University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, has filed suit for libel against freelance climate change denier Tim Ball.

The suit (attached below) arises from an article that Ball penned for the right-wingy Canada Free Press website, which has since apologized to Weaver for its numerous inaccuracies and stripped from its publicly available pages pretty much everything that Ball has ever written.

In the article, Ball, a former geography professor at the University of Winnipeg with an indifferent academic record and a lifetime peer-reviewed literature output of just four articles (none of them in atmospheric physics), assailed Weaver as uninformed about climate, unqualified to teach and compromised by his lavish funding, accusations for which he offered no proof whatever.

Weaver, a member of the Royal Society of Canada who has authored more than 190 papers, was also a lead author on three of the four reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climage Change (IPCC), and is lined up as a lead author on the fifth. He’s also won pretty much all the academic and teaching awards that are available to a Canadian professor who has not yet had his 50th birthday. Ball, famously slow to notice the obvious, apparently didn’t realize that he was overmatched.

Of course, it’s not the first time. Ball sued University of Lethbridge Professor Dan Johnson in October 2006 over imagined slights in a letter to the editor that Johnson had written to the Calgary Herald. When both Johnson and the Herald filed a devastating Statements of Defence, Ball turned tail and ran.

But regardless that the suit had exposed the numerous falsehoods that once coloured Balls resume – and regardless that a University of Calgary audit confirmed that Ball had been accepting money that had been sluiced through a university slush fund that had been set up to conceal the money’s oil industry origins, Ball has continued to write and speak, claiming some higher knowledge of the workings of climate change – actually, of the lack of climate change.

Suddenly, however, he appears to have gone quiet.