Denier-for-hire Fred Singer has enriched himself defending everything from CFCs to second-hand smoke, parlaying his fame as a promising young scientist in the 1950s and ’60s to more recent infamy as an all-purpose front man for environmentally suspect industries. Alas, it appears that he has become so well-known in the U.S. that his bursts of disinformation no longer attract attention from major media outlets south of the border.

Lucky for Fred that faltering organs like the Winnipeg Free Press either don’t check people’s credentials or don’t mind buying opinion pieces from “scientists” whose opinions have been paid for, already. The article in this link is a tired compilation of distractions and non sequiturs – bland, irrelevant or outright inaccurate statements dismissing the threats of global warming as “a new environmentalist fad, like the Alar apple scare or the ‘new Ice Age’ fears of the 1970s.”

As has been pointed out to Singer (and to any reporter who has been paying attention in the last five years), the current situation is nothing at all like the mid-’70s report by a couple of outlier scientists that an ice age “might” be in the offing. We now have overwhelming agreement among reputable scientists (i.e., those known for their science, not for the payments that they take from the energy industry) that the issue we currently face is unprecedented in human history. That’s why every major nation on earth has read and approved the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That’s why even the quibblers, like George Bush and Stephen Harper, have acknowledged a problem and claimed – however unconvincingly – that they are determined to help fix it.

Against this scientific reality, the fading Free Press finds it appropriate to present the tainted Dr. Singer as an expert, as something other than a public relations shill, peddling a product and hiding his sources of funding.

We know that Singer is beyond shame. It’s disappointing to find that a once-admirable newspaper like the “Freep” has sunk to that standard.