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.

CanWest Global has followed up on an earlier story about the climate quibblers at the so-called Friends of Science, reporting that an FOS consultant was working as "an unpaid spinner" for the Conservative Party during the 2006 federal election.

Unpaid, that is, by the Tories, but on retainer for the Friends of Science, which was in the midst of a widely touted - but not legally registered - effort to affect the outcome of that election.

Given how quick FOS members are to deny taking money from oil and gas interests, we must assume that Mr. Paulsen’s oily overlap is purely coincidental.