It's Douglass with 2 s's. Other authors are Christy, Pearson and Singer.
It's not in print yet but appears on the METS site under the journal link.
Here's a link that has a link to the PDF. I've seen this work both heralded as showing GHG models are incorrect and others that trash the study.
New Study Increases Concerns About Climate Model Reliability
The Reference Frame: Douglass, Christy, Pearson, Singer
Thanks, for one reason or another I couldn't find this on SciFinder. This is an interesting study. I wouldn't classify this work as junk science. Christy is very well respected and wouldn't put his time into an effort that was worthless. I am not a Fred Singer fan though, so I have to admit that I would expect a little propoganda as soon as I see him name attached.
The conclusions I draw from this and the conclusions that a lot of blogs drew from this are quite different. I see this study as identifying an interesting disagreement between the popular climate models and the data sets they (Douglass and Pearson) have chosen to study. You would prefer not to see disagreement of this kind. However, the amount of disagreement is hard to discuss outside of a discussion on the errors of the models and data. I know that the models have propability distributions associated with their temperature predicitons (this is where the 2 sigma in the model comes in, which is discussed). The sattelites used to take these measurements, however, have to have error bars as well. I would like to see those before I made any hard and fast conclusion.
The bottom line is that it is very hard to really dissect this paper. While I am very interested in the material, they are crossing into a region of familiarity with the inner-workings of the models and data measurement that I do not have. So, my conclusions probably don't mean much.
I don't think that this will end up being a global climate change life-changing moment. But, this may be a good indication that the models need improvement; however, without error bars, I won't even say that with too much concreteness. Whether this is a sign of not enough attention to negative feedbacks should be looked at. To assert that current models do not consider negative feedbacks, only positive feedbacks, is ridiculous, though...as some have done.
I wish that I knew enough about the details to have a more firm opinion, Volinbham. I read through some of the stuff that the folks on the blogs and realclimate had to say. I agree with realclimate's discussion of error bars .. I don't know enough some of the other aspects to agree or disagree. I would honestly expect this to be hyped a lot by the "denial" blogs...and hopefully not discarded by the GW scientists. These results should be looked at, and the more updated sattelite observations should be included in an updated study..with error bars.
).