"We are already experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate. To continue to ignore the problem would be flirting with catastrophe"

-- Sunday Times, September 3, 2006.

This alarm was uttered by John Holdren, who is now Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology. Holdren completed a Ph.D in physics in 1970 and has been a political activist since.

He got in to the prestigious National Academy of Science through a "temporary nominating group" designed to gain entry for climate alarmists. Holdren has been mainly employed by the Woods Hole Research Center, which should not be confused with the apolitical Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

In earlier times, he was a fellow traveler with Paul Ehrlich, and in the mid-1980s predicted that climate catastrophes could kill around 1 billion people by 2020.

"Climate change will bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten the fabric of life everywhere on Earth."

-- Al Gore, Washington Post, January 29, 2009.

Some Science: A couple of our special essays addressed the mania about what was called "Global Warming" and is now called "Climate Change". Our January 2008 piece, "Intellectual Hysteria", noted that such manias typically erupted towards the culmination of a great boom in asset prices. In the 1860s a leading economist, Jevons, had a personal revelation that severe shortages of coal would end civilization. His book "The Coal Question" can be read on the internet.

Our July 2008 study, "Global Warming", included a cartoon with the caption that "The karma of geophysics would soon overwhelm the dogma of global warming religions". Changes in solar and volcanic activity were indicating the probability of some global cooling. These influences have continued, as the decline in solar output for all of 2008 is now the most distinctive since 1913. This is updated as follows:

"My running mean of the International Sunspot Number for 2009, just dipped below 1.00. For anything comparable you have to go back before 1913 (scored a 1.43) which could mean we're now competing with the Dalton Minimum."

-- Paul Stanko, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
(NOAA), April 21, 2009.

Another way of looking at the numbers for 2009 to April 23:

The solar minimum is defined as starting with the first blank day.

• Typical Solar Min: 485 days.
• Since 2004: 609 days.

There is no way that the mania for political science can spin the numbers or the effect.

The deep minimum called the Dalton Minimum ran from 1790 to 1830.

There is no certain forecast on the duration of this deep minimum.