be more harum-scarum than it actually is. In fact, the report is
quite a considerable step down from the previous reports. For example, they
have reduced the potential temperature rise and they've reduced the sea
level increase and a whole bunch of other things. Part of it is because they
know so many people will be watching the report this time.

Q: Why should we be leery of the IPCC's report -- or the summary of the
report?

A: Well, because the report is the end product of a political agenda, and it
is the political agenda of both the extreme environmentalists who of course
think we are destroying the world. But it's also the political agenda of a
group of people ... who believe that industrialization and development and
capitalism and the Western way is a terrible system and they want to bring
it down.

They couldn't do it by attacking energy because they know that would get the
public's back up very quickly. ... The vehicle they chose was CO2, because
that's the byproduct of industry and fossil-fuel burning, which of course
drives the whole thing. They think, "If we can show that that is destroying
the planet, then it allows us to control." Unfortunately, you've got a bunch
of scientists who have this political agenda as well, and they have
effectively controlled the IPCC process.

Q: You always hear the argument that the IPCC has several thousand
scientists -- how can you not accept what they say?

A: The answer, first of all, is that consensus is not a scientific fact. The
other thing is, you look at the degree to which they have controlled the
whole IPCC process. For example, who are the lead authors? Who are the
scientists who sit on the summary panel with the politicians to make sure
that they get their view in? S You've got this incestuous little group that
is controlling the whole process both through their publications and the
IPCC. I'm not a conspiracy theorist and I hate being even pushed toward
that, but I think there is a consensus conspiracy that's going on.

Q: What is your strongest or best argument that GW is not "very likely" to
be caused by SUVs and Al Gore's private planes?

A: I guess the best argument is that global warming has occurred, but it
began in 1680, if you want to take the latest long-term warming, and the
climate changes all the time. It began in 1680, in the middle of what's
called "The Little Ice Age" when there was three feet of ice on the Thames
River in London. And the demand for furs of course drove the fur trade. The
world has warmed up until recently, and that warming trend doesn't fit with
the CO2 record at all; it fits with the sun-spot data. Of course they are
ignoring the sun because they want to focus on CO2.

The other thing that you are seeing going on is that they have switched from
talking about global warming to talking about climate change. The reason for
that is since 1998 the global temperature has gone down -- only marginally,
but it has gone down. In the meantime, of course, CO2 has increased in the
atmosphere and human production has increased. So you've got what Huxley
called the great bane of science -- "a lovely hypothesis destroyed by an
ugly fact." So by switching to climate change, it allows them to point at
any weather event -- whether it's warming, cooling, hotter, dryer, wetter,
windier, whatever -- and say it is due to humans. Of course, it's absolutely
rubbish.

Q: What is the most exaggerated and unnecessary worry about global warming
or climate change?

A: I think the fact that it is presented as all negative. Of course, it's
the one thing they focus on because the public, with the huge well of common
sense that is out there, would sort of say, "Well, I don't understand the
science, but, gee, I wouldn't mind a warmer world, especially if I was
living in Canada or Russia." They have to touch something in the warming
that becomes a very big negative for the people, and so they focus on, "Oh,
the glaciers are going to melt and the sea levels are going to rise." In
fact, there are an awful lot of positive things. For example, longer
frost-free seasons across many of the northern countries, less energy used
because you don't need to keep your houses warm in the winter.

Q: Is the globe warming and what is the cause?

A: Yeah, the world has been warming since 1680 and the cause is changes in
the sun. But in their computer models they hardly talk about the sun at all
and in the IPCC summary for policy-makers they don't talk about the sun at
all. And of course, if they put the sun into their formula in their computer
models, it swamps out the human portion of CO2, so they can't possibly do
that.

Q: Is the rising CO2 level the cause of global warming or the result of it?

