SM -
I agree absolutely. I’m off on a tangent with billc and Joshua.
I don’t have any numbers for this, but even with a background warming of, say 1.5C per century, 17 years strikes me as unrealistically short. There’s, as you say the unpredictability of volcanic forcing as well as the periodicity of all the others.
Even if his data spoke, of their own accord, that 17 years was significant, it wasn’t politically astute to make a big deal about it.