Wildly untruthful at WUWT - Tim Ball did not "win" anything

Over at WUWT there's jubilation in the air over...nothing. Anthony Watts is falsely claiming that Tim Ball won a court case. In fact, what happened was Tim Ball got the Court to dismiss the lawsuit because of delay. There was no finding. Tim got a lucky break (so far) and the case was dismissed without any judgement. Professor Mann may (or might not) appeal. Tim's going to be disappointed that Mann won't pay his legal fees. (See update below.)

I'll let Michael Mann correct the fake news.

There have been some wildly untruthful claims about the recent dismissal of libel litigation against Tim Ball circulating on social media. Here is our statement:

The defendant Ball did not “win” the case. The Court did not find that any of Ball’s defenses were valid. The Court did not find that any of my claims were *not* valid.

The dismissal involved the alleged exercise of a discretion on the Court to dismiss a lawsuit for delay. I have an absolute right of appeal. My lawyers will be reviewing the judgment and we will make a decision within 30 days.

The provision in the Court’s order relating to costs does NOT mean that I will pay Ball’s legal fees.

This ruling absolutely does not involve any finding that Ball’s allegations were correct in fact or amounted to legitimate comment. In making his application based on delay, Ball effectively told the world he did not want a verdict on the real issues in the lawsuit.

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UPDATE

The reason Tim Ball requested the court stop the case due to "delay" is because he says he's old and sick. He supported his request by claiming no-one listens to his ravings. No-one takes any notice of his defamatory words. The Alexa rating for his blog is low, he says. So he sees himself as an old, sick nobody (or so he claims to the court). A man who's lived a life of no consequence (except to Anthony Watts and his band of inconsequential conspiracy nutters). See here and here.

This crazy climate! What do Anthony Watts and Alex Jones have in common? Prison Planet.

Some of you might think HotWhopper may on occasion go overboard reporting the lies, duplicity and straight up weirdness of deniers. That's not so. If anything, the articles here underplay the weirdness of deniersville. Some of what goes on in climate conspiracy land is not fit for publication on normal blogs.

WUWT has recently reinvigorated its crusade to libel or solicit libel of prominent climate scientists and climate hawks. In the last couple of days there have been articles about Michael Mann and Ben Santer, for example. When all else fails, disinformers turn to lying smears.

But that's not all.

WUWT is now using US conpiracy theorist Alex Jones' Prison Planet as a source!

Manipulating Tim Ball at WUWT

Tim Ball is Anthony Watts' pet conspiracy theorist. He's an utter nutter of the first order. He was the first-named author of a book denying the greenhouse effect (pictured right).  Anthony Watts never mentions that, although he has a policy that "WUWT is a slayer free zone". Anthony only implements this policy on very rare occasions, and always exempts Tim Ball.

Today I'll just write about one thing, and it's not about Tim's main preoccupation (anti-semitic conspiracy theories). This time it's about manipulation.

Manipulation is a curious word. It sends shivers down the spine of every science denier yet they flock to blogs like WUWT where manipulation of the gullible is the only stock in trade.

Anthony Watts posted an article with the usual nonsense from Tim Ball (climate science is a hoax, a communist plot, a conspiracy for world domination by persons sometimes named, sometimes not). In it, Tim opened with this sentence:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the people who formulated the structure that directed their research, constantly manipulated the data and the methods to predetermine the results.

Climate science denial dismissed - Judge finds Tim Ball too wacky to be believed

Over at WUWT, Anthony Watts has gleefully announced to his climate conspiracy mob that a Canadian judge has dismissed a lawsuit against Tim Ball. What Anthony didn't (and probably won't) tell his readers, is that the judge dismissed the complaint because:

Simply put, a reasonably thoughtful and informed person who reads the Article is unlikely to place any stock in Dr. Ball’s views, including his views of Dr. Weaver as a supporter of conventional climate science.

Now we know that no-one who is a fan of WUWT is a "reasonably thoughtful" or "informed person". And we also know that about 99% of them won't bother reading any judgement, and most don't read DeSmogBlog (or HotWhopper) either. Still, I thought it might be useful to spread the word, thanks to Richard Littlemore - who wrote about this first.

If the argument put by the judge is extended, it means that he regards most fans of Anthony Watts' wattsupwiththat blog as unreasonable, lacking in thinking power, and distinctly uninformed. He also holds a large minority of the US population in contempt, the ones who still believe anything their authoritarian idols tell them to believe.

Another key quote was how the Judge found Tim Ball intended to harm then climate scientist Andrew Weaver:

The judge agreed, saying, first of all that Ball’s intent to injure was adequately established in the evidence:
“These allegations are directed at Dr. Weaver’s professional competence and are clearly derogatory of him. Indeed, it is quite apparent that this was Dr. Ball’s intent.”

