This opinion piece has no journalistic merit. The author starts out with the usual smear attack on scientists as "climate deniers", which right away shows his ignorance of the actual science of climate. Calling Anthony Watts' web site Watts Up With That, a "denialist web site" demonstrates the laziness of the author of the column, who did not even bother to look at the web site, or he would know that it is entirely about scientific analysis of climate data. The author does not know that Dr Muller only presented 2% of the data that BEST is to analyze, and did not use the surfacestations database to judge the validity of the data that was analyzed. Go to the link to understand the problems with the data. Look at Figure 2 to see what the problem is. Alas, this column gets only a 6 on the Krugman hate scale, due to the author's laziness. We expect better of him!