[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 30, 2008]
Skeptics of climate alarmism have often trotted out the fact that a number of climate scientists sounded the alarm over global cooling before they sounded the alarm over global warming–an argument for humility in the face of complexity, uncertainty, and change.Global cooling was more than fringe thinking. As Paul Ehrlich and Anne Ehrlich wrote in their 1996 book, Betrayal of Science and Reason (p. 34):
…“Predictions of future climate trends by Stephen Schneider and other leading climatologists, based on the prevailing knowledge of the atmosphere in the early 1970s, gave more weight to the potential problem of global cooling than it now appears to merit.”