Career
Harris has 30 years’ experience working as a mechanical engineer, project manager, and in science and technology communications. From May to September 2006, he was Ottawa operations director of the High Park Group, a public relations and lobbying firm active in the debate over global warming. The International Centre for Scientific Culture calls itself "a non-partisan group of independent scientists", but has been described as having "less to do with science than with public relations".
Geochemist and National Science Board member James Lawrence Powell contrasts the mission and principles of the International Centre for Scientific Culture with those of the American Geophysical Union.
In Powell"s opinion, the International Centre for Scientific Culture is a "denier organization" that "know the answers and seek only confirmation that they are right. One group of minds is open.
The other closed". James Hoggan, public relations professional and Chair of the board of the David Suzuki Foundation, and Richard Littlemore of DeSmogBlog.com quoted and analyzed some paragraphs from the International Centre for Scientific Culture website.
They noted that Harris"s views as executive director of the International Centre for Scientific Culture were published from the same Intellectual Property address as and shared the tactics of the skeptic organizations New Zealand Climate Science Coalition and Australian Climate Science Coalition. The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition created the International Centre for Scientific Culture in 2007 and International Centre for Scientific Culture led the creation of the Australian Climate Science Coalition in 2008, and the Climate Science Coalition of America in 2010.
At the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change hosted by the Heartland Institute, Tom Harris gave a speech in which he discussed what he called "information sharing" and "coordinated local activism":
We need regular high-impact media coverage of the findings of leading scientists — not just one or two publications, but we need to have hundreds all over the world. We need to have a high degree of information sharing and cooperation between groups, so that when Vincent Gray for example has an article published in New Zealand, we can take the same piece and we can (say) submit it to newspapers all over North America and Europe.
