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From WUWT, an article by Willis Eschenbach, titled ‘What the BEST data actually says’.

It would have been better to publish this here, prior to ‘Global Temperature “Trends” – Realistically Nowhere!‘. The BEST claims were instrumental in revisiting the arguments which then inspired my comments and the post. Nevertheless, it is all relevant, connected and meaningful.

The BEST claims are offered as ‘conclusive’ evidence that the global warming trends are for real, therefore, it follows that the portion due to man’s industry is real, therefore carbon dioxide is an enemy of civilization, therefore carbon emissions must be drastically cut and carbon trading is justified.

The only part of this scenario that is valid, is that man has contributed to increases in pollution and CO2. The rest is simply debatable. The claim of global warming trends may be valid and is generally accepted in the scientific world. The BEST claim that it is conclusive is more or less irrelevant. Nevertheless, here we have a serious argument as to whether their claim is scientifically valid anyway?

Why am I considering this worth space on this blog? To show how ridiculous the whole debate really is. When BEST claim an issue is conclusive yet it can be fairly argued that it is isn’t even necessarily valid, let alone conclusive, and I argue it is irrelevant anyway, where is the reality of AGW as a threat to mankind?

Here is an extract of the WUWT post:

My theory is that the BEST folks must have eaten at a Hollywood Chinese restaurant. You can tell because when you eat there, an hour later you find you’re hungry for stardom.

Now that the BEST folks have demanded and received their fifteen minutes of fame before their results have gone through peer review, now that they have succeeded in deceiving many people into thinking that Muller is a skeptic and that somehow BEST has ‘proven the skeptics wrong’, now that they’ve returned to the wilds of their natural scientific habitat far from the reach of National Geographic photographers and people asking real questions, I thought I might take a look at the data itself. Media whores are always predictable and boring, but data always contains surprises. It can be downloaded from the bottom of this page, but please note that they do not show the actual results on that page, they show smoothed results. Here’s their actual un-smoothed monthly data:

Figure 1. BEST global surface temperature estimates. Gray bars show what BEST says are the 95% confidence intervals (95%CI) for each datapoint.

I don’t know about you, but Figure 1 immediately made me think of the repeated claim by Michael Mann that the temperatures of the 1990s were the warmest in a thousand years.

Follow the story here.

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