The scope of this conversation is drifting - we started by talking about whether scientists always use scientific methodologies in trustworthy ways. The BEST p

The scope of this conversation is drifting - we started by talking about whether scientists always use scientific methodologies in trustworthy ways. The BEST project you mentioned uses very similar methodologies as climatologists usually do, so it's not a surprise they replicated the results. As the quote you give makes clear, the BEST people took acknowledged-to-be corrupted data, assumed a priori that "correcting" that data is a legitimate thing to do, "corrected" it in largely similar ways and got largely similar results. That isn't really a surprise because replicability wasn't ever an issue under contention. The issue under debate here is rather whether that's a scientifically legitimate approach to begin with, and whether it's the sort of thing people expect when they think of science. I don't see how editing observational data can ever be scientific. If you allow one field to do it you have to let them all do it and then what can be said with any confidence about what's true? The problem is researchers usually start by saying "this question feels important, therefore, we will work with what we've got" and there's no incentive to stop and say "the data quality is insufficient for analysis". BEST claimed to address UHI effects but just like previously, when people dug into the details they found that large numbers of weather stations at airports and post offices had been classed as "very rural", for example, so the data here is just of garbage quality. W.R.T. climatology specifically there probably is a slight rise in temperatures across the globe in the past decades - the satellite data suggests as such. But not much, certainly much less than predicted, and we only have such data stretching back a few decades so not much can be said about long term trends. By climatologist's own admission the surface temperature dataset is heavily corrupted, that's why they modify it so much. The modifications in the current era are relatively small but in the past e.g. first half of the 20th century they are much larger, effectively making the past colder than it was actually observed to be at the time. That's why all the papers and newspaper articles from the 60s and 70s discussing global cooling are now considered obsolete - they edited the data to remove the cooling but, once again, there was never any post-mortem into why their measurement methodologies failed so badly or why they collectively asserted a new ice age with so much confidence. Finally, note that once we zoom out a bit from the question of SST reliability, there is still the problem of aggressive exaggeration and unscientific behavior elsewhere in the field. To quote Muller back at you: "much, if not most, of what is attributed to climate change is speculative, exaggerated or just plain wrong. I've analyzed some of the most alarmist claims, and my skepticism about them hasn't changed"