Dr Roy Spencer raises another interesting point.

I have to admit that I find Dr Roy Spencer blog more interesting than RealClimate.

I have tried a couple of times to post comments there but they did not appear. Recently he has been involved