Is Tim Ball wanting to try the "insane" defense in his court cases, with the help of Anthony Watts?

Global warming is real and happening, yet there will probably always be a small coterie who choose to promote the craziest, wackiest conspiracy theories rather than accept reality. Anthony Watts is one such person. Soon he'll no doubt announce that he's also joined a Flat Earth Society.

I've wondered for a while if Tim Ball is wanting to try on a defense of insanity when he goes to court. Is that the reason Anthony Watts publishes his utter nutter conspiracy theories? I know Anthony is conspiratorially-minded himself and likes to play the part of the persecuted victim/hero, but I find it hard to accept that he believes the incredible dark conspiracy theories Tim spews.

Yet he promotes Tim's wackiness - often. So another idea is that Anthony Watts holds the same immensely stupid notions that Tim Ball does. In his latest piece (archived here), Tim Ball is claiming once again that global warming is a dark conspiracy. Strangely, according to Tim, this conspiratorial plot is backed by virtually all the world's climate scientists and virtually all the professional scientific organisations in the world but he still claims it's a political plot!

So how does Tim explain that, as he admits, all the experts independently looked at all the the evidence and found it supported the same conclusion? That physics, chemistry, biology, geology, agriculture, ecology, oceanography, glaciology and more - all show that global warming is real and caused by human activity.

He doesn't.

He just says that it's a "political agenda".

And what does he offer to explain what is causing global warming, if not the huge increase in greenhouse gases?

Nothing. Tim has no explanation. He offers nothing. He just calls the science of the last 200 years a "falsely created scientific fraud".

As a reminder - this is how much the world has warmed over the past 136 years. 2016 was more than 1.4 C hotter globally, than it was in the coldest year in the record.

Annual global mean surface temperature. Anomaly from the 1881-1910 mean. Data source: GISS NASA.

I also notice that Tim makes another mistake that's been pointed out to him before by lots of people. Lord May of Oxford is not the same person as Brian May, guitarist with Queen (and astrophysicist). That's a tiny error by comparison with Tim's gigantic and unbelievable conspiracy theory. The latter involves most of the world conspiring against Tim Ball and the absolute crazies among Anthony Watts' readers.

Why does Anthony Watts push Tim's loony ideas?

There's a clue in Tim's article for why Anthony Watts continues to push Tim's mish-mash of crazy. As you know, Anthony Watts wages his war on science in part by trying to discredit the world's more prominent climate scientists. He doesn't do this by showing the science wrong because he can't. He's got no evidence. (Most climate science deniers don't do science, they rely on misrepresenting the science done by real scientists.) Anthony Watts does it by pushing pseudo-science, lies and innuendo.

The clue I'm speaking about is where Tim writes, about the Nobel Prizes awarded to the IPCC and Al Gore:

I know that these are still major arguments used to support the claims of the IPCC because they are cited in most legal documents I receive and are quoted in almost every media interview I have ever done. 

Is Tim hoping that the utter nutters at WUWT will give him an argument he can use in his upcoming court cases? If so, he's out of luck. (Climate scientists don't actually rely on the decision of the Nobel committee as evidence of global warming. They don't need to. They use evidence from scientific analysis of data. It's the other way around. The Nobel committee accepts the vast array of scientific evidence.)

Global Cooling isn't much help. I'm guessing from their name that Global Cooling is willing to accept Tim's crazy notions rather than admit that global warming is real. This comment won't carry much weight in a court case.

April 23, 2017 at 12:32 pm
Now we have fake science in addition to fake news.

Pat Frank hasn't yet thought to ask himself why the American Physical Society would accept science. It hasn't yet occurred to him that it might be because of the preponderance of evidence. He would rather choose Tim's crazy notion that all the world's scientists have been faking data for more than a century, amazingly producing results that all point to the same thing. And no-one's been able to figure out how they've done it. Weird doesn't cover it.

April 23, 2017 at 12:40 pm
I share Hal Lewis’ amazement and anger at how the APS rolled over for AGW. I still don’t know how that happened, though. What were (are) those people thinking?
I always thought physicists were the most hard-minded of people, by far the most resistant to pseudo-science, by far the most likely to scoff at nonsense. I could rely on them to keep straight the ship of rational thought. Not any more. 

Leo Smith puts on his tin foil hat to protect his head against massive pressure. He hasn't the wit to think of the alternative explanation - that the APS is correct and that the science is robust.

April 23, 2017 at 2:05 pm
I share Hal Lewis’ amazement and anger at how the APS rolled over for AGW. I still don’t know how that happened, though. What were (are) those people thinking?
If you disbelieve the cliamte narrative, and believe that Al gore and chums created it for political reasons, that’s one thing. What the roll-over of all major institutions points to is massive pressure being applied at a very deep level.
It’s real tinfoil hat territory. But what other explanation is there?

