The principal disinformation vehicle this time around is a video series created by the oil-and-gas apologists at Friends of Science. Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: what your’e not being told about the science of climate change (see here, here, here, here and here) is available on the FOS website and has popped up a couple of times on YouTube.com. Whenever it does, we at the DeSmog have appended a comment, pointing out the degree to which FOS has been exposed as a pseudo-science astroturf group fronting for the Alberta energy industry.
When the FOS series appeared on YouTube again yesterday, we got curious about who was behind the repeated posts. So we followed up on the identity of the hotmail handle, “ferrethouse,” and we found Craig Smith, a Conservative Party activist and one of the founders of The Blogging Tories.
Here’s the link where we connected “ferrethouse” to Mr. Smith. If you go here, you get to BloggingTories.com and if you click on Mr. Smith’s name in the upper left corner, you go to his own website. If you search out the registration for that site, you get a bunch of fake information, including a telephone number with a non-existent 555 prefix.
It comes back to the old story: if these people aren’t ashamed of what they are doing, why do they go to such lengths to misrepresent themselves?
Political junkies might also remember that the Blogging Tories were embroiled in an earlier controversy after allegations that the Conservative Party itself set up the site as a third-party political voice.
Does this qualify as a pattern?
