Roy Spencer's paper on climate sensitivity

What The Science Says:
Spencer's model is too simple, excluding important factors like ocean dynamics and treats cloud feedbacks as forcings.

Climate Myth: Roy Spencer finds negative feedback
"NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed." (James Taylor)

Climate scientists have identified a number of fundamental problems in Spencer and Braswell's 2011 study which wrongly concludes that the climate is not sensitive to human greenhouse gas emissions. One of the main problems with the paper is that it uses Roy Spencer's very simple climate model which we've previously looked at in

This simple model does not have a realistic representation of the Earth's oceans, which are a key factor in the planet's climate, and it also doesn't model the Earth's water cycle. One key aspect in the Earth's temperature changes is the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which is a cycle of the Pacific Ocean. Spencer's model does not include ENSO, and he assumes that ENSO responds to changes in cloud cover, when in reality it's the other way around.

There are some other key problems in the paper. It doesn't provide enough information for other scientists to repeat the study. When two other climate scientists (Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo) tried to replicate its results as best they could with the information provided, they found quite different results (see the Advanced version of this rebuttal for further details). Spencer and Braswell's conclusions also only seems to work using the satellite data set they chose, but Trenberth and Fasullo found that using other data sets also changes their results.

Trenberth and Fasullo also found that when using a few different climate models, the one which replicated the observed data best was the one with a climate more sensitive to greenhouse gases, which directly contradicts Spencer and Braswell's conclusion that the climate is not sensitive to greenhouse gases.

It's also worth noting that the journal which published Spencer and Braswell's paper does not normally publish climate science research. This may explain how the paper made it through their peer-review system with so many problems. In the end, Trenberth and Fasullo find that the Spencer and Braswell study has no merit.