NurseLeah_Nash said:

The honest answer is that the effect is real, the magnitude is contested, and the individual variation is larger than either.

There is a second half to this that has not been said yet. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

I would rather be corrected than agreed with, if it comes to it.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look. It is a small discipline and it changes what you notice.

Happy to go further on any of that.

Following on from NurseLeah_Nash — and this may be the naive question:

How would you tell the difference between that and the alternative explanation?

josh_phd_bmore said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

This is where I part company with the consensus forming above. I think the framing smuggles in the conclusion. Ask it the other way round and the obvious answer reverses, which usually means the question is doing the work.

Happy to go further on any of that.

josh_phd_bmore said:

Say what you would expect to see if you were wrong, before you look.

Agreed on the substance. I would put less weight on the timescale, because two months of anything is not enough to distinguish a trend from a wobble.