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[ five ] INTERNATIONALIZING UNCERTAINTY Taking the doctrine of doubt on the road

There are few “skeptical scientists” with as little actual expertise and as much ambition as the Canadian geography professor Dr. Timothy Ball. Never a climate scientist per se, Dr. Ball quit his position as an associate professor at the University of Winnipeg in 1995, apparently ending an academic career that featured a lifetime output of just four peer-reviewed journal articles, none of which addressed atmospheric science. Yet ten years later, Ball-the-climate-expert seemed to be everywhere— on the radio, in the newspapers, on the lecture circuit, even testifying before a committee in the Canadian parliament. Online videos of his radio and lecture performances showed him to be an affable and entertaining speaker with a warm, funny, and folksy style. He would say things like this, quoted from an interview with Charles Montgomery for an August 12, 2006, story, “Meet Mr. Cool,” in the Globe and Mail: “Environment Canada [the Canadian national weather service] can’t even predict the weather! How can you tell me that they have any idea what it’s going to be like 100 years from now if they can’t tell me what the weather is going to be like in four months, or even next week?” Ball always elicited a knowing chuckle with this kind of commentary, which he delivered in hundreds of speeches across western Canada. No chamber of commerce, beef producers’ association, or Probus Club of active retirees was too small to justify Ball’s time. And the fact that Ball widely proclaimed himself to be “the first Canadian Ph.D. in climatology” seemed to give him carte blanche to confuse weather and climate—to dismiss out of hand the entire output of the best climate scientists working in the field today—and have his lunchtime crowds take him completely seriously.

Ball was the favorite front man for a Canadian Astroturf group called the Friends of Science—as Montgomery described them in the Globe article, “a coalition of oil-patch geologists, Tory [Canadian Conservative Party] insiders, anonymous donors and oil-industry PR professionals” from the Canadian oil capital of Calgary, Alberta. Here, taken from “Kyoto no no,” one of Tim Ball’s podcasts at fcpp.org, is his own entirely unwitting critique of the presumptuousness involved in calling your organization the “Friends of Science”: “One of the things that angers me are these groups like Friends of Science. Now think of the arrogance of the title of that. Basically, what they are saying is that if you’re not in our group, you’re not a friend of science, or Friend of the Earth I should say. Sorry, the Friends of the Earth.” Oops. According to Ball, it’s okay to be an exclusive friend to science—even if your principal goal is to argue with the world’s leading scientific experts—but it takes maddening arrogance to call yourself a friend of the Earth.

The Friends of Science motto is “Providing Insight into Climate Change,” and on the Web site, friendsofscience.org, they announce their purpose this way: “Concerned about the abuse of science displayed in the politically inspired Kyoto protocol, we offer critical evidence that challenges the premises of Kyoto and present alternative causes of climate change.”

Founded in 2002, Friends of Science attracted relatively little mainstream media attention and no serious independent scrutiny in its first couple of years. It made a series of YouTube videos such as “Climate Catastrophe Cancelled” and sponsored talks by Tim Ball and others. It solicited funds for the stated purpose of affecting Canadian elections.¹ But it wasn’t until August 2006, when the freelance writer Charles Montgomery started nosing around on behalf of the Globe and Mail, that anyone really came to understand what the “Friends” were up to and who was paying their bills.

As Montgomery reported in “Meet Mr. Cool,” you could argue that the Friends began as a legitimate grassroots organization:

“We started out without a nickel, mostly retired geologists, geophysicists and retired businessmen, all old fogeys,” says Albert Jacobs, a geologist and retired oil-explorations manager, proudly remembering the first meeting of the Friends of Science Society in the curling lounge of Calgary’s Glencoe Club back in 2002.

“We all had experience dealing with Kyoto, and we decided that a lot of it was based on science that was biased, incomplete and politicized.”

Mr. Jacobs says he suspects that the Kyoto Accord was devised as a tool by United Nations bureaucrats to push the world towards a world socialist government under the UN. “You know,” he says, “to this day, there is no scientific proof that human-caused CO2 is the main cause of global warming.

Given that Albert Jacobs was happy to rely on the likes of Tim Ball for scientific analysis—and giving him the benefit of the doubt—you could assume that he was sincere in his misguided position about the causes of global warming. But his ensuing fund-raising tactics demonstrated that he understood the implications of his actions. In the same Globe article Montgomery reported that the Friends were having difficulty garnering enough cash in the form of small donations to have the kind of impact that they wanted.

“There was plenty of money for the anti-Kyoto cause in the oil patch, but the Friends dared not take money directly from energy companies. The optics, Mr. Jacobs admits, would have been terrible.

This conundrum, he says, was solved by University of Calgary political scientist Barry Cooper, a well-known associate of Stephen Harper.

As is his privilege as a faculty member, Prof. Cooper set up a fund at the university dubbed the Science Education Fund. Donors were encouraged to give to the fund through the Calgary Foundation, which administers charitable giving in the Calgary area, and has a policy of guarding donors’ identities. The Science Education Fund in turn provides money for the Friends of Science, as well as Tim Ball’s travel expenses, according to Mr. Jacobs.

And who are the donors? No one will say.

“[The money’s] not exclusively from the oil and gas industry,” says Prof. Cooper. “It’s also from foundations and individuals. I can’t tell you the names of those companies, or the foundations for that matter, or the individuals.”

This was a sweet deal for the “Friends” and for their funders. The fledgling association got all the money it needed without having to account for its origins, and the oil and gas companies got tax receipts from the Calgary Foundation for donating to “educational” causes, even though the Friends’ activities were overwhelmingly political rather than educational. But what had arguably started as a grassroots collection of retired oil-patch workers with a perhaps sincere belief in their position became an industry-funded political action group.

After the Montgomery story ran in the Globe and Mail, the Friends of Science became something of a political hot potato. The University of Calgary launched an internal audit that found Barry Cooper had sluiced hundreds of thousands of dollars through his “educational” accounts without meeting any of the university’s standards for such actions. He had personally written checks as large as C$100,000 (to a Canadian arm of the public relations firm APCO Worldwide) and he had used some of the money to employ his wife and daughter, in contravention of University of Calgary policy. The University auditors also found that the uses to which the bulk of the money had been put “were not legitimate scientific research and education and were funded by anonymous donors to promote special interests.”²

As punishment for all of this, Barry Cooper—fishing buddy of Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper—has paid no price whatsoever. He maintains his position. He still writes a weekly column, often on climate change politics, in the local “newspaper of record,” the Calgary Herald, which has neither reported the Friends of Science story nor ever advised its readers of Cooper’s extracurricular activities.

Nevertheless, the Friends seem to be damaged goods generally, and though the Web site was still operating in early 2009 and the organization continues an annual luncheon, most of its activities have ground to a halt. But Tim Ball never missed a beat. Working with a former APCO public relations executive named Tom Harris, Ball reemerged in 2006 as the “chief science advisor” of a new organization called the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP), which, as a first order of business, promised to launch “A proactive grassroots campaign to counter the Kyoto Protocol and other greenhouse gas reduction schemes while promoting sensible climate change policy” (emphasis mine). Harris, who once had organized the public launch of the Friends of Science, stood in as executive director and, along with Ball, populated the list of other “science experts” with most of the scientists who had appeared on the Friends of Science honor roll.³