Roger wrote:
The message
from Terry Fields contains these words:

The Jan 2009 data is going to be interesting....but whether it will
settle any differences is probably a forlorn hope.

Definitely (a forlorn hope). :-)

As long as there are people on both sides, or even just on one side,
happy to cherry pick the data they use to prop up their position there
will be disputes.

I'm sure we'll be back to this before 2012.

Most probably.

I am tempted to write to the Met Office about the bizarre way they
terminate their smoothing filter. Doubt if that will even provoke a
response let alone nudge them onto something a bit less extreme.

Smoothing filters are remarkably difficult to implement on data that
comes to a sudden stop..

I've had occasion to implement them, sometimes.

It's amazing how, if what you are trying to do, is produce a sine wave,
almost any random collection of points can be smoothed into one.