A Guest Post by Basil Copeland Like many of Anthony’s readers
here on WUWT, I’ve been riveted by all the revelations and
ongoing discussion and analysis of the CRUtape Letters™ (with
appropriate props to WUWT’s “ctm”). It might be hard to imagine
that anyone could add to what has already been said, but I am
going to try. It might also come as a surprise, to those who
reckon me for a skeptic, that I do not think that anything was
revealed that suggests that the global temperature data set
maintained by CRU was irreparably damaged by these revelations.
We’ve known all along that the data may be biased by poor siting
issues, handling of station dropout, or inadequate treatment of
UHI effects. But nothing was revealed that suggests that the
global temperature data sets are completely bogus, or
unreliable. I will return to the figure at the top of this post
below, but I want to introduce another figure to illustrate the
previous assertion: This figure plots smoothed seasonal
differences (year to year differences i