A: That's a very good question because in the theory the claim is that if
CO2 goes up, temperature will go up. The ice core record of the last 420,000
years shows exactly the opposite. It shows that the temperature changes
before the CO2. So the fundamental assumption of the theory is wrong. That
means the theory is wrong. ... But the theory that human CO2 would lead to
runaway global warming became a fact right away, and scientists like myself
who dared to question it were immediately accused of being paid by the oil
companies or didn't care about the children or the future or anything else.

Q: Have you ever accepted money from an oil company?

A: No. No. I wish I did get some. I wouldn't have to drive a '92 car and
live in a leaky apartment bloc.

Q: Why are sea levels rising and should we worry?

A: Sea levels have been rising for the last 10,000 years. In fact, 8,000
years ago, sea level was almost 500 feet lower than it is today. It's been
rising gradually over that time. It's risen very slightly in the modern
record, but it has risen no more rapidly than it has in the last 8,000
years. One of the factors that people forget is that most of the ice is
already in the ocean, and so if you understand Archimedes' Principle, when
that ice melts it simply replaces the space that the ice occupied -- even if
the ice caps melt completely. What they do is they say if we estimate the
volume of water in Antarctica and Greenland, then we add that to the
existing ocean level. But that's not the way it works at all. But it does
work for panic and for sea-level rises of 20 feet, like Gore claims.

Q: Why are the sea levels rising, just because we are in a warming period?

A: Yes. We are in an inter-glacial. Just 22,000 years ago, which is what
some people can get their minds around, Canada and parts of the northern
U.S. were covered with an ice sheet larger than the current Antarctic ice
sheet. That ice sheet was over a mile thick in central Canada. All of that
ice melted in 5,000 years. There was another ice sheet over Europe and a
couple more in Asia. As that ice has melted, it's run back into the oceans
and of course that's what's filled up the oceans. But if you drilled down in
Antarctica, you go down almost 8,000 feet below sea level. That ice below
sea level, if it melts, is not going to raise sea level.

Q: Is there any aspect of global warming alarmism that you are worried
about?

A: There are a couple of very minor things. I'm interested in and need more
research done on commercial jet aircraft flying in the stratosphere. The
research that's been done so far says no, it's not an issue, but I think the
jury is out on that still. The other concern I have is that we're totally
preparing for warming. The whole world is preparing for warming, but I
mentioned that we have been cooling since 1998 and the climate scientists
that I respected -- particularly the Russians and Chinese -- are predicting
that we're going to be much, much cooler by 2030. So we've got completely
the wrong adaptive strategy.

Q: Is it not inevitable that we will have another ice age?

A: Yes, I think there is another ice age coming, because the major causes of
the ice ages are changes in the orbit of the Earth around the sun and
changes in the tilt of the Earth. Those are things we've known about for 150
years.

Q: If someone asked you where he should go to get a good antidote on the
mainstream media's spin on global warming, where should he go?

A: There are three Web sites I have some respect for. One is the one I
helped set up by a group of very frustrated professional scientists who are
retired. That's called Friendsofscience.org. It has deliberately tried to
focus on the science only. The second site that I think provides the science
side of it very, very well is CO2Science.org, and that's run by Sherwood
Idso, who is the world expert on the relationship between plant growth and
CO2. The third, which is a little more irreverent and maybe still slightly
on the technical side for the general public, is JunkScience.com.

Q: If you had to calm the fears of a small grandchild or a student about the
threat of global warming, what would you tell him?

A: First of all, I probably wouldn't tell him anything. As I tell audiences,
the minute somebody starts saying "Oh, the children are going to die and the
grandchildren are going to have no future," they have now played the
emotional and fear card. Just like in the U.S., it's almost like the race
card. It's not to say that it isn't valid in some cases. But the minute you
play that card, you are now taking the issues and the debates out of the
rational and logical and reasonable and sensible and calm into the emotional
and hysterical.

So I wouldn't raise these kinds of fear with the children. What I would do
with my children and grandchildren is what I'm trying to do with the public
and say, "Look, here's the other side of the story. Make sure you get all of
the information before you start running off and screaming 'wolf, wolf,
wolf.'"

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