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And even with your “real, undistorted facts” I find problems.

#1 - Berkeley? Red flag. Data from communists is often less than reliable. If they don’t flat out lie to fit their message, they more often then not will massage the data.

#2 - The rise seems to be significant, but warming doesn’t mean AGW. Climate changes. Weather is variable. Stuff happens.

#3 - And finally, 1800-2000, 200 years. So, for 200 years of data, they sound the alarm? How old is the planet? 4 billion years? How many warming/cooling cycles have been documented?

Here in NE Ohio, the weather people can’t get tomorrow’s weather correct. I’m being very literal, half the time they can’t get tomorrow’s weather correct. It’s amazing how the technology has made forecasters less accurate. I know climate isn’t weather, but they are related. If we are incapable of understanding one, how can we understand the other?

Curry doesn't have any problems with the global temperature reconstruction itself, what she does maintain (correctly) is that one of the other authors (Muller) was incorrect when he stated that the data contains no "evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down".

Mueller's statement was incorrect because of precisely the issue presented in that first "skeptics versus realists" graph I posted: 10 or 15 years is not long enough to achieve a statistically significant discrimination between short-term and long-term temperature trends (that requires around 30 years).

That's why by cherry picking the data (as in the skeptic example in that graph) you can demonstrate that for a decade or so there have been numerous periods when the temperature trend for that period was downwards - even though the longer term trend has clearly been upwards.

So Curry is correct: the recent downward trend absolutely cannot be used to indicate that "global warming has not stopped", just as the same data cannot be used to demonstrate that "global warming has stopped".

Thus Curry's comment that Murry's comment "detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

So where does that leave us?

What the latest "skeptical" analysis does do is increase our confidence that previous global temperature reconstructions were reasonably accurate - that even when she bring more powerful statistical tools and careful reanalysis to questions such as siting induced errors there has been a substantial increase in global temperatures, prior to 1990.

WHY this happened is a separate question.

"Berkeley? Red flag. Data from communists is often less than reliable. If they don’t flat out lie to fit their message, they more often then not will massage the data."

BEST was funded by a501(c)(3) called "Novim", to which the largest contributor was Charles G. Koch (via the Charles G. Koch foundation), and I don't think Mr. Koch funds communists.

This was the home team, and IMO it's quite telling that it ended up providing strong support for the "consensus view" of the climate trend over the last hundred years.

"Berkeley? Red flag. Data from communists is often less than reliable. If they don’t flat out lie to fit their message, they more often then not will massage the data."

BEST was funded by a501(c)(3) called "Novim", to which the largest contributor was Charles G. Koch (via the Charles G. Koch foundation), and I don't think Mr. Koch funds communists.

This was the home team, and IMO it's quite telling that it ended up providing strong support for the "consensus view" of the climate trend over the last hundred years.