For many Indians, the most powerful and urgent reason to battle global warming arose from a report warning that the Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, reports the Washington Post.

But that prediction was an error, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which authored the report, said Wednesday.

Speaking publicly on the issue for the first time Saturday, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Nobel Prize-winning panel, said the mistake occurred because rigorous procedures for scientific review were not followed. He promised a more robust research system in the future.

But he said the blunder should not detract from a sense of urgency over the need for action on a crisis that threatens the entire planet. "I hope that people around the world are not going to be distracted by this error. Climate change is not only limited to what will happen to the Himalayan glaciers," he said.

Admission of the mistake comes weeks after the release of e-mails apparently stolen from the panel's scientists ahead of the global climate summit in Copenhagen in December. The e-mails hinted at a deliberate suppression of data from researchers with opposing views. Critics say the flawed report is further proof that climate change concerns are overblown.

Marc Sheppard over at American Thinker has the other side of the story…

Not surprisingly, the blatant corruption exposed at Britain’s premiere climate institute was not contained within the nation’s borders. Just months after the Climategate scandal broke, a new study has uncovered compelling evidence that our government’s principal climate centers have also been manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.

Not only does the preliminary report [PDF] indict a broader network of conspirators, but it also challenges the very mechanism by which global temperatures are measured, published, and historically ranked.  

Last Thursday, Certified Consulting Meteorologist Joseph D’Aleo and computer expert E. Michael Smith appeared together on KUSI TV [Video] to discuss the Climategate -- American Style scandal they had discovered. This time out, the alleged perpetrators are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).   

NOAA stands accused by the two researchers of strategically deleting cherry-picked, cooler-reporting weather observation stations from the temperature data it provides the world through its National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). D’Aleo explained to show host and Weather Channel founder John Coleman that while the Hadley Center in the U.K. has been the subject of recent scrutiny, “[w]e think NOAA is complicit, if not the real ground zero for the issue.”

And their primary accomplices are the scientists at GISS, who put the altered data through an even more biased regimen of alterations, including intentionally replacing the dropped NOAA readings with those of stations located in much warmer locales.

As you’ll soon see, the ultimate effects of these statistical transgressions on the reports which influence climate alarm and subsequently world energy policy are nothing short of staggering.