Gleick is right on this. How thrilling that he gets to be right in Forbes. There is no serious scientific debate about the rise in global mean surface temps, hasn't been any for at least a decade. As he describes, public claims to the contrary usually pick a short sequence in a time series -- there are a couple to choose from -- starting with a relatively high value. This graphic illustrates the technique:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47
The data are from the recently published BEST time series, which seems to be less interesting for scientific reasons than for being spearheaded by contrarians, partially funded by the Kochs, and telling the same story as all the previous efforts. The Skeptical Science website is a compendium of rebuttals to climate denialist talking points, probably the best single source on the web at this point.
What I find more interesting is thinking about why this would be a particularly rightist trope.
-- Andy