http://www.sterndavidi.com/publications_type.html

The Wayback Machine crawled the url linked to in this original post several times.

Here’s a hit from 2007.

Still looks like it might be a preprint.

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20070417214507/http://www.bu.edu/cees/people/faculty/kaufmann/documents/Model-temporal-relation.pdf

See http://www.economics.rpi.edu/workingpapers/rpi0411.pdf

If the 2005 paper or an abstract is available online, please post URL here. I will greatly appreciate it.

If it can be verified that the major models all assume a high positive cloud feedback (I suppose I should run over to RC and see what the thread’s about), then it’s not just another nail in the coffin of AGW but a lowering of the coffin into the ground. It’s funny though that the friends of the occupant of the coffin don’t realize he’s dead but believe his report (via mental telepathy; see discussion with/concerning Hotblack Desiato in the Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams) that it’s just been kinda dark lately.

I would also like to thank readers #1,#4, and #5 for pointing out this error in the figure. It is interesting how these things get through the review process!

Another way of stating the results from this paper is that the feedbacks that we are moderately confident about (water vapor, lapse rate, and snow/sea ice albedo) seem to generate a sensitivity near the low end of the canonical range, with the more uncertain cloud feedbacks then providing the positive push, in these models, to generate all of the higher sensitivities. I think the picture that many of us had, speaking for myself at least, was that the first set of feedbacks brought us with moderate confidence to the middle of the canonical range, with cloud feedbacks, both positive and negative, then providing the spread about this midpoint. One evidently has to argue for a signficantly positive cloud feedback to get to the 3K sensitivity that various empirical studies seem to be pointing towards.

We needed to make a lot of approximations in this analysis, especially for the cloud feedback term, because of the limitations of what we could do with the model results that have been archived, so it will be interesting to see if this picture holds up. If, in fact, this is an accurate diagnosis of what the models are doing, why is it that they all have positive cloud feedbacks? This is in itself a bit surprising given the diverse schemes used to predict clouds in these models.

Doesn’t it seem ridiculous that Held is surprised at the allocation between cloud feedback and the rest-of-the-model and surprised that the cloud feedbacks are all strongly positive in the models?

I recall an arch comment by Ellingson when he did an intercomparison of infrared schemes in GCMs in the early 1990s. He found that the radiation schemes were all over the place with some of them sipmly being wrong. However they all agreed on one thing – what happened with 2xCO2. He archly wondered about tuning.

My understanding is that shortwave absorption by clouds is substantially under-estimated in many GCMs (18-30 wm-2 in ARESE II) and it’s disquieting to see this type of systemic effect together with such strong connection of model response to positive cloud feedback.

http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/000675myanna_lahsens_late.html

Dr. Tennekes gives an overview of some of the problems with models. Not to be missed is a link to one of his own cited papers, which argues against the view that “clouds are clocks”, i.e., “if we knew as much about clouds as we do about clocks, clouds would be just as predictable as clocks”.

Loehle’s paper has only one independent citation since publication, but that’s an interesting pretty high resolution Austrian O18 stalagmite proxy study, which showed clear evidence of a MWP and a LIA. It also corroborated M&M in showing a more intense MWP than the present. Likewise the Roman Warm Period. I wonder why the polar bears aren’t already extinct; they’ve had two good opportunities already.

Anyway, that paper is Mangini, A., Spotl, C. and Verdes, P. (2005) “Reconstruction of temperature in the Central Alps during the past 2000 yr from a delta O-18 stalagmite record” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 235, 741-751. The proxy record also plots very closely onto tree-ring C-14 data, which the authors take to indicate a NH solar-climate connection.

I don’t expect climatologists will pay much attention to Loehle’s study because it’s not based in physics as Paul already intimated in #4. Besides, it doesn’t support the AGW claim and so it’s wrong.

Re: #7, Loehle’s fits EXcluded the 20th century, and were then propagated _through_ the 20th century. So, the fits were independent of the 20th century, and relied only on long-term periodicities detected in the earlier data sets. Several models then did a good job simulating 20th century temperature trends, and projected cooling later in the 21st century.

I remember being taught, by science teachers, to expect that would be the case. They were right.