Smug and lazy journalism was on display in Friday’s New York Times, in “climate policy” reporter Maxine Joselow’s contemptuous account of the Heartland Institute’s International Climate Change Conference, held in Washington, D.C. Joselow used loaded and dismissive language to characterize the attendees, many of who were scientists, who dared to believe the world wasn’t in a climate crisis, accusing them of “climate denial,” whatever that could mean: “Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington.” The first sarcastic paragraph was certainly not something you read ever day in the paper. Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by “leftist politicians.” Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless. As if liberals like population doomsayer Paul Ehrlich, or former Vice President Al Gore (who had no environmental academic credentials) and his ballyhooed environmental 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, didn't make dire predictions of disastrous consequence -- all of which embarrassingly failed to pan out. Yet Joselow was serenely confident that the doomsaying side of the warming controversy was the only possible correct one. These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general. The Times constantly found the most hostile label to place on those who don't see a looming climate crisis. The event made clear that climate change deniers are experiencing a triumphant resurgence in Mr. Trump’s Washington after years of feeling sidelined by the scientific and political establishments. A vast majority of scientists agree that climate change is real and that it is caused by burning fossil fuels like oil, gas and coal. They expect average global temperatures to rise 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels within the next decade, unleashing dire impacts that include more deadly heat waves, coastal floods, water shortages and crop failures. …. The event was organized by the Heartland Institute, a research organization that says it promotes free-market solutions and that has attacked mainstream climate science for decades. Other sponsors included the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that claims falsely that planet-warming carbon dioxide is beneficial to humans. The influence of both groups waned under the Biden administration, which embraced the science behind climate change and pushed policies designed to address it. Mr. Zeldin’s appearance at the conference underscored how the groups’ sway has grown in the Trump era. The criticisms became truly loopy at times, with a throwaway line faulting the lunchtime portion of the talk for serving "a relatively carbon-intensive lunch of roasted chicken breast, cannellini bean ragù and ricotta cheesecake." The bad faith portrayals continued into the very last line. The conference was set to continue on Thursday with a speech by John Clauser, a Nobel physics laureate who has claimed, falsely, that clouds have a net cooling effect on the planet. Criticizing the unearned certitude of Joselow’s write-up, the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman pointed out “there seems to be some support for the view that clouds have a cooling effect given their ability to reflect sunlight back into space, though different types of clouds have different effects and clouds can also trap heat on the planet’s surface.” Freeman suggested she “may have been under the initial impression that [physics laureate Clauser] hadn’t studied" clouds because of an ensuing correction to the story: “An earlier version of this article misstated a distinction held by the physicist John Clauser. He has received a Nobel Prize, not a Pulitzer Prize.”