That's why I think Andrew Weaver stands a chance if he chooses to appeal. Even though I agree with the judgement in its essence, it's also not unreasonable to argue that something like 30% of the US population might be "reasonably thoughtful" despite being wrong about climate science, and are instead merely "uninformed". (That's not the case for probably most WUWT commenters. The long term fans can only be considered as unscrupulous disinformers who deliberately spread lies, or are wilfully ignorant, because they've had ample time and means to find out the facts for themselves.)

Now will Anthony keep his promise and perhaps post the judgement (pdf) or not. Any bets?

By the way - I did predict that Tim Ball was trying for the insanity defense, back in April last year. He must be very pleased his efforts have come to this!

As an aside, sorry for being tardy in getting back to blogging. Other commitments mean articles will be a bit slow coming for a little while yet. Sorry about that. I shall return in full swing shortly.

Further reading

Is Tim Ball wanting to try the "insane" defense in his court cases, with the help of Anthony Watts? - HotWhopper article from April 2017

More about Tim Ball from HotWhopper

Club of Rome conspiracies from Timothy Ball at WUWT

Timothy Ball is Anthony Watts' most conventional conspiracy theorist, and an utter nutter. Anthony decided for his blog audience he would target the crank end of cyberspace and Tim fits the bill admirably. His latest theory is that the Club of Rome invented climate science, and as a nefarious plot.

Some might call WUWT fans wackadoodles, others will think of the funny farm. Wattsupwiththat is a natural meeting place for paranoid conspiracy theorists who think that efforts to protect humanity and nature are a satanic plot.

Tim is a greenhouse effect denier who wrote the first chapter in an obscure book that gained modest popularity among climate conspiracy nutters a few years ago, called "Slaying the Sky Dragon - Death of the Greenhouse Gas Theory".  There was no death, of course, but the book is a bible of some of WUWT's "climate hoax" conspiracy theorists. Not that they understand anything in it (who would? It's gobbledegook.) Nor would they understand anything about physics, chemistry, climate or mathematics. They just get some comfort from seeing they are not the only weirdos in the world.

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!

Lamar Smith and denier scientists were outwitted and outperformed by Michael Mann

I'll keep this short - and it's sweet :)

Anthony Watts' pet uber-conspiracy theorists both thought Michael Mann performed best at the recent committee hearing that Lamar Smith and his cronies orchestrated.

Tim Ball, who promotes the nuttiest climate conspiracy theories, wrote (emphasis mine):

My challenge to skeptics is to view the hearing as an uninformed citizen. From that perspective, I would argue that Mann was the most effective and persuasive. He was assertive, apparently provided hard evidence, had the backing of most scientists and scientific societies. He turned the minority status role the organizers gave him into the base for his victimization role. It wasn’t a debate, but he turned it into one and clearly believed, as would most uninformed observers, that he won.

Leo Goldstein (aka Ari Halperin), who is also as nutty as they come, (see here in particular) wrote (emphasis Leo's):

If it had been my first time hearing about this subject I would have concluded that the climate alarmists were right.

Good for you, Professor Mann.

Anthony Watts publishes another recklessly defamatory article about NOAA scientists, by Tim Ball

Anthony Watts has published another defamatory article on his blog (archived here). I use the term without it being proven in the courts, but if one of the retired scientists mentioned wanted to take him and Tim Ball to court, he'd surely be able to make a case to be heard. Tim Ball started his false claims in the very first sentence.

Some key points about the NOAA temperature reconstruction paper, Karl15

Before going into the despicable actions of Tim Ball and his publisher Anthony Watts, let me remind you about the NOAA work that they don't understand, but dislike so much they'll risk being sued (yet again, in the case of Tim Ball).

The work was built from two main pieces of research. One was an updating of a sea surface temperature record, which was in turn built from zillions of records from different sources, carefully analysed in great detail. The scientists re-aligned the data from different sources so that it provided a more accurate account of how the temperature of the sea surface has changed over time. As an example of this, the authors of Karl15 wrote:

Anthony Watts, Tim Ball, Christopher Monckton, and Willie Soon and chemtrails, HAARP, and the New World Order

I'm of the view that one shouldn't get on the same platform with people who aren't credible. It gives them an undeserved legitimacy and you'll end up confusing anyone ignorant of the subject.

