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Showing posts with label Skeptics from around the globe-Canada. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Skeptics from around the globe-Canada. Show all posts

February 16, 2010

Climatology expert threatened for climate change views


When I initially started investigating global warming, what drew my attention more than any single issue was the absolute vileness of the "believers" towards their opponents. It was and remains one of the most despicable events in the history of science. Someday probably many years from now, some of the skeptics who have stood by the truth in the face of absolute unfounded attempts at personal destruction by their so called peers will be seen as truly courageous men of not only science but of humanity. Their persecutors if remembered at all have shamed themselves and will be remembered with utter contempt. I sincerely believe this to be true. Timothy Ball is a very courageous and honorable man whom all who love truth should admire. IMO

FROM-Toronto Sun

By MICHAEL COREN,

Recently I interviewed professor Tim Ball on my TV show. Ball is a highly qualified and experienced academic with an expertise in historical climatology who rejects most of the current hysteria around climate change and global warming.

He is a modest, gentle man who, in spite of his enormous work in the field and the chairing of inquiries and commissions into environmental causes, is now libelled, slandered, abused and threatened for his opinions.

“If people knew just how deep and dark this conspiracy is — yes, conspiracy — they’d be amazed,” he explains. “More and more academics are standing up to refute climate-change theories, but it’s still dangerous to do so. It can mean the end of a career, the targeting of someone by well-organized fanatics.”

I rather doubted this man who is arguably Canada’s leading scientific opponent of climate-change fundamentalism until the e-mails poured in after his television appearance. People wrote that he was in the pay of big oil, was a simple high-school geography teacher, was insane and worse. In fact, he is a university academic with impressive graduate degrees and doctorates and, unlike so many global warming advocates, is not in the pay of anybody.

Because he took some of his degrees under a university department of geography, an Internet mythology has developed around him and people who cannot spell let alone define scientific concepts try to silence him whenever he speaks.

“I’ve rather got used to it by now,” he says. “At first it was shocking that a climatologist with different ideas was treated like a Holocaust denier. Now I just move on and speak the truth.”

Such aggression has become typical of climate-change fanatics. When they lose arguments or are exposed as frauds, they attack their critics’ reputations or, in the case of the UN climate chief last week, shout that opponents should have their faces rubbed in carcinogenic material. It’s a grander, better financed version of pushing someone off a stage and is as crass and nasty as any anti-Communist witch-hunt.

Usually I wouldn’t reveal this sort of information, but in this case it’s necessary. We flew professor Ball to Toronto from Victoria for our interview because he could not afford the flight. The money for the economy fare was donated by two friends of our program with no connections to the climate-change debate and there was no fee for professor Ball. In other words, this man alleged to be in the pay of millionaires could not find anyone to subsidize even an entirely legitimate domestic flight for a major interview seen by 300,000 people!

“The believers are on increasingly thin ice — which is ironic because 400 years ago, the ice on London’s River Thames was three-feet thick!” he explains. “There has always been and always will be climate change, but it has very little to do with human activity and has nothing at all to do with pollution of course. We’re being lied to and the lies started 40 years ago.”

And professor Ball continues to speak out, no matter what the cost. More e-mails condemning him? Yes indeed. They’re being written right now.
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June 9, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe

CANADA



L. Graham Smith, PhD, Associate Professor, Dept. of Geography, University of Western Ontario




Alarmism about climate is predicated upon the assertion that contemporary temperature changes are both unprecedented and unnatural. Using the Little Ice Age as a base point for today's temperatures is a contrivance designed to promote alarmism. The existence and world-wide distribution of the Medieval Warm Period, greatly devalues the credence of any assertion of climate alarmism, which is why paleoclimatology has become a discipline of great policy import over the past decade.

The science of climate change is multi-faceted and extensive because climate is a dynamic, multi-variate entity. Left to themselves, the various disciplines may eventually have resolved many of the disputes over data and their meaning that have emerged. I say may, because the point is mute. Once the IPCC was formed, the science ceased to exist in an objective, value-free, apolitical vacuum and all climate science became enmeshed in an increasingly polarized and ideological politicization that persists today.

Is science ever truly objective and non-ideological? That's a good undergraduate philosophy question. The reality for climate change is that the science has become massively politicized. Until this is explicitly acknowledged within the various disciplines themselves, the overall result will remain as disputed and contested as the politics it mimics.

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May 30, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe


CANADA















Christopher Essex, PhD, Professor of Applied Mathematics and Associate Director of the Program in Theoretical Physics, University of Western Ontario


"There is no such thing as global temperature. And if there is no global temperature, how can there be global warming?...

...When the global-average-temperature-index "thingy" goes out in public, all of the temperature baggage comes with it. Extraneous things are subjected to the tortured temperature treatment. Glaciers and hurricanes become temperature, so do frog, horse and human maladies, including pulmonary disease, delirium and suicide. Apparently the "thingy" can even be employed to follow evolutionary changes in squirrels and explain kitten numbers. It's amazing what tenths of a degree can do...."
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May 16, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe


CANADA



Dr. Mitchell Taylor
, Polar Bear Biologist, Wildlife Research Section, Department of Environment, Igloolik, Nunavut, Canada



I understand that people who do not live in the north generally have difficulty grasping the concept of too many polar bears in an area. People who live here have a pretty good grasp of what that is like to have too many polar bears around.

This complexity is why so many people find the truth less entertaining than a good story. It is entirely appropriate to be concerned about climate change, but it is just silly to predict the demise of polar bears in 25 years based on media-assisted hysteria.....

... they are not in danger of extinction. According to a recent article, many Inuit feel that the current time is the “time with the most bears”. Many Inuit have also participated in scientific studies of polar bears over the years. So their experience is not consistent with the notion that polar bears are threatened or endangered or declining.
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May 6, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe


CANADA

Timothy F. Ball, PhD, environmental consultant and former climatology professor - University of Winnipeg, Chair, Natural Resources Stewardship Project, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada


"Consensus was a major argument throughout the debate even though it’s a meaningless argument in science. Consensus is not a scientific fact. It is important in politics, which underscores the political nature of the debate."

April 28, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe


CANADA


Susan Crockford, PhD (University Victoria )Archaeozoology/Zoogeography; Archaeozoology in the Pacific Rim, Domestication and Breed Development, Evolutionaary Theory, Evolution and History of the Domestic Dog; Pacific Rim (Sessional Instructor and Adjunct Assistant Professor)




The polar bear survived two major warming periods over the last 11,000 years, the first of which saw temperatures rise rapidly to at least 2.50C higher than present and there is no evidence that Arctic sea ice disappeared entirely during those times or that any ice-dependent species became extinct.

April 13, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe

CANADA


Brian Pratt-Professor Sedimentology, Paleontology-Geology University of Saskatchewan









"There has grown a whole industry of taxpayer-funded climate modellers whose equations can’t reproduce last week’s weather let alone past climate change at all, but whose crystal balls universally forecast impending disaster (and of course the urgent need for more research money)."

April 7, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe

CANADA

Petr Chylek Professor of Physics and Atmospheric Science-Departments of Physics and Oceanography Dalhousie University




“Scientists who want to attract attention to themselves, who want to attract great funding to themselves, have to (find a) way to scare the public . . . and this you can achieve only by making things bigger and more dangerous than they really are.”.........

To summarize, we find no direct evidence to support the claims that the Greenland ice sheet is melting due to increased temperature caused by increased atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The rate of warming from 1995 to 2005 was in fact lower than the warming that occurred from 1920 to 1930. The temperature trend during the next ten years may be a decisive factor in a possible detection of an anthropogenic part of climate signal over area of the Greenland ice sheet


March 20, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe


CANADA


Ian D. CLARK- Professor of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa,
Director, G.G. Hatch Isotope Laboratories








"I am compelled to disagree that there is a consensus of scientists who agree that this is the consequence of human activities. While the melting of permafrost, retreat of glaciers and waning of the permanent ice pack may be alarming, it is only alarming to those unfamiliar with past changes in climate in the North. Paleoclimatologists recognize such events as part of natural changes wholly unrelated to CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. In fact, the waxing and waning of ice shelves, along with glaciers, ice caps and pack ice are largely related to changes in solar inputs.


Arctic paleoclimatologists are very familiar with the Holocene "Hypsithermal" event - a warm period some five to 10 thousand years ago caused widespread retreat of permafrost and changes in vegetation patterns. Indeed, we have shown that Arctic summer temperatures at that time were five to eight degrees warmer than today. Polar bears and those lower on the Arctic food chain survived, as they will with the current warming."



March 3, 2009

Skeptics From Around the Globe -Canada


CANADA

Dr.Frederick A. Michel, Director Earth Sciences & Environmental Science, Carleton University


"We could all die tomorrow, or return to the Stone Age and global warming would continue unabated. It is a natural phenomenon to which the human contribution is negligible."








February 22, 2009

Inquisition of Tim Patterson



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Dr. Tim Patterson is a Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada and Director Ottawa-Carelton Geoscience Center

He was appointed an International Fellow in the School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology at the Queen's University of Belfast in 2006.

Tim Patterson was a founding executive editor of the electronic journal Palaeontologia Electronica. He served as associate Editor of Micropaleontology (1990-1997) and has just stepped down from serving a 14 year stint as Associate Editor of the Journal of Foraminiferal Research (1995-2008).

He is Canadian leader of the UNESCO supported International Geological Correlation Programme Project (IGCP) 495 "Quaternary Land-Ocean interactions" and was appointed chairman of the International Climate Science Coalition in 2008.

Tim Patterson has made ~200 scholarly contributions, including ~120 peer-reviewed research papers. He utilizes micropaleontological, sedimentological and geochemical techniques to:

study of paleoclimate records in Holocene lacustrine, marine, and bog environments to assess the dynamics of climate variability.

assess the impact of anthropogenic land-use change on natural lacustrine systems.

investigate the dynamics of sea-level change utilizing fossil salt marsh deposits.

For his research efforts he was awarded a 2002-2003 Carleton University Research Achievement Award for 'outstanding research'.


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Some heretical writing by this Skeptic

The Geologic Record and Climate Change

Testimony before the Commons Committee on Environment and Sustainable Development


Read the sunspots


Finally, an open-minded report on climate change

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Point To Ponder

"I teach a general climate change course. To get the significance of this correlation over to the students I use the following analogy. I tell the students that based on these records if you believe that climate is being driven by CO2 then they probably would have no difficulty in accepting the idea that Winston Churchill was instrumental in the defeat of King Herold by Duke William of Orange at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. If you can believe that this historical temporal incongruity could be feasible then you can have no problem believing that CO2 is what's driving Earth's climate system".