By Roy Spencer on Roger Pielke Sr’s Climate Science Weblog

There are three main points/opinions/issues I’d like to explore, which are all interrelated:

(1) The traditional way in which feedbacks have been diagnosed from observational data has very likely misled us about the existence of positive feedbacks in the climate system.

(2) Our new analyses of satellite observations of intraseasonal oscillations suggest negative cloud feedbacks, supporting Lindzen’s Infrared Iris hypothesis.

(3) I am increasingly convinced that understanding precipitation systems is the key to understanding climate sensitivity.

I think it is time to provoke some serious discussion and reconsideration regarding what we think we know about feedbacks in the real climate system, and therefore about climate sensitivity. See this thought provoking analysis here.