Anthony Watts, who runs a  "climate hoax" conspiracy blog wattsupwiththat.com, doesn't agree. He gives a platform to greenhouse effect denying "sky dragon slayers", despite weakly protesting on occasion that he "believes in" the greenhouse effect. However if you've read about Tim Ball and Christopher Monckton of Brenchley before, you know they are more than mere science quacks, they are wacky conspiracy nutters. Anthony Watts frequently promotes them and their silly ideas on his blog. Today I discovered they are associated with a whole society of utter nutters. A group, or if you like, a collective of individualists, wanting to take over the world. (Seriously.)

At WUWT, Anthony posted another conspiracy-laden article by Tim Ball, where he said: "Recently I spoke at the Freedom Force Conference in Phoenix on Climate Change. " So off I trotted to see what this "Freedom Force" group was all about.

Where are the clowns?

There is not a lot to report from denialists this week. Their repetitive denial is boring. Judith Curry is not very busy, merely posting things that caught her eye to give voice to her Trump fans (politics), her core anti-science brigade (science), and her luddites (energy and policy), interspersed with silly guest articles by deniers. She's given up on science altogether and is now a hard core climate science disinformer.

At WUWT, Anthony Watts has been posting articles saying the reason no debates had a climate question was because no-one in the USA is interested in climate change. Given that Anthony touts his blog as "the world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change", this raises the question of whether he is rethinking the point of his anti-science efforts of the past nine years or so.

A weak "climate hoax" conspiracy theory from Tim Ball at WUWT

There's not much happening at WUWT these days. The latest is just another "climate hoax" article from uber-conspiracy theorist Timothy Ball, one of Anthony Watts' pets (archived here). Anthony posted the article as "climate news".  It contains no news and nothing new. It's an article empty of a point except that greenhouse effect denier Tim Ball says that climate science is a hoax.

Tim mentions Maurice Strong again, but not his role as President of an oil company. Instead he suggests that the World Meteorological Organisation should play no role on the climate stage. Tim wrote:

Why, despite all the evidence of failure of corrupted science, and failed predictions does the global warming/climate change agenda continue? The answer is simple and the result of Maurice Strong’s organizational skills in setting up the entire process. When he set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) he did it through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). 

There is no evidence of "failure of corrupted science" and Tim doesn't even bother to make up stuff to try to show there is. He's a lazy conspiracy theorist. The IPCC was jointly established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988, and endorsed by the UN General Assembly. Tim doesn't say what organisations would have been more suitable.

Anatomy of Tim Ball's conspiratorial pseudo-science at WUWT

I'm perpetually puzzled by Anthony Watts who at time shows signs that he yearns for respectability, giving voice to Tim Ball, who is by any benchmark an utter nutter loon and conspiracy freak.

Tim Ball in almost every article shows he hasn't left the 1970s. Today he's barely entered it. In the manner of religious fundamentalists, Tim doesn't accept any scientific knowledge that was developed after 1970, and he doesn't accept most science that was developed before then either. He makes up his own from fragments of books written by people he took a fancy to up until he was in his early 30s. (Tim was born in November 1938. Any science done after 1970 doesn't exist in Tim's mind, and most done before 1970 is wrong - in Tim's mind.) Like Peter Pan Tim didn't grow up. He exists in a dark fantasy of his own creation where ogres roam. Tim's ogres include Maurice Strong, an oil industrialist who was Secretary General of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in the early 1970s, and was the first executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme. If there is one type of person that Tim can't abide (apart from Jews and scientists), it is anyone who thinks it's important to protect our natural world. The list of ogres who roam Tim's nightmares is too long to list here but it includes climate scientists Tom Wigley, Michael Mann, and Andrew Weaver. Tim's heroes include Adolf Hitler and Osama bin Laden.

Seriously deluded: wacky conspiracy theories at WUWT with more ozone hole denial

Denier blogs are in the doldrums and have been for quite some time. I wrote about Judith Curry, who actively agitates for no mitigation of global warming, complaining about scientists warning US Congress about the dangers of climate change. Seriously! Is that all she's got?

Jo Nova has been focused on politics. She likes One Nation's climate conspiracy theories and in one article she urged her readers to vote for a Senate candidate from an ultra-conservative populist party that stands on climate science denial, homophobia, islamophobia, and against almost all the values that decent Australians cherish. That is the Christian Democrat Party, which is the creature of Fred Nile. Joanne is a proud deluded conservative (DelCon) who regards centrist conservatives as socialist. She paints everyone to the left of Ghengis Kahn as subversive commies.

Anthony Watts has been posting a lot of political articles too. He hasn't been around much except to put up some very silly articles from his band of freeby contributors. His latest contribution is another wacky article by one of his favourite uber-conspiracy theorists Timothy Ball (archived here).

Denier quote of the week from Tim Ball at WUWT

This is what passes for climate science at Anthony Watts' blog WUWT:

Since climate is an average of the weather, the average temperature for a 24-hour period is the climate of the day.

