[Ed. note: This post complements that of Ken Green earlier this week, Five Climate Questions for Richard Muller (Temperature findings begin, not end, the real debate)]

The recent announcement of the results of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) Project by project chairman Richard Muller has caused quite a stir. True believers in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) have greeted it as the final nail in the coffin of dissent. Why? Because it concludes—take a deep breath, now—that “Global warming is real.”

Jumping to Conclusions

At the Washington Post, for example, opinion writer Eugene Robinson states:

For the clueless or cynical diehards who deny global warming, it’s getting awfully cold out there.

The latest icy blast of reality comes from an eminent scientist whom the climate-change skeptics once lauded as one of their own.

“I wrote this book because the rising cost of energy is an increasingly important feature of the political landscape, as it massively affects the cost of living for families across Britain. Excessive green taxes make everything from driving to work to taking a well-earned holiday more expensive and make it a lot harder for manufacturers to compete and keep employing people here in Britain.

Motorists are particularly hard hit and unfairly penalized well beyond the cost of maintain the roads and the environmental harms their emissions create. The Government need to give families a better deal and cut unfair green taxes.”

– Matthew Sinclair, Press Release, Let Them Eat Carbon (London: TaxPayers Alliance: August 2011)

Matthew Sinclair, director of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, has penned an educational tract to get his fellow countrymen to reconsider what in their good graces has been accepted as sort of a public duty–to buy into climate/energy alarmism and to do their fair share.…

One big difference between Congressional mandates and regulations by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is that if you don’t like what the EPA is doing, as they say on The People’s Court, “you can take ‘em to court.” (The other big difference, of course, is that if Congress takes action the members must explain their votes to their constituency).

In the case of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the Clean Air Act (the authority under which EPA is acting to restrict such emission) explicitly states that the Washington D.C. Court of Appeals has exclusive jurisdiction over final action taken by the EPA’s Administrator.

And since the EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has issued her final action on the matter—finding that greenhouse gases endanger the public health and welfare and therefore should be regulated—multiple challenges to that action have been made by parties unhappy with that decision.…

“There has to be a lot of shrillness taken out of our language,” Environmental Defense Fund chief Fred Krupp said in a moment of candor last month. “In the environmental community, we have to be more humble. We can’t take the attitude that we have all the answers.”(1)

Fred Krupp–please call Joe Romm, the incendiary editor of the (‘Lack of’?) Climate Progress blog of the Center for American Progress. Romm is as shrill as ever, and except to his apocalyptic apostles, people are turned off. What is wine for his hard core is whine to the open-minded, which is the large majority of us. Making jokes about global-warming exaggeration has turned into pretty good sport, as Krupp must know.

The latest from Dr. Doom (what’s new?) is that we are living on borrowed time.…