I’m used to working on very difficult problems, like the most complicated electronic circuitry on the planet.

This award was from the IBM/Motorola/Apple Power PC design team in Austin, Texas, which developed the brain of Macs and Playstations for many years.

Microprocessor designs have to be perfect. They can’t make any mistakes, ever. Modern designs contain billions of transistors, and every one of them has to work perfectly – all the time. The way you become a “Debug God” is by analyzing the design through many different approaches. Any single methodology is inadequate and doomed to failure, so I developed and utilized dozens of different methodologies to make sure that no bugs slipped through. During my 20 year career designing microprocessors, no silicon bug was ever found in any part of any design which I worked on.

By contrast, finding flaws with adjustments to the temperature record is like shooting fish in a barrel.  The work being done would fail any reasonable high school science class. It is a complete joke, and doesn’t even vaguely resemble science.

The mistake people keep making is using the same broken methodology to verify the original broken methodology. In order to find problems, you need to analyze the data from many different angles.

No methodology is perfect, but a straight up average of raw temperatures is the simplest, cleanest and most effective way to spot trouble. It may be less precise than other methods, but exposes potential fundamental issues related to accuracy. Once you start gridding, adjusting and infilling, you can no longer see the forest for the trees – and you are lost.