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THERE’S a new climate denial lobby group on the block - bravely regurgitating previously debunked pseudo-science and making wild unsubstantiated claims that climate scientists are all corrupt.

Not happy with misrepresenting the science on climate change, The Galileo Movement has also misappropriated the name of the father of modern science who was persecuted for his insistance that the Sun, rather than the Earth, was the centre of the universe.

The Galileo Movement, launched in Australia, has stated its prime mission is to stop the Government’s current efforts to introduce a price on greenhouse gas emissions and boasts a list of advisors resembling a who’s who of international climate change denial.

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The Carbon Brief (TCB) has a nice analysis on the not-very-startling coincidence that at least nine of the top 10 “skeptical” “scientists” who are publishing on climate change have direct links to Exxon.

This is interesting, as well, in that it doesn’t account for the increasing amounts of money being invested invested by funders (such as the Koch brothers) who have been taking a less transparent approach than Exxon in acknowledging their links.

In a second instalment, TCB also took a closer look at both the quality and content of the purported “900+” science papers identified by the Global Warming Policy Foundation as somehow skeptical of the science of climate change. The news, for the skeptics as for the climate, turns out to be all bad.

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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.”

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Rep Henry Waxman (D-CA), the ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee, has written to committee Chair Fred Upton (R-MI) requesting an investigation into whether Patrick J. Michaels misled the committee when he reported that only three per cent of his income comes from industry.

Michaels is a famous denier-for-hire who, as Waxman notes, has estimated previously that 40% of his income comes from the energy industry. As the only “scientist” who told the E&C committee that climate change is nothing to worry about, it should be interesting to question whether that opinion was bought and paid for - and by whom - especially when Pat Michaels’ personal accounting seems so casually inaccurate.

Given that Michaels hailed from Virginia, maybe that state’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli would like to join the investigation. He’s all about holding people accountable, isn’t he?

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The tired, old climate-change deniers who keep trying to get themselves taken seriously have launched another petition claiming that “having assessed the relevant scientific evidence, (they) do not find convincing support for the hypothesis that human emissions of carbon dioxide are causing, or will in the foreseeable future cause, dangerous global warming.”

This new laundry list of paid skeptics and ideologues is yet another instalment in the periodic petition process that has confused the climate conversation since Dr. S. Fred Singer launched the first such stunt in 1992. In fact, usual suspects such as Singer, Richard Lindzen, Patrick Michaels and Sherwood Idso are on both lists.

Connoisseurs will recognize more names, perennial Canadian deniers like Tim Patterson and Tim Ball, both alumni of an evolving series of oil-backed astroturf groups including the Friends of Science and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project. The oily lobbyist and former APCO Worldwide PR guy Tom Harris, who was prominent in both of those organizations, is also the “brains” behind this effort.

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It’s not often the public gets to follow the money trail, so it was a treat this week when PR Watch revealed the Cato Institute has been bankrolling a consulting company owned by notorious climate denier Patrick Michaels to the tune of $242,900 since April 2006.

Michaels is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and according to tax documents uncovered by PR Watch for 2006 and 2007, Cato ponyed up almost a quarter million to Michaels’ firm New Hope Environmental Services for “environmental policy” services.

Small world eh?