Have the skeptics been debunked?

No. Not even close.

As we have been reporting since yesterday, a new study led by Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Group claims to validate the notion that surface temperatures have increase by about 1^o since 1950. Muller says that this warming proves the skeptics wrong.

Here’s what you need to keep in mind about this claim.

The temp record is a sideshow. It is irreparably biased, unreliable and/or incomplete — no matter what Muller or any alarmist says. The only temperature record that begins to approach a scientific standard is the satellite record, which is about 30 years long — and even that’s too short a period to validate and claims about climate change.

But the purpose of Muller’s study and obivous PR campaign is not to add to scientific knowledge about the climate; it is to distract the public so as to discredit climate skepticism.

The scientific question that the public is being distracted from is: Do manmade greenhouse gas emissions significantly change climate and, then, do they do so for the worse?

The only scientific way to validate the alarmist hypothesis would be for the alarmists to construct a greenhouse gas-dependent model than predicts global/regional temperature/climate change with reasonable accuracy — and then they’d still have a ways to go to show that change is bad.

The BEST results are obviously contrived and then released with the false spin that the skeptics’ last leg has been cut out from under them. The temp record alone was never something on which the skeptics’ case rested.

Even Muller debunks his own “debunking” by admitting:

How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

Let’s not fall into Muller’s trap: Warming since 1950 (to whatever degree) does not mean Al Gore has been right all along.

Read Muller’s “The Case Against Global Warming Skepticism.”