If you are even a casual observer of current news regarding our climate system, you may have noticed a recently published research paper, which has gotten the skeptical community very excited. This new paper, according to a press release, supposedly demonstrates that the human contribution to current observed warming trends is not significant:

Climate scientists at the University of Rochester, the University of Alabama, and the University of Virginia report that observed patterns of temperature changes (‘fingerprints’) over the last thirty years are not in accord with what greenhouse models predict and can better be explained by natural factors, such as solar variability. Therefore, climate change is ‘unstoppable’ and cannot be affected or modified by controlling the emission of greenhouse gases, such as CO2, as is proposed in current legislation. - Science and Environmental Policy Project

Lead author, David Douglass, even suggested that "greenhouse gases make only a negligible contribution to climate warming", while one of the co-authors, Fred Singer, resorted to a much more politically motivated description of the findings:

Our research demonstrates that the ongoing rise of atmospheric CO2 has only a minor influence on climate change. We must conclude, therefore, that attempts to control CO2 emissions are ineffective and pointless. – but very costly. - Science and Environmental Policy Project

I must admit that if these statements are true, this paper will have a profound effect on not only climate research, but also the world's approach to dealing with changes in our climate. What once was a fairly well-understood problem with a workable solution in the making would now become a natural phenomenon that is beyond our control, rendering any attempt at remediation completely useless. Seeing as the ramifications are so great, I figured I'd do a little research of my own. The first step would be to find a copy of the paper, which was published in the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society. So, I obtained a copy, and then I barely finished reading the title of the paper before the first red flag went up. The paper is called "A Comparison of Tropical Temperature Trends with Model Predictions". So, it seems that the authors decided only to compare trends in the tropics, where the least amount of warming has occurred. This piqued my interest, so I dug a bit more and found that the climate scientists at RealClimate have also examined the paper, and found a few more red flags. Firstly, they point out that the authors did not use the latest data that was available to them, which just so happened to err in favor of their argument:

It turns out that the radiosonde data used in this paper (version 1.2 of the RAOBCORE data) does not have the full set of adjustments. Subsequent to that dataset being put together (Haimberger, 2007), two newer versions have been developed (v1.3 and v1.4) which do a better, but still not perfect, job, and additionally have much larger amplification with height... The authors of Douglass et al were given this last version along with the one they used, yet they only decided to show the first (the one with the smallest tropical trend) without any additional comment even though they knew their results would be less clear. - RealClimate

Even more puzzling, according to RealClimate, was the lack of any uncertainty in the paper. Generally, when establishing trends, scientists will provide ranges within which such trends are probable. After applying appropriate levels of uncertainty for them, and correcting for the recent versions of radiosonde data, the scientists at RealClimate found that "there is no clear model-data discrepancy in tropical tropospheric trends once you take the systematic uncertainties in data and models seriously", rendering the paper in question meaningless, at least in the context in which it was presented in its press release. This paper was obviously an attempt to skew data in an effort to prove a politically-motivated point about climate change. Fortunately, there is an entire community of climate scientists available to provide a peer-review check to each other's work. In this case, one might say that the peer-review worked very nicely, and that the paper failed.

So, the truth of the situation is a far cry from the hype that was provided in the press release. While this paper provided some buzz among skeptical bloggers, its long term effects within the scientific community will surely be less eventful. Attacking the validity of climate models is a common tactic of climate skeptics, and this one, like many others before it, has proven to be unsuccessful.

Graph comparing models and measurements in the paper

New graph by RealClimate scientists showing proper data and uncertainties