WTF Happened In B.C.?

You are asking me?  One thing I'll say is that this did not remind me of last year's Alberta polling cock-up.  The B.C. NDP are not an untried bunch, and the charges of radicalism that were flung at them are par for the course in a B.C. election, so  I can't see them having had much effect.   If I were to guess, I would say the turning point came when Christy Clark came out against the Trans-Mountain pipeline, essentially mirroring the NDP "no-pipeline" stand and taking away their most important policy contrast.  But I'm not even going to try to guess.

PS.  Congrats to Andrew Weaver, the first Green Party MLA ever elected to the B.C. Legislature.

Andrew Weaver To Run For B.C. Greens

UVIC climate scientist (and Nobel Peace Price recipient) Andrew Weaver will be running under the GP banner in B.C.'s next provincial election.  Imp's got the deets.  I should say that I'm a big fan of Dr. Weaver, who has done all sorts of interesting research (including this stuff which suggests that the tar sands are not quite as dirty as some, me included, have suggested).

One thing I would add to Nancy's account is that up here in Canada climate scientists have not typically been subject to the really over-the-line smearing and harassment from the political Right that seems routine down in the U.S....the jihad against Michael Mann, for example.  Except, that is, for Mr. Weaver, who had his campus office BNE'd in advance of the Copenhagen conference on climate change back in 2009.

Tim Ball Leaves The Stage

While their abject apology to climate scientist Andrew Weaver appears to have gotten the Canada Free Press of the hook, Tim Ball, author of the original article--"Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years "--was not so lucky: renowned Canadian climate scientist Andrew Weaver has begun legal action (legal docs available through link). What I find most interesting is that if you go to the CFP website and to Ball's archive of articles--you find nothing. It appears that, being a small outfit with (presumably) limited legal resources, the CFP has decided that discretion is the better part of valour, and erased every one of Ball's 200 plus articles even, it appears, from Google's cache.

Which is good: you shouldn't give a soap-box to somebody who will use it to defame others.

Tim Ball De-Balled!

The Canadian Free Press issues a grovelling apology to UVIC Climate Scientist Andrew Weaver:

On January 10, 2011, Canada Free Press began publishing on this website an article by Dr. Tim Ball entitled “Corruption of Climate Change Has Created 30 Lost Years” which contained untrue and disparaging statements about Dr. Andrew Weaver, who is a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Contrary to what was stated in Dr. Ball’s article, Dr. Weaver: (1) never announced he will not participate in the next IPCC; (2) never said that the IPCC chairman should resign; (3) never called for the IPCC’s approach to science to be overhauled; and (4) did not begin withdrawing from the IPCC in January 2010.

You can read the rest through the link; the extent of the mud-wriggling and self-abasement is quite astonishing. As a note to journalists: its always a bad idea to repeat material that is already subject to a defamation claim. As an aside to Dr. Weaver and any other climate scientist inclined to counter denialist lies with legal action: go for it, the beasts won't regulate themselves.

Andrew Weaver Strikes Back

Back in the Climategate's early days, before it was shown to be a crock drummed up by the right-wing noise machine, a number of MSM outlets thought they could print any lies they wanted about what Climate Scientists had said re the CRU hack and the subsequent controversies around the IPCC. In the UK this attitude resulted in Rosegate, and Leakegate. In Canada, naturally enough, the morally as well as financially bankrupt National Post was worst among offenders.

In the case of UVIC climatologist Andrew Weaver the NP said, among many, many other things, that Weaver had called for the resignation of IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri, when he had not.

But now, Mr. Weaver has indicated that he will strike back!

VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA--(Marketwire - April 21, 2010) - University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, launched a lawsuit today in BC Supreme Court against three writers at The National Post (and the newspaper as a whole), over a series of unjustified libels based on grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet.

First off, get 'em good, Mr. Weaver! And don't be gentle! With a few exceptions, the "journalists" at the Natty Post are godless, crud-eating vermin and the flaming death spiral that their profession is in, plus their paper's many, many unique management misteps, have rendered them starved of both ethics and lucre. Stomp 'em, baby! Stomp 'em! Help me realize my dream of sitting in a MacDonald's and beaning Jonathon Kay in the head with french-fries from the plastic clam-shell he just served me!

And, here's some possibly useful semi-legal advice, because The Post has already caved to this kind of thing before and because you note in your news release that your suit:

...also seeks an unprecedented Court order requiring the newspaper to assist Dr. Weaver in removing the defamatory National Post articles from the many other Internet sites where they have been re-posted.

Demand the copyright to the story they lied about you in!(*) Richard Warman, in his effort to fight the various slanders against him, has apparently been able to negotiate this from NP as part of their settlement. He has used his ownership of the slanderous piece to successfully demand that Free Dominon, for example, pull their version of it from their website on the basis of copyright law and, with much whining and complaining, FreeD have indicated that they will comply.

And remember: generally, when you sue the National Post, you win win. This guy even managed to wring a six-figure settlement out of them.

And, if you need donations to fund your suit, there's a Cdn $5 in my pocket! More if you can use my wife's points card!

Mr. Weaver's writ of summons can be found here.

H/t.

(*) They have done this already, and I missed it: see par. 72, h) and i) in the writ of summons.

National Post: One Editorial, Two Falsehoods

From their Feb 1, 2010 editorial:

The blows to the IPCC's integrity have been so great that even Andrew Weaver --a Canadian climate scientist, prominent member of the IPCC, and himself an enthusiastic champion of the prevailing theory that human industrial activity is making the world hotter -- has called for the resignation of the agency's chairman, Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri.

...a claim which Andrew Weaver denied not 24 hours earlier in another CanWest newspaper:

A recent article published on Jan. 27 in many Canwest papers suggested I believe that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was tainted by political advocacy, that its chairman should resign, and that its approach to science should be overhauled. These statements do not accurately reflect my views.

And the 2nd one:

For instance, since it was revealed two weeks ago that the IPCC had relied on speculation by an environmental interest group -- rather than peer-reviewed science -- when it made its famous 2007 claim that there was a 90% chance all 15,000 glaciers in the Himalayas would be melted by 2035, the agency's lead glacier scientist, Murari Lal, has admitted he knew the data was faulty when he inserted it in the UN's last official Assessment Report, but he did so nonetheless because "we thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action."

This "admission" 1st appears in a story by U.K. Daily Mail columnist David Rose, but was swiftly denied by Lal himself. Furthermore, Mr. Rose seems to have a problem with attributing comments to scientists that they later claim to not have made. He's up to three now, all within the last couple of months.

Its worth pointing out at this point that the only way to get the National Post to retract falsehoods is to threaten legal action.

PS. Four! Rose is up to four misquoted scientists!

Looks Like There IS An International Climate Conspiracy

...for it looks like CRU is not the only institution targetted by criminals allied with the denialist community: attempts were made to steal documents and computer files from U-of-T as well:

An alleged series of attempted security breaches at the University of Victoria in the run-up to next week's Copenhagen summit on climate change is evidence of a larger effort to discredit climate science, says a renowned B.C. researcher.

Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and key contributor to the Nobel prize-winning work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says there have been a number of attempted breaches in recent months, including two successful break-ins at his campus office in which a dead computer was stolen and papers were rummaged through.

It would sure be nice--and its interesting that its the NP picked up on this story--if the media concentrated a little more on the fact that they are being shopped material by crooks rather than picking over emails they don't understand the meaning of and freely improvising based on what they think they see behind the words.