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Chuckle. I haven't tried to find the article yet, and I don't know who the author from the University of Rochester is, but the author from the University of Alabama will be either Roy Spencer or John Christy, and the author from the University of Virginia is apparently Singer (though it might be Patrick Michaels).

In other words, the skeptics are trying again. For some reason I don't think they'll be more successful this time.

Singer is incorrect. There are multiple ways to show that current solar variability is insufficient to drive the observed climate changes.

It's a shame that I can't ping all of the people who read this post up to now to show that basing their skepticism on this paper is probably shaky.

I found a better article about the paper:

New Study Increases Concerns About Climate Model Reliability

Here's the key finding:

""Models are very consistent in forecasting a significant difference between climate trends at the surface and in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere between the surface and the stratosphere," said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH's Earth System Science Center. "The models forecast that the troposphere should be warming more than the surface and that this trend should be especially pronounced in the tropics.

"When we look at actual climate data, however, we do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface. For those layers of the atmosphere, the warming trend we see in the tropics is typically less than half of what the models forecast."

What's funny is that an allusion to this paper a few days ago allowed me to anticipate it. See below. The posting has a link to a 137 page compilation discussion climate change and tropospheric temperature trends.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1935839/posts?page=66#66

I'm posting this now and then I'll reply again, because sometimes pulling up a large PDF crashes my browser.

OK, the browser didn't crash. The cited document has an in-depth discussion of a paper authored by Douglass (the lead author of the more recent paper), Singer, and Pat Michaels, from 2004. So skeptic John Christy has replaced skeptic Pat Michaels in the author list for the most recent paper.

The cited document extensively critiques the failings of the 2004 paper. Feel free to read it.* I am certainly not the one to do it; it will be the task of scientists to address the more recent paper. Given the example of the previous paper and the POV of the authors, I am fairly certain that this contribution will be effectively addressed and subsequently dismissed.

* There is a particularly noteworthy section in which it is noted that there is a discrepancy between a model and the University of Alabama - Huntsville atmospheric temperature record (co-authored by Christy and Roy Spencer), but the RSS atmospheric temperature record -- which has a stronger warming signal than the UAH record -- does not demonstrate a similar discrepancy. This immediately leads me to wonder if the discrepancies in the more recent paper are due to comparisons only to the UAH temperature record. Given that Christy is a co-author, I think this is indeed possible.