Russ Campbell, Tim Ball and climate change (I mean global warming)
I wrote about my personal experience of Tim Ball quite some time ago. I was recently perusing right wing blogs when I tripped over this post by Russ Campbell in which he overstates Tim Ball’s credentials. This is a common ploy and we’ve probably all been guilty of doing this in some fashion or another. After all, if someone says something we disagree with, we generally try to discredit them or at least play down their expertise. And if someone says something we agree with, then will try to affirm their opinion.
It’s a terrible public relations and advertising tendency. I would also speculate that on a more basic psychological level, it’s also a common human behaviour that we utilize almost instinctively. It’s not exactly rational and I think it probably happens more often and more subtly than most would care to admit.
But sometimes it happens not so subtly.
To underscore the point, Russ Campbell has several posts generally denying human caused global warming. So he loves Tim Ball. So he tries to affirm Tim Ball’s status as an expert in the field, claiming that, among other things, “Dr. Ball has the bona fides to talk about global warming.” The DeSmogBlog’s goal is to remove public relations spin from the climate change debate so they have a different take on Tim Ball’s credentials. Tim Ball is in the employ of those whose short term fiscal interests are diametrically opposed to making policy changes to help mitigate human caused global warming. Oi. But Russ Campbell never mentioned that.
It is interesting that Russ Campbell quotes Wikipedia on Tim Ball. But there is currently (at the time of publication) no entry on Tim Ball. I can imagine that this entry has been very controversial and the Wikipedia community can be very tenacious about this sort of thing. I am a little curious why the page was deleted. The pages on both climate change and global warming are very good. 1 Russ Campbell doesn’t mention these either.
- And by “very good” I mean simply that they seem to generally affirm my opinion. Comedy. ↩