Timothy Ball PhD (climate conspiracy theorist) 

That has to be the shortest climate period ever!

And not one person questioned it.

Extra-tropical storms: Anthony Watts publishes more of Tim Ball's nonsense

While Anthony Watts might have said something to Tim Ball to stop him writing about his favourite conspiracy theory about the One World Government, he hasn't stopped him from making up nonsense about climate science. Today he's published an article by Tim where he wrongly claimed that the world is cooling (archived here). Tim lives on a world of his own, not this one. In your world and mine, the global mean surface temperature has had four of the last four decades the hottest ever recorded. It's also had two of the last two years the hottest ever recorded, soon to be three of three:

In this article from the greenhouse effect denier, Timothy Ball, he was writing about mid-latitude cyclones, or extra-tropical cyclones. These are different to tropical cyclones. The Bureau of Meteorology website explains:

An internally inconsistent straw man from the Cornwall Alliance

A few months ago the pseudo-religious science-denying cult the Cornwall Alliance posted a bunch of denialist videos on YouTube. I didn’t watch most of them, though a few hundred people have.  One of them did catch my eye. It had the title: Greener on the Other Side - Attacking the Person, Not the Argument, Is Wrong.

I liked the message, however it struck me as a possible example of a straw man logical fallacy. Still, I wondered if there were going to be examples given where the research was sound, but was criticised solely because of the funding source. (I realised it was probably too much to hope that the Cornwall Alliance would be telling fake sceptics to stop attacking climate scientists and instead read their research.) Anyway, I watched the entire one minute and thirty second video almost through to the end (missing only the final long promo). I thought I'd check to see if the argument was supported by examples or if it was just another logical fallacy typical of science deniers.

There weren’t any examples given. It was pure straw man through and through. However it turned out to be more than just a straw man fallacy. The very short video contradicted itself. Below is the transcript so you can see for yourself.

The dark side of humanity at WUWT: Tim Ball's hopes have been realised, his lies have not

Anthony Watts has posted another article from his resident conspiracy theorist Tim Ball (archived here, latest here). I won't bore you with all the details. You know that Tim's articles are usually ugly paranoid conspiracy theories written to feed the salacious appetites of Anthony's deluded fans. There are just a couple of points I'll make.

The hope

The first one is that Tim's hopes are realised. He says: "I Hope The IPCC Is Correct About Warming Because Cooling Is a Bigger Problem". Here you go, Tim:

Data source: GISS NASA

Assaulting Reason: The Climate Inquisition and silencing science - with Tim Ball and Chuck Wiese

Be afraid. Be very afraid...Climate science deniers are running scared. Tim Ball has donned his sandwich board and picked up his megaphone. He is broadcasting to the little conspiracy theorists at WUWT that they are all at risk of being hung, drawn and quartered. He warns them of the coming Climate Inquisition, which is apparently like the Spanish Inquisition only worse. The headline for Tim's latest meandering diatribe is: "Use of Fear to Silence Climate Skeptics Is An Assault On Reason" (archived here).

The dim deniers are putting on a brave front, faking bravado in the face of imminent peril. They are proud of their allegiance to the war against knowledge. They refuse to be cowed by the scary thought that they will soon become martyrs for the cause or sent to FEMA camps in chains.

I wondered what it could be that so made the WUWT-ers so fearful (this time around). (Conspiracy theorists are a weird bunch who thrive on paranoia.) Tim Ball mentioned the US Attorney General, so I did a Google search. It turns out that it's not just the dim deniers at WUWT who are shaking in their boots. Science deniers in other dark corners of the Internet are panicking. The rumour has gone around that there are to be RICO prosecutions of climate science deniers.

Crank magnet WUWT defends pseudo-science and promotes Velikovskyism "in the context of learning"

Credit: Donna Foster Roizen
Source: Wikipedia

This doesn't warrant a long article but it ended up being longish. It's just to comment on the fact that Anthony Watts has published another article from Tim Ball, pushing Velikovsky's crank ideas as science. Tim argues that scientists shouldn't point out dumb and wrong notions posing as science. Tim calls such behaviour "scientific elitism".

Anthony Watts gives an excuse (if you can call it that) for publishing such nonsense, saying that he promotes Velikovsky "in the context of learning" and seems to think the Director of GISS NASA is a coward for not doing the same.

The Worlds Collide at WUWT - Astronomy is a Hoax!

What can I say? After promoting Tim Ball's wacky One World Guvmint conspiracy theories, now Anthony Watts has got Tim Ball resurrecting Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision. Scientists pointing out that the 1950's book was gobsmackingly stupid is another sign that climate science is a hoax.

I wonder what the WUWT-ers will make of that?