Geo Rubik seems to think that humble climate scientists all want power. If that's what they wanted they wouldn't have chosen science as a career. (Geo hasn't moved on to the obvious question: how did all the scientists from different disciplines all manage to get all the different data to point to the same conclusion?)

April 23, 2017 at 12:41 pm
“Focus on the bad science was necessary, but once demonstrated, demands an explanation of the motive.”
There’s only one motive. Power

Tim's conspiracy theory brought out others that are equally wacky and dark. Moa wrote how he believes not only was Mother Theresa evil, Nelson Mandela was a genocidal maniac. Huh? (I'd not come across that one before.)

April 23, 2017 at 2:46 pm (excerpt)
I’m pleased you mentioned Theresa as less than a saint as Hitchens pointed out.
Nelson Mandela was also an unrepentant Communist terrorist who ordered hundreds killed in the racist South African genocide against the white minority.

Just in case you thought Rudd Istvan is in any way respectable, despite being a climate science denier, this should put any such notion to rest. ristvan wrote how he's just another utter nutter conspiracy fruitcake as bad as Tim Ball and the rest at WUWT:

April 23, 2017 at 3:35 pm
Interesting essay, but not new news. UNFCCC was from the beginning a progressive political construct. IPCC is a creature thereof. Figueres was clear about its ultimate objective, as were Wirth and Edenhofer. Actual climate science never mattered. It was only a facade to support a preordained political conclusion; those scientists who played along were (to now, times are changing) richly rewarded.
But that ship has hit the rocks of reality and is foundering. Trump’s election is but one consequence. Yesterday’s March for Science protests another. If the climate science is settled, we don’t need to spend more on it and can build a wall instead with the funds. If it isn’t, then we can fire (no more grants) all the incompetent ‘played along’ climate scientists who said it was. Either way, the marchers lose.

The paranoid conspiracy weirdos at WUWT couldn't make up their mind if climate science is an evil communist plot or an evil capitalist plot. They regard scientists all over with fear and loathing, while knowing not a thing about science, or scientists, or scientific careers, or intellectual pursuit, or how knowledge is obtained. Here's a sample, showing their different notions. mark4asp wrote:

April 23, 2017 at 4:28 pm
Skeptics (especially Tim Ball) promote the idea that CAGW is a green-communist plot. No. It’s more of an elite / establishment plot. Follow the money. Billionaire foundations fund the green movement. The elites are not communists.

Chimp thinks that scientists are only in it for the money, and that there's lots of money to be made doing climate science, and that climate scientists are all capitalists. That's showing a bit of independence from most at WUWT who think that all climate scientists are commie stooges.

April 23, 2017 at 4:46 pm
They want communism for the masses but capitalism for themselves. 

crackers345 asked a good question:

April 23, 2017 at 4:39 pm
i’m always wondering why tim ball doesn’t just disprove all the ipcc’s science via technical papers published in the scientific literature, instead of writing for blogs.
it’s my understanding that ball only published 4 scientific papers during his career, none on any of the crucial issues of anthropogenic climate change. am i wrong on that? 

Tim said it's not true, and pointed to a broken link to a paper that he claimed was peer-reviewed, which he managed to get published 25 years ago, in the  Canadian Water Resources Journal. The paper was pretty awful, full of wrong information and denier memes. I don't know why he claimed it was peer-reviewed. On his blog page he says it was a presentation, which wouldn't have been peer-reviewed.  Maybe he meant reviewed by his own peers, none of whom are climate scientists. (Tim's peers are his fellow utter nutter conspiracy freaks.) In any case, his paper/presentation was fairly ordinary by comparison with the amazing conspiracy theories he pushes these days. Tim didn't manage to show that he's been a prolific publisher of climate science papers, however, because he's not. Most of the articles in his bio aren't in journals and he's not published any papers progressing climate science. (He was a lecturer long ago, in the geography department, not a research scientist. He's not a climate scientist.)


If Roger Knights was a real sceptic, not a fake sceptic, he'd have learnt that it was someone who turned out to be a climate science denier who led the APS committee, and called on science deniers Judith Curry, Richard Lindzen and John Christy to have their say together with more reputable scientists. It didn't work. In the end the APS couldn't bring itself to favour a conspiracy theory or science denial over scientific evidence.

April 23, 2017 at 5:54 pm
I suspect that the world’s scientific societies have a standard practice of calling for volunteers when a job needs doing, such as to serve on a committee to write a report. If I’m right, then those societies asked for volunteers to serve on committees to examine the CAGW question, and those who volunteered were those who felt strongly about the matter—i.e., alarmists. That’s what I suspect happened in the AGU & the APS. If so, those societies were and are naive about zealotry (or their leaderships were machiavellian warmists).

References and further reading

Threats to Tomorrow's World: Anniversary Address 2005, delivered by the President of the Royal Society Lord May of Oxford OM AC Kt