David Whitehouse has done a round up of press coverage of the BEST paper. He doesn't reckon they've done a good job.
There are very few people who do not believe the world has warmed, in various episodes, since the instrumental record began about 150 years ago. We are today warmer than the Little Ice Age, warmer than the Victorian Era, indeed warmer than the 1970s. The proper question is, of course, why? The Berkeley team have no conclusions about this.
So all the headlines that basically say sceptics have been trounced because the world really is warming are trivial. The Berkeley team confirm what has been found in three other datasets and what "both sides" of the debate already agree on. I could say "so what," and "is it news?" Well, news is what reporters print.
He ends by noting a comment in one of the BEST papers about attribution:
The researchers find a strong correlation between North Atlantic temperature cycles lasting decades, and the global land surface temperature. They admit that the influence in recent decades of oceanic temperature cycles has been unappreciated and may explain most, if not all, of the global warming that has taken place, stating the possibility that the “human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.”
I think this will probably engender a great deal of discussion over the weekend.