Relevant

29 July 2011:  Dr. Roy Spencer, Chairman of the CSCA Technical Advisory Board, along with William Braswell, published an article this week in the Journal of Remote Sensing containing new information on climate feedbacks and the climate models relied on by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  In a press release from the University of Alabama, Huntsville, Dr. Spencer stated:  "The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show.  There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."  See the press release here.

Spencer and Braswell compared temperature data from the Hadley Centre Climate Research Unit in Great Britain with radiated energy measurements collected by the Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA's Terra satellite.  Time-lagged regression analysis showed that climate feedbacks proposed by the climate models were not able to explain changes in measured radiation after temperature changes, particularly over the oceans.  The analysis indicates the presence of natural forcing factors due to changes in clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans or other factors that are not described by the models. 

According to Spencer:  "The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations."  Since climate models do not account for these natural forcings, they likely overstate the temperature changes caused by CO2 emissions.  See the full technical article here.