Natural Resources Stewardship Project (think: Not Really Science People) Executive Director Tom Harris is back in the only venue that seems willing to give him a soapbox, the “news” site Canada Free Press. And he’s up to the same tawdry tricks as ever.

First, he begins his article with a quote from Albert Einstein and ends with Nobel laureate Andre Gide, as if either of those characters would ever have set foot in the same room as the oil industry apologists who hang out with Tom Harris and Tim Ball. Then Harris digs into the same old arguments, using the same flexible scientific sources. For example, in reference to Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth,Harris says:

Gore repeatedly labels carbon dioxide (CO2) as “global warming pollution” when, in reality, it is no more pollution than is oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for photosynthesis without which Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ice ball.

This is the same argument we’ve been hearing from the Competitive Enterprise Institute on their “We Call it Life” advertising series. (That was the series that inspired the Royal Society to write a scolding letter to ExxonMobil, asking it to stop funding “think tanks” like CEI in their global campaign to mislead the public on the true likelihood of climate change.) CO2 is less like oxygen than like water: it’s true that we can’t live without it, but when it’s over your head, it’ll kill you.

Harris also says this:

The hypothesis that human release of CO2 is a major contributor to global warming is just that – an unproven hypothesis, against which evidence is increasingly mounting.

”.. against which the evidence is increasingly mounting?” That’s a bare-faced lie, Tom Harris – not just a half-truth or a misdirection – as is the case with most of the rest of the article – it’s a full-on, in your face falsehood. (And if you want to take issue with me calling you a liar, this is the email address of my lawyer: [email protected].)

The best climate scientists in the world, the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are set to release their fourth assessment report in the new year and it will demonstrate the speed at which the science is moving toward certainty.

But Harris doesn’t want to listen to the world’s best scientists. He prefers to peddle the bromides of people like Dr. Tim Ball, who can’t even tell the truth about his own resume, much less give an accurate account of climate change.

Harris’s most fundamental act of deception comes after the article is finished, in the section where he advertises himself as “a mechanical engineer.” He may have studied as a mechanical engineer, but he has long since switched from engineering to public relations – an honourable trade when it is practiced by honourable people.

But when someone won’t even admit that’s their job, it’s pretty clear they have long since thrown honour to the warm wind.