The paper's author, University of Alabama, Huntsville researcher Roy Spencer, is a climate change skeptic and controversial figure within the climate research community.
Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, called Spencer a "controversial figure" within the climate research community. He argued that Spencer's paper is neither new nor correct.
""He's taken an incorrect model, he's tweaked it to match observations, but the conclusions you get from that are not correct,"" Andrew Dessler, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M University, said of Spencer's new study.
The study finds a mismatch between the month-to-month variations in temperature and cloud cover in models versus the real world over the past 10 years, said Gavin Schmidt, a NASA Goddard climatologist. ""What this mismatch is due to — data processing, errors in the data or real problems in the models — is completely unclear.""
Other researchers pointed to flaws in Spencer's paper, including an ""unrealistic"" model placing clouds as the driver of warming and a lack of information about the statistical significance of the temperatures observed by the satellites.
""I cannot believe it got published,"" said Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research.