David Whitehouse takes a long hard look at Richard Black's (ahem) analysis of global temperatures.
The problem with [Black's analysis] is that it makes the rudimentary mistake of ignoring the short-term variations and noise in the data resulting in spurious trend estimates that, as statistics often does in the wrong hands, obscures more than it illuminates. A more scientific and statistically preferable approach is to start in 1991, using monthly data, and plot ten-year regression lines. It is obvious that they are converging on zero for the past decade – the exact opposite of what Black told his audience.