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As to the “beautiful” science behind AGW, nothing in the science requires that climate respond to CO2 increases in a non-linear manner.

By "beautiful", I was being sarcastic. While much of the science isn't understood, the first principles bloody well should be by now. Don't know about climate data from a century ago, but it seems to me that recent technology has given scientists an incredible amount of short term but high quality weather data to analyze and possibly even validate models to, not to mention number crunching power, and there's probably more where all that came from as well. The problem is that if the central purpose of the work is to direct public policy rather than test and improve upon theories... well, ask the psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, economists and other so-called "scientists"/"experts" out there.

As for the "long handle" of "hockey stick", if only a select few were genuinely interested and therefore permitted to examine centuries of climate data for a short period of time before it got trashed, then yes, it's pretty obvious how good the raw or "value-added" data --presumably the product of millions of dollars, years of work-- really was the first place.

If you would prefer referring to these CRU stiffs as mindless beancounters instead of all-knowing all-powerful statisticians, that's ok with me as long as I can tune you out should you try to convince me that there's a real link between average temps and sunspot cycles based on the plots shown above.

“If you would prefer referring to these CRU stiffs as mindless beancounters instead of all-knowing all-powerful statisticians, that’s ok with me as long as I can tune you out should you try to convince me that there’s a real link between average temps and sunspot cycles based on the plots shown above.”

LOL. I do statistics. Not sure what it is the CRU folks do. But it’s not statistics. It’s the application of techniques they don’t understand to a hypothesis they don’t want to falsify—or something like that.

Nor is it science. For that you need falsifiable hypotheses and replicable results, things the AGW folks have been avoiding like plague for years.

My point was that real statisticians have done much of the heavy lifting in exposing the AGW folks for what they are. That’s not surprising because when folks manipulate data and don’t disclose the manipulation and the sample size is pretty big, the manipulation usually leaves great big muddy footprints when a statistician tears it apart.

As for the sunspot data, its just another hypothesis right now. I know there are some journal articles claiming a high correlation (0.8 or there abouts) between smoothed sunspot activity and global temperature. Haven’t looked at it in detail because noone is trying to take control of the world economy based on the “sunspot crisis.” So it falls in the category of “interesting to look at someday.”