Patrick Moore, one time co-founder of Greenpeace but now an anti-green spin campaigner, is attacking one of fish farming's most dedicated and credible researchers.

Biologist Alexandra Morton has been testing and reporting on the impact of sea lice on the pink and chum salmon runs in the Broughton Archipelago for over five years. Her findings have been consistently proved by independent scientists, and this month her work was given further backing. New research shows that the wild salmon population is being devastated by sea lice from fish farms, with 95 per cent of young wild salmon that migrate out to sea dieing after swimming through lice plumes from infected farms.

Unfortunately, like global warming, the potential for profits have drawn a host of PR professionals who are only too willing wade into the fish farming front lines with half-truths and attack campaigns.

Enter Patrick Moore, who has forged his new career by leveraging whatever remians of his green reputation for the benefit of unsustainable energy, forestry and fish farming. In a pathetic effort, Moore has incomprehensibly tried to paint Morton as "flip flopper" in a naked assault on her credibility. Readers will need to consult his press release directly for the allegations, as his assertions are so convoluted they are impossible to reproduce in any coherent form.

The ploy was Moore's second ill-advised and poorly executed PR attack in as many months. Back in September, he had the audacity to accuse the world's pre-eminent scientific organization of repressing science. At that time, the UK's Royal Society' released a timely and impeccably researched open letter criticizing Exxon for funding groups that misrepresent the scientific facts of climate change. Moore embarrassed himself by comparing the Royal Society - which counts Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking among its fellowship - to the Inquisition.

Moore's problem isn't that he sold out decades of environmental work for a career in misinformation - its just that he's so bloody bad at it. His allegations are as laughable as they are limp, and in the ultimate irony, after abandoning legitimate environmental causes back in the 1980s he has managed to create a new, and truly renewable industry - by supplying the environmental and progressive community with an inexhaustible supply of jokes and laughing material.