Frank and Mike. Don't get too excited. The article you linked to is heavily biased by the rhetoric of James Taylor from the libertarian/right wing think-tank lobby group, the Heartland Institute. In fact he goes so ridiculously over the top with his various uses of "alarmist" (count them!) that it becomes clear that what we are reading is propaganda, not fair comment. Denialist sources like this pounce on and promote any evidence at all that supports what they want reality to be and completely ignore the vastly greater amount that does not.
The author of the paper that all the fuss is about is Dr Roy Spencer who has long had an idee fixe that the climate sensitivity is much less than just about every other practicing climate scientist believes . He keeps trying to prove this because, if true, it would mean that although more fossil fuel emissions will still increase the greenhouse effect and lead to further global warming, the end result will not be dangerous and may be relatively benign. This is because feedbacks would barely amplify any warming. He and his fellow sceptic scientist Dr John Christy - who make up (with Richard Lindzen) just about all of the credible "sceptic" scientists around - were responsible for the very long term denialist myth that ground based measurements showed warming while satellite based measurements did not because their previously published work with satellite sensing of global temperature proved to be wrong because they did not correct for orbital drift/decay. When they eventually did, the warming signal became clear. Trying not to be too ad hominem, it must be mentioned that Spencer is an "intelligent design" creationist, so presumably expects that intelligence to have designed the climate system so that we can't destabilise it - so that God won't let us screw things up! Evidence from palaeo-climatology (way before 4004 BC...) suggests that the climate does not have a benign negative feedback to influences that force warming or cooling but has actually reacted strongly in the past. It's always possible that this time he's onto something but his new paper has not been hailed as revolutionary. Here's an excerpt from reaction: New research suggesting that cloud cover, not carbon dioxide, causes global warming is getting buzz in climate skeptic circles. But mainstream climate scientists dismissed the research as unrealistic and politically motivated. "It is not newsworthy," Daniel Murphy, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) cloud researcher, wrote in an email to LiveScience. The study, published July 26 in the open-access online journal Remote Sensing, got public attention when a writer for The Heartland Institute, a libertarian think-tank that promotes climate change skepticism, wrote for Forbes magazine that the study disproved the global warming worries of climate change "alarmists." However, mainstream climate scientists say that the argument advanced in the paper is neither new nor correct. The paper's author, University of Alabama, Huntsville researcher Roy Spencer, is a climate change skeptic and controversial figure within the climate research community. "He's taken an incorrect model, he's tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct," Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said of Spencer's new study. What Spencer did was to build on his earlier work - rather comprehensively debunked here http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/just-put-the-model-down-roy/ Nick Palmer On the side of the Planet - and the people - because they're worth it Blogspot - Sustainability and stuff according to Nick Palmer http://nickpalmer.blogspot.com
