Several days before key Senators introduce that body’s version of controversial global warming “cap-and-trade” legislation, and 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. The September 24th John M. Broder article reads:

Alan Carlin, a 72-year-old analyst and economist, had labored in obscurity in a little-known office at the Environmental Protection Agency since the Nixon administration.

In June, however, he became a sudden celebrity with the surfacing of a few e-mail messages that seemed to show that his contrarian views on global warming had been suppressed by his superiors because they were inconvenient to the Obama administration’s climate change policy. Conservative commentators and Congressional Republicans said he had been muzzled because he did not toe the liberal line.

But a closer look at his case and a broader set of internal E.P.A. documents obtained by The New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act paint a more complicated picture.

The Times implies that Carlin is of questionable qualification to opine on the matter, despite his degree in physics from CalTech, because his graduate training is a PhD in economics from MIT.

This is different than the Times’ treatment of and lack of interest in the academic training of the individual it regularly refers to as an authority without such commentary the economist and former railway engineer Rajendra Pachauri, even hailing him in the past as the UN IPCC’s chief “climatologist”.

Carlin’s findings have been used as a counter to those of the body led by Pachauri, and both will be aired by competing sides next week.