Public relations man and energy industry lobbyist Tom Harris has launched a new paper arguing that the great scientific academies in the world have misrepresented the consensus that human activity is causing climate change - and yet Harris begins and ends by misrepresenting himself.

The bio in Harris’s paper, released by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, presents him as “Executive Director of the science-based, nonpartisan group, the International Climate Science Coalition.” It says he’s “an engineer and project manager” and it comes close to the truth in adding that he is a “communications professional and media and S&T advisor to a former Opposition Senior Environment Critic.”

What it doesn’t mention is that Harris is a PR guy and a lobbyist, most commonly for energy industry firms. We know, for example, that he was a senior associate for the PR firm APCO Worldwide, in which role he was instrumental in launching the climate change denial (and oil industry front group) Friends of Science. We know that he moved on to a senior position at a lobby firm called the High Park Group, from which perch he created the Natural Resource Stewardship Project. We know that when NRSP was outed as an astroturf group that Harris popped up next at the International Climate Science Coalition, a group devoted not to science but to “coordinated local activism.”

Deep Climate, the foremost expert in all details of the Friends of Science (FOS), has a dandy post speculating on who has been financing the recent FOS radio advertising campaign.

DeepC has tied the FOS campaign to the Winnipeg-based Frontier Centre for Public Policy (FCPP), which shared the “credit” for bringing the ridiculous Christopher Monckton to Canada for his recent denial tour. The intermediary is Morten Paulsen, a Conservative Party fixer who has been deeply enmeshed in previous FOS adventures.

DeepC also connects the FCPP to the Calgary Foundation and then wonders if that foundation is now sluicing money to FOS through the Frontier Centre, rather than through the old University of Calgary slush fund run by Barry Cooper.

There is, here, still no smoking gun that demonstrates who is funding the FOS campaign, but the smell of cordite is hanging in the air.

Dangerously Dishonest Climate “Expert” at Large in Canada

Christopher Walter, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley is gamboling his way across Canada, acting like a character recently escaped from a Monty Python skit and inflaming the passions of climate change deniers and their favourite newspaper editors (at the National Post and the Calgary Herald). 

Monckton is being urged on and abetted by the Friends of Science, an oily front group, long derided for  trying to conceal its connections to the Calgary oil and gas community. Right wing think tanks the Fraser Institute and the Frontier Centre for Public Policy are also sponsoring the tour. (Although the Fraser Institute has been a recipient of Exxon Mobil funding in the past, neither organization is acknowledging who is paying Monckton to suggest that we all have “the courage to do nothing” about climate change.)

More Gore-Bashing

The neo-con Frontier Centre for Public Policy, long a promoter of oil-sponsored deniers of climate change, has produced a new “background paper” that challenges the showing of An Inconvenient Truth in Canadian schools on the basis of a 15-month-old UK Court decision.

The report, written by high school social studies teacher and Steinbach, Manitoba city councillor Michael Zwaagstra, declares that “there is no demonstrable causal relationship between the CO2 record and the temperature record at any point in earth’s history,” and goes on to complain that Gore’s movie (which presents this information rather more accurately) should therefore only be allowed into Canadian schools with a stern warning to students.

A COMPAS poll (attached) sponsored by the neo-con Frontier Centre for Public Policy offers an embarrassing example of a survey that sacrifices the discovery of new information in favour of eliciting specific answers for later use in building a political case.

This poll appears to have been designed to promote the phony debate over whether human activity causes climate change - a debate long since settled in science, but still raging in the media.