I think we need to get off the personalities in the climate change debate. Scientists, being only human, sometimes go overboard. Climate change deniers, being only human, sometimes go overboard. But this is a mere sideshow to the real issue of what is happening to the planet, home to over 7 billion people.
Rahu, long ago and far away, my academic love was ecology. Also, I was married to a climatologist for 20 years. We talked shop a lot, I met climate scientists socially through them, we talked shop, and I've kept up a general interest in the topic, long after I recognized that I was not going to become a cutting-edge scientist myself.
Also, most academics get involved in hiring committees, promotion and tenure committees, grant application review panels, and other activities where they learn to sift through the really top-drawer work in a field from research that is not meeting the best standards.
Here is Tim Ball's CV: I hope it's up to date (last entry in 2011.) He seems to have retired in 1996, a date consistent with his age. It's enough to give you the general impression of his scholarship:
http://drtimball.com/_files/dr-tim-ball-CV.pdf
If you scroll part way down, you'll see the topic of Ball's dissertation:
"Climatic Change in Central Canada: A Preliminary Analysis of Weather Information
from Hudson's Bay Company Forts at York Factory and Churchill Factory, 1714-1850,
unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of London, England."
I believe this was in the geography department, not specifically in meteorology, which is sometimes offered as its own field, sometimes offered in departments of geography, geology (earth science,) and even physics.
Tim Ball was recognized back-then as someone doing good research on climate history. He looked at historical records for weather descriptions and recorded temperature data. Obviously nobody working for the Hudson's Bay Company in the 18th and 19th centuries knew anything about the jet stream or other major forcing functions of the earth's climate.
If you read through this CV, you will find some interesting studies in a field that might best be called environmental history. It isn't cutting edge meteorology. We don't find Ball's work appearing in top-drawer journals like
Science or
Nature. Most of his research that did not come from his dissertation is published in regional journals.
(
The Beaver is the history and geographical magazine of the Hudson's Bay Company.) He's got two articles in 1990 where he raises concern about objectivity in climate change research. But most of what he's got in his cv is environmental history. He has no specific hands-on research listed on climate change. This might be something like looking at ice cap or sea level change, tree ring or ice core analysis, changing ocean temperatures, changing snowpack albedo, chemical composition of air or water samples, and so on. This type of research is expensive, which is why Ball's lack of grant listings is noteworthy.
It is from such data, as well as monitoring instrumental data from satellites and weather stations that climate models are constructed. There's nothing inherently suspect about models. Your daily weather forecast is in part based upon models, as are many other things in your daily life. You've heard of business models, for example. The question is whether a model accurately predicts the change that subsequently takes place.
He doesn't list any major research grants as a faculty member. His "gold medal" appears to have been from his student days. As a retiree in 1996, it would have been more difficult but not impossible for him to get grants on the type of cutting edge climate change research that might have put him in the forefront of this field.
So please take what Tim Ball says with a grain of salt. Because other meteorologists and climatologists with much more knowledge of the science than Ball displayed during his career are saying the opposite.
CO2 does a bunch of stuff once it winds up in the atmosphere. There is some evidence of a "greening" effect, in which the carbon gets sequestered in vegetation through photosynthesis. This would be great, except that deforestation and ocean pollution are removing some of the great natural carbon sinks: the TRF and ocean algae.
It should also be noted that C02 is not the only greenhouse gas. But it is the major one.
Rahu, nobody is suggesting that Inuit people are a bunch of ignorant savages. In fact, you're the one who brought up this trope.