Congratulations to a group of climate change contrarians who, somehow, managed to stink up a real peer-reviewed journal with their industrial taint. Kudos are in order because only by getting legitimate research published in peer-reviewed venues, and surviving the withering scrutiny that ensues, can climate change skeptics hope to even begin to earn the scientific cred they assume they're entitled to and secretly crave. But getting it published is just the first step. On that critical survival point, the paper is getting hammered:
Now the trio have claimed that their analysis demonstrates that global warming is primarily a result of natural processes with little role for anthropogenic influences such as greenhouse gases. A barrage of criticism has forced the authors and their champions to backpedal furiously.
The paper begins by talking about the ENSO, better known as El Niño. It's a periodic shift in ocean currents and surface winds associated with wide reaching changes that no climate scientist doubts. But the authors then pivot off that fact in a manner familiar to any science cartoon fans, "And then a miracle occurs". The miracle step being they've extrapolated from the completely unremarkable, well known finding that El Niño governs much of the short-term oscillations from one year to the next in global temperature, to the completely bogus claim that it explains the long-term trend. If the scientific intricacies sound daunting, think of it as the Dr. Frankenstein approach: they sewed the lifeless head of an ideological claim onto the stump of a cold, hard fact, pronounced the monster alive, and now hope to parade the mangled corpse around on the media stage calling it science.