That was a surprisingly tricky question from the BBC. A politician or lawyer would have known to be very careful when answering a question that began with “Would you agree that ….” Perhaps the CRU ought to be headed by someone with more experience in contentious issues.

Jones’ response was factually incorrect, too: the data doesn’t show statistically-significant warming but it also doesn’t show its absence. He ought to have said something like “we are measuring subtle changes that accumulate over long periods. The raw data does show an increase in temperature, and we hope that further measurements will tell us whether this is part of a warming trend.”