New paper finds global temperature data trend prior to 1950's "meaningless" & "artificially flattened"

The Hockey Schtick
A correspondence published today in Nature Climate Change is a damning indictment of
the updated HADCRUT global temperature database, which is used as the basis of all of the other land-based temperature databases including GISS and BEST. 

The correspondence demolishes the claim of Ji et al that "the global climate has been experiencing significant warming at an unprecedented pace in the past century" as well as the reliability of the HADCRU database to determine global temperature trends of the past 164 years. According to the authors, conclusions about global temperature change cannot be reliably determined prior to the 1950's due to the poor spatiotemporal coverage prior to the 1950's and trends determined from the early HADCRU data are "meaningless and "artificially flattened."

Likewise, all climate model "tuning" based on the "meaningless" global temperature trends prior to the 1950's are therefore "meaningless" GIGO as well. "