This chart seems really disingenuous: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/easterbrook_fig1.jpg?w=640&h=369 http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpres

This chart seems really disingenuous: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/easterbrook_fig1.jpg?w=640&h=369 http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/easterbro... I don't see any explanation for how the dates defining the "periods" were chosen. It looks a lot like they were chosen to maximize the number of cooling "periods." Shift the cut-off dates to the right a bit, and you'll get four periods of warming in a row (1890-now), at which point it seems silly to divide that up into arbitrary periods. The data he started with is relatively high resolution, with a data point for every year, apparently, and he's simplified that down to just four bits of data (four periods, each either warming or cooling). Then he analyzes those four bits at length. And he conflates "cooling" with "cool" and "warming" with "warm" in the process. He describes the second "cooling" period as "cool" even though the chart shows the average temperature is higher than the previous "warming" period, which he describes as "warm." This doesn't seem reasonable to me. Frankly, his eagerness to slice up that high-res temperature data into big, discrete pieces, with no rhyme or reason, would alarm anyone who has ever designed any sort of feedback-based control-loop system; that's no way to find real trends in noisy data. And his blog is full of ads. I realize pointing that out is sort of ad-hominem, but it seems unserious. Stephen Hawking's website isn't full of ads exhorting the viewer to "measure the age of the universe yourself!"