Timothy Francis Ball (November 5, 1938 – September 24, 2022) was a British-born Canadian public speaker and writer who was a professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Winnipeg from 1971 until his retirement in 1996.
Subsequently Ball became active in promoting rejection of the scientific consensus on global warming, giving public talks and writing opinion pieces and letters to the editor for Canadian newspapers.
[10] Ball has published a number of peer-reviewed papers in the field of historical climatology, most of which pertain to reconstructing temperatures in Canada during the past several centuries.
[11][non-primary source needed] In 2003, Ball co-authored a book entitled "Eighteenth-Century Naturalists of Hudson Bay," which was reviewed in the American Indian Quarterly by Theodore Binnema of the University of Northern British Columbia in 2005,[12] as well as by Fred Cooke in the Auk in 2004.
[13] In 2007 Ball was one of seven co-authors of a paper arguing that "spring air temperatures around the Hudson Bay basin for the past 70 years (1932–2002) show no significant warming trend," and that, as a result, "the extrapolation of polar bear disappearance is highly premature.
[22][23] Ball worked with Friends of Science and Natural Resources Stewardship Project, which oppose the scientific consensus of significant anthropogenic global warming,[24] and is a former research fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
"[27] Ball rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and stated that he believed global warming is occurring but that human production of carbon dioxide is not the cause.
[27] Ball told National Geographic that carbon dioxide causing warming was just a hypothesis, but had been treated as fact because it fit a political agenda and the views of the environmentalists.
[31] He reiterated the view that man-made global warming was fabricated by the environmental movement, particularly Environment Canada, in a presentation he gave in June 2006 to the Comox Valley Probus Club.
On July 21, 2011, while a guest on the show, he stated: "To suggest that CO2's a pollutant when it's an extremely important gas in the atmosphere for all plant life and therefore for the oxygen that's produced, is just nonsense.
[35] He also wrote about ocean acidification from a similarly dismissive point of view, arguing that "Even if CO2 increases to 560 ppm by 2050, as the IPCC predict, this would only result in a 0.2 unit reduction of pH.
From 2002 to 2007, Ball wrote 39 opinion pieces and 32 letters to the editor in 24 different Canadian newspapers, and from 2002 to 2012, he gave over 600 public talks about global warming and various environmental issues.
[53] In the ensuing court case, Ball acknowledged that he had only been a tenured professor for eight years, and that his doctorate was not in climatology but rather in the broader discipline of geography,[46] and subsequently withdrew the lawsuit on June 8, 2007.
Writing that Ball's statements "meet the classic test for defamation," it sent the case back to the trial judge to decide the amount of damages and whether the article was fair comment.
[62] Mann then sued Ball and Frontier Centre for libel,[63] and stated that he was seeking punitive damages and for the article to be removed from the web site.
[67] Some have linked Ball's activism to funding from the fossil fuel industry,[25][32][68] especially through the organization Friends of Science, whose scientific advisory board he sat upon.