Epic FAIL, and no messing
I'm amazed that I'm still being invited to "Be the first to post a comment" well over twelve hours after this was posted. Is everyone still sleeping off a good Friday night?
For a start, your subheading is wrong: "Climate skeptics dealt 'clear and rigorous' blow"? Hardly. A more accurate version would be "Climate alarmists' favourite straw bogeyman wheeled out yet again": virtually nobody in the sceptical community denies that overall, the earth's climate has warmed by about a degree over the last century and a half or so. All the "BEST" study has done is rework one of the existing temperature databases and confirm that it shows a slight increase.
More telling is the quote you take from the paper by Muller himself: "The key issue is what fraction of the observed change is anthropomorphic. We don't shed much light on that." Precisely. It is the misattribution by alarmists of every bad thing to human influence which is exactly the issue which engenders scepticism, the more so when it is repeatedly backed by long-discredited pseudoscience.
Remember the original "global warming" mantra? "Human greenhouse gas emissions are causing irreversible, catastrophic damage to the climate". Well, I've spent over three years now looking for any evidence at all that this might be the case, and I can report that (a) The climatic cycles are continuing very much as they always have done; (b) Nothing catastrophic appears to be happening; (c) IF there is any human "fingerprint" in the data, it is way, way below the noise. If anyone can point me to evidence (by which I mean proper, observational evidence, not "yet another" collection of pretty printouts from this or that failed model), please do so, as a friend has had hard cash on the table for some years now for anyone who can provide such proof, and I could use the money.
That this halfbaked "study" has been splashed across the world's media has a lot more to do with the approaching IPCC AR5, to be worked on at Durban this Nov/Dec. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story! It's all true, and it's worse than we thought, and it's all evil humanity's fault! Codswallop.
If you want to check just how disinterested an observer Richard Muller is, check out his site at www.mullerandassociates.com - where you will find such trademarked products as "GreenGov", advice to governments on how to minimise their evil CO2 emissions. As in everything related to climate "science", follow the money. Nothing to see here, move along please.