“Worldwide temperatures haven’t risen much in the past decade…. If you are a climate-change activist pointing to year after year of mounting climate crises, you might want to rethink your approach.”

– Richard Kerr, Science, May 2, 2008.

There has been a flurry of activity in recent weeks in the discussion as to the significance (scientific, political, social) of the evolution of the global average surface temperature during the past 10 years or so.

For those of you who don’t know, the surface temperature of the globe, as a whole, has not warmed-up by anyone’s calculation since at least the turn of the century (January 2001) and depending on your dataset and statistical technique of choice, perhaps as far back as January 1997. And all of this non-warming occurred over a period of time during which the global emissions of CO2 increased faster than ever before (thanks primarily to China).…

“On our current emissions path, we’re going to … warm more than 4°C by century’s end.”

– Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, August 11, 2009

“I will be happy to bet anyone that the 2010s will be the hottest decade in the temperature record, more than 0.15°C hotter than the hottest decade so far using the NASA GISS dataset.  Any takers? Andy [Revkin]?”

Joseph Romm, Climate Progress, September 22, 2009

In a fit of rage, uber-alarmist Joe Romm of ClimateProgress has recently offered a temperature warming bet that he can win even if more than 85% of all climate models are shown to overpredict future warming.

Has Joe seen the light and become a “lukewarmer”—that is, someone who thinks that the human CO2 emissions will result in only a modest rise in global temperature, somewhere at or below the bottom end of the IPCC range of projections?…

[Editor Note: An earlier series at MasterResource on John Holdren, President Obama’s science and technology advisor, is being reprinted given the recent controversy surrounding Dr. Holdren’s earlier views. This original post is dated December 31, 2008]

Paul Ehrlich founded the neo-Malthusian movement with his 1968 bestseller, The Population Bomb, and John Holdren was an instant convert. In 1971, mentor-and-disciple wrote:

“We are not, of course, optimistic about our chances of success. Some form of ecocatastrophe, if not thermonuclear war, seems almost certain to overtake us before the end of the century. (The inability to forecast exactly which one – whether plague, famine, the poisoning of the oceans, drastic climatic change, or some disaster entirely unforeseen – is hardly grounds for complacency.)”

–  John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, ‘What We Must Do, and the Cost of Failure’, in Holdren and Ehrlich, Global Ecology, p.

In last Friday’s Wall Street Journal (Jan. 2, 2008), Science Journal editor Robert Lee Hotz reviewed the climate of 2008 and concluded that despite a relatively cool year, all signs were go for anthropogenic global warming proceeding at a rapid and destructive clip—perhaps even faster than climate models envisioned.

Hotz’s review was extremely selective, with the effect of keeping the specter of catastrophic global warming alive and well, in the face of mounting evidence that it has, in fact, become gravely ill.

A closer look at the recent behavior of global temperatures indicates that all is not well with climate-model projections of alarming climate change.

2008 added another year to a lengthening string in which the rate of global temperature rise has been far beneath model predictions showing that natural variability still plays a large role in everyday weather and climate.…