It may be folly or even apostasy - but only in the eyes of some - to do this mere hours after another Earth Day has passed. But, as we see it, now is the perfect time to praise courageous men, those who persistently stick to their own data and conclusions as they swim against the gadarene tide of global warming. Men like William Gray and Patrick Michaels.

Mr. Gray, a professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State, is the world's pre-eminent authority on hurricanes. He is also an outspoken foe of the global-warming "consensus," one who has testified before Congress, delivered numerous speeches, and penned myriad articles on the subject. Here's his pungent take on the matter:

"I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people. I've been in meteorology over 50 years. I've worked damned hard, and I've been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who've been around have not been asked about this. It's sort of a baby-boomer, yuppie thing."

Still, Mr. Gray, now 79, has not merely been ignored. He has been ostracized, his research funding cut off. But such is his conviction that he has poured more than $100,000 of his own money to fight what he deems a rank canard.

Mr. Michaels, a professor of environmental sicence at University of Virginia, knows the feeling all too well, though he is reputed to be the nation's most popular lecturer on the subject of global warming. But he, too, is a warming "skeptic." This mindset was most recently revealed in his commentary piece - "Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess" - in Friday's Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Michaels not only cast a cool eye on recent legislative and executive endeavors to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions - we'll have to do with less energy, as no technology is available to achieve said goals - but also implied that, given the skewed state of data accumulation, these initiatives may not be necessary. The key paragraph in Mr. Michaels' article is the fourth: "The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect."

How so? While records from surface thermometers have indicated a warming trend these last 30 years, data from satellites and weather balloons did not concur - that is, until incessant revisions were made, always in the direction of a warming trend.

Mr. Michaels doesn't say so in such pungent terms, but his piece seems to contend the books have been cooked, or at least "warmed." Consider this, as he does: Six major revisions have been made to warming figures in recent years, all trending the same way. "[I]t's like flipping a coin and getting tails each time," he wrote. "The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small."

Furthermore, Mr. Michaels takes issue with what the "consensus" scientists abjectly refuse to discuss - for instance, the state of the Eurasian arctic. For thousands of years after the last ice age, it was so much warmer in summer than it is now that green forests extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean. How do we know? Because the trees of these forests are buried in areas now too cold to support them. In other words, what once was forest is now tundra. These facts are conveniently overlooked.

But such is the state of climatology that the news is always bad, Mr. Michaels said. Mr. Gray would attribute this to a zeal, bordering on the religious, to "organize, propagandize, force conformity, and exercise political influence."

The key word in that sentence, we believe, is "political." The one missing, but clearly implied, is "power."