The global warming scandal keeps getting worse. Revelations over the last few weeks show that many important assertions in the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were based on misquotes and false claims from environmental groups, not on published academic research as originally claimed. This is on top of the recent mess regarding data, where the three most relied-on data series used by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 assessment report still not been released. Other information indicates that data have been systematically biased to produce a rise in measured temperatures when actual temperatures were falling or flat.

Take some of the false claims in the 2007 IPCC report.

– The IPCC claims that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035. The forecast was based on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999, and the Indian glaciologist who was interviewed, Syed Hasnain, says that he was misquoted, indeed he had provide no date. Professor Hasnain discovered the mistake in 2008 when he read the IPCC’s published report, but he said: “There are many mistakes in it. It is a very poorly made report. . . . My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

Even more disturbingly, Rajendra Pachauri, the U.N.’s climate chief, first denied that he knew about the error before the Copenhagen global warming conference. He only admitted that he knew about it before the conference when a writer for the journal Science, Pallava Bagla, pointed to email correspondence that he had with Pachauri last fall.

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The 13th Annual Energy & Environment Conference, held in Phoenix Feb. 1-3, isn’t the sort of place where global warming “deniers” are exactly welcome. In fact, by my observations, the skeptical caucus at the event consisted entirely of: James M. Taylor, a senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute; Keith Lockitch, a fellow of the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights; and me. All the other attendees spent their time discussing how the U.S. government — or, even better, a “global government” — needs to compel us all to live “greener” lives through schemes like cap-and-trade. Environmentalists are a bossy and power-hungry lot.

Lockitch gave a presentation arguing free-market economies are better positioned than socialist societies to deal with any severe weather events caused by climate change — and was called a “denier” and compared to a shill for “Big Tobacco” for his trouble. Taylor got off a little easier, receiving only scoffs and curious-to-annoyed glances for asking inconvenient questions.

But that’s not to say we were the only people to question the assumptions of the attendees who believe the “science is settled” on global warming. Perhaps the greatest challenge came from one of their own — renowned climate scientist William Sprigg — who urged his colleagues to stop treating the ClimateGate scandal as irrelevant noise promoted by “deniers.” In an amazingly telling moment, green energy consultant Andy Van Horn, who introduced Sprigg, admitted he’d never heard of ClimateGate until Sprigg suggested it a few weeks ago as a topic worthy of discussion. (Who are the real “deniers” again?)

Sprigg, adjunct research professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, believes the planet is on a potentially dangerous warming path and atmospheric carbon dioxide is to blame. He also led the technical review of the first global warming report issued by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990. Clealry, Sprigg is no “outlier” or “rebel,” but one of the most respected and “mainstream” scientists in the field of climatology. So it came to a bit of shock to the audience when Sprigg expressed concerns about how contrarian scientists are treated with contempt by many of his colleagues.

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Mere days before Senators Barbara Boxer and John Kerry are scheduled to introduce their version of controversial global warming “cap-and-trade” legislation — if several months after EPA whistle-blower Dr. Alan Carlin drew attention to the fact that the recent published scientific literature presents a decided tilt against prevailing “global warming” scientific wisdom — the New York Times has run a piece diminishing Dr. Carlin’s stature and findings.

This meme is picked up by those running with the Times’ “news”. For example, today’s trade press outlet “E&E Daily” styles their #2 story this way: “Employee lacked credentials for endangerment views”.

That’s odd.

Carlin has been with EPA since its inception in the early 1970s, having earned a degree in physics from CalTech. His lack of the same qualifications implicitly possessed by our law-givers comes from his having gone on to attain a PhD in economics from MIT.

This is different than the Times’ (and others’) treatment of and lack of interest in the academic training of the individual regularly cited without such “just an economist” commentary as a leading and essentially unimpeachable authority, the economist and former railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri. The Times has even hailed Pachauri in the past as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s chief “climatologist”. Climatology is a specialty field if ever there was one but a qualification which Pachauri, for all of his other virtues toiling for years in the UN vineyards, attained by virtue of being appointed to head the IPCC. This is unfairly disparate treatment.

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