President Obama picked an odd time to remind people he's in league with the global-warming alarmists. He did so in his State of the Union address.

He put in a pitch for his economy-hobbling, government-expanding global-warming "cap-and-trade" plan. This in the very same speech in which he declared he's focusing anew on creating jobs and reining in bureaucracy.

Odder yet, Obama also took the occasion to declare, as he has before, that science is on the side of global-warming alarmism.

Such an assertion has never been more in doubt than right now.

As never before, the alarmists are under siege in serial controversies, some of which have the potential of exploding into fullblown scandal.

In the most recent episode, the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was forced to withdraw an alarmist claim it had made in one of its much-cited reports that Himalayan glaciers are on the verge of melting.

The claim was inserted in a 2007 report as a supposed scientifically established finding. Based on this supposed finding - which alarmists the world over have been quoting ever since - the U.N. report warned that global-warming catastrophe is more imminent than previously thought, given the research on glaciers.

"The likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at its current pace," said the U.N. panel's report.

India's environmental ministry noted, however, that there was "not an iota of scientific evidence" supporting the assertion. A closer look at the claim, instead of blind acceptance of it, revealed it to be based solely on one scientist's offhand speculative remark during an interview.

Yet the U.N. panel did not hesitate to highlight the remark as "science," and alarmists did not hesitate to echo the claim.

Next there came the revelation by Canwest News Service in Canada that U.S. Researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) are including far less temperature data from cold regions than previously.

According to this report, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations once provided temperature readings for NOAA's database, but now only 35 stations across Canada do. Some anti-alarmist scientists have expressed the suspicion that this monitoring adjustment serves to give the alarmist cause the results it's determined to "discover."

Then there were the leaked British e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, which works hand-in-hand with the abovementioned U.N. panel. The e-mails showed the unit's scientists - leading adherents of the alarmist point of view - discussing ways to manipulate data to bring it more into line with alarmist orthodoxy and ways to silence skeptical scientists.

In one e-mail exchange, chagrined alarmist-aligned scientists discussed what might be called an incovenient truth - that global surface temperatures over the last 10 years or so have been trending downward, not upward.

Fretted climatologist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in one of these e-mails: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it's a travesty that we can't."

Another unreassuring e-mail from an unidentified source at the East Anglia climate unit - apparently a computer programmer - griped about problematical data and what was supposed to be done with it.

The e-mailer suggested the following solution: "Oh, yeah - there is no 'supposed,' I can make it up. So I have."

None of this is quite yet damning, absolute proof, as some global-warming skeptics have been quick to declare, that the alarmists have built their case on fraud. Certainly, however, at a minimum it reveals a disturbing predisposition on their part to proceed in that direction if they think that's what it takes to make their "scientific" case.