In a hysterical piece in the National Post today (see next post), business page Editor Terrance Corcoran rails at the Globe and Mail  for “distortions, errors, untruths and omissions.”

His outburst attracted this riposte from University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver:

Dear Mr. Corcoran,

I read the article today that you wrote in the National Post. I thought I would correct a number of factual errors in your piece.

1) I am neither a government of Canada employee nor have I ever been (except back in 1983 when I had a student summer job with DND). I am not a civil servant and do not work for a division of Environment Canada. (a quick google search would have revealed that I am a Professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria).

2) I do not lobby for more climate funding. If you ask anyone who has actually interviewed me, they will say that what I say is “We don’t need more research money to deal with the issue as to what needs to be done. “.

3) You state “These days apparently federal civil servants – which is what Mr. Weaver is – apparently have absolute freedom…”. As I mentioned, I am not nor have I ever been a civil servant.

4) I have never been a member of any political party and I have criticised Liberal policy as much as I have criticised Conservative policy. In fact, I have not passed any public judgment on the current administration’s climate policy as I have publicly stated that I take a wait and see position on what this “made in Canada” solution is. I also pointed out how unimpressed I was with Liberal “accounting games” in trying to meet Kyoto targets (buying credits; trying to get credit for forests etc).

5) Mr. Ball is interviewed in a taped recording on the Ottawa Citizen web

page: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/galleries/06-05-17.mp3 wherein he states climate models don’t account for water vapour (at least twice).

6) I never dismissed “the original hockey-stick research debunking research debunking the 1,000-year claim as “simply pure and unadulterated rubbish”

In fact your newspaper already published a retraction to the original quote on February 2, 2005. To remind you it says:

“Andrew Weaver, a professor in the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, has described the contention that the theory of global warming is reliant on research published by Dr. Michael Mann as “unadulterated rubbish,” but he has not read a recent paper challenging Dr.

Mann’s work, by Ross McKitrick and Stephen McIntyre, published in Geophysical Research Letters. Incorrect information appeared in the National Post of Jan. 27. The Post regrets the error.”

Andrew Weaver