If as you say they are using monthly data to obtain annual temperature anomalies it still seems to me the sample size is too small for reliable statistical analysis.

This is the reason I wonder why the skeptics are labouring what is quite a weak point of order.

I’m no climate scientist of course so there is probably not much point me arguing this any further.

Jones has been interviewed many other times; he is hardly a media virgin.

you can have tables up to your armpits and still get confused

If he can get ‘confused’ while answering questions provided to him via email then he shouldn’t be heading the CRU.

after all people here are confused about the statistics until John helped them out

John, I believe, is wrong, although I’m happy to change my mind if convinced otherwise. Motl says, in the comments to an above linked post, in relation to the monthly/ yearly problem among other things:

I am still not 100% sure whether it holds for your calculation but these estimates of significance decide whether the annual data could have been white noise. It could, for up to 15 years into the past. But white noise is surely not the best description of the global mean temperatures at more generic time scales: the global temperatures are much more continuous. For example, a decade of monthly anomalies is surely enough to falsify the theory of a “white noise” whether or not the decade under considerations included some human influences: the error margins for the calculated slopes would go down if you used monthly data. Do you agree with this?

For these more general time scales, one surely needs to create a “redder” null hypothesis, a kind of pink noise. Of course, the best stochastic model has the full “color” encoded by the typical behavior of Fourier components one should expect from the known observations. I am kind of confident that with the best model of this type, no temperature series anywhere in the world, or the global ones, will show any deviation from the stochastic model – even though the stochastic model has no trend incorporated in it.

Why do you think execs get training with the media?

you can have tables up to your armpits and still get confused after all people here are confused about the statistics until John helped them out

Yes, Paul is right.

He brought along a table with those figures on them, FFS.
Actually, I believe it was an email exchange, with follow up. (He he)

He said exactly what he wanted to say.

If you have little experience with the media you can forget the obvious and say things you didn’t really want to say or thought relevant