Abstract

My first encounter with Dr. Tim Ball was while watching him in the BBC documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, released in 2007. In a cast that listed, among others, well-known climate skeptics such as the Canadian environmentalist Patrick Moore, former member of Greenpeace; Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Patrick Michaels, Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia; Nigel Calder, Editor of New Scientist from 1962 to 1966; John Christy, Professor and Director of the Earth System Science Center at University of Alabama; Paul Reiter of the Pasteur Institute; former British Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson; and Piers Corbyn, a British weather forecaster, Dr. Tim Ball was a pleasant surprise for me. Well-articulated, with a sense of humor that was difficult to ignore, Dr. Ball brought a voice of reason to the heated debate on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). His recent book, The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science, describes a collection of specific cases where, according to Dr. Ball, blatant corruption of science enabled the activities of “a cabal, a secret political clique or faction.” His main goal in this book was to “explain their motive and objectives, which were political, not scientific... How... they bypassed and perverted the scientific method... [and how] They effectively silenced scientists who tried to perform the normal roles of critics and skeptics” (pp. 3–4).