Why BEST matters.

Confirming earlier results that had already been repeatedly confirmed is nice, but that's not why BEST matters. BEST matters because, as great as it would be in a perfect world to confirm all facts through direct personal observation and replace all expert opinion with each individual's perfect mastery of every field of science and human endeavor, until that blessed day we will have to rely on the expertise of others in fields in which we are not experts ourselves. And while this does not ask us to surrender our own reasoning and common sense, the loudest demand of common sense when confronted with a complex and technical issue is to find people with good credentials and a good track record and let them explain things. So who has a good track record on climate change?

BEST is another reminder that it is the mainstream scientists of the "consensus" that have the track record. They said they had controlled for UHI and that station dropout was not notably altering the trend. They were right. "Skeptics" that pushed these issues as discrediting the temperature record were wrong. They said that siting issues might affect individual sites, but would not distort the global trend. They were right. "Skeptics" were wrong.

As with the temperature record, so with predictions of warming. The real scientists got it mostly right:

Kellogg, no cookie for you

The "skeptics," when they have made predictions, have been consistently wrong:

And so it goes with CO2 levels, ice loss, sea level rise and pretty much any other parameter you can name. Where you can compare the projections of real scientists to "skeptics," science wins, every time.

So who are you going to trust?