NRSP

The tireless Tom Harris, executive director of the NRSP (Not Really Science People), has discovered the right-wingy Alberta website Free Dominion, “The Voice of Principled Conservatism.” Harris popped up on FD a week ago, pleading for $10 donations that might help him argue that his mysteriously funded astroturf group is actually a grassroots organization with wide public support.

Here 's a bit of pathos, the lonely lament of a couple of public relations has-beens who can no longer get anyone (other than Financial Post Editor Terence Corcoran) to answer their phone calls.

The mournful victims here are Dr. Tim Ball and Tom Harris (right), the nominal brains behind the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP, or Not Really Science People). In this article, printed in the business pages of the National Post, Ball and Harris complain that, even among Canadian Conservatives, “open discussion of the vast uncertainties (my emphasis) in climate change science has been declared off-limits.” Which is to say, the Tories no longer invite industry-funded climate-change deniers like Tim Ball to their policy sessions.

Climate denier, retired geography professor and chair of the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (NRSP or Not Really Science People), Dr. Tim Ball, has been less in evidence lately: perhaps Canada's biggest media company (CanWest Global) is reticent to publish his meanderings after being added to the lawsuit against University of Lethbridge Professor (and defender of truth) Dan Johnson.

But apparently Ball is still chatting with the converted, spreading disinformation and (this is juicy) claiming that we at the DeSmogBlog are tracking his mail.

We have received this excerpt from a ClimateSceptics listserv which you can only access with an account. (We don't have one, but it would appear from the anonymous hits in our inbox that at least a couple of actual skeptics do.)

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.

Ball and Harris go on the attack against Canada's Johanne Gélinas, Canada's Commissioner of Environment and Sustainable Development. Gélinas, whose job is to audit “how well the federal government is meeting its environmental and sustainable development commitments,” earned the NRSP's wrath by releasing a report in September, suggesting that the last federal adminstration had done an appalling job dealing with climate change. Ball and Harris were particularly offended that Gelinas said this:

"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE