Climategate Redux? The Times of London follows up on its story from yesterday about climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson, who was hounded into resigning from a climate skeptic think tank.

Now it appears that a paper auithored by Bengtsson was rejected by a prestigious journal because it may have aided the skeptic's cause.

Lennart Bengtsson, a research fellow at the University of Reading and one of the authors of the study, said he suspected that intolerance of dissenting views on climate science was preventing his paper from being published. “The problem we now have in the climate community is that some scientists are mixing up their scientific role with that of a climate activist,” he added.

Professor Bengtsson’s paper challenged the finding of the UN’s Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the global average temperature would rise by up to 4.5C if greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were allowed to double.

It suggested that the climate might be much less sensitive to greenhouse gases than had been claimed by the IPCC in its report last September, and recommended that more work be carried out “to reduce the underlying uncertainty”.

The five contributing scientists, from America and Sweden, submitted the paper to Environmental Research Letters, one of the most highly regarded journals, at the end of last year but were told in February that it had been rejected.

A scientist asked by the journal to assess the paper under the peer review process wrote that he strongly advised against publishing it because it was “less than helpful”.

The unnamed scientist concluded: “Actually it is harmful as it opens the door for oversimplified claims of ‘errors’ and worse from the climate skeptics media side.”

What's significant is that Bengsston's paper does not deny global warming is happening, but rather the IPCC is wrong about how fast the climate is changing and the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gases. And yet, because the paper is "less than helpful," it was rejected.

Climate change hysterics are looking more and more like members of a cult or religion. Apostasy must be punished at all costs - even at the expense of sacred scientific principles of open inquiry and following the evidence wherever it leads.

No doubt this will add fuel to the fire to the debate here in the US as President Obama readies his pen to sign more executive orders to "fight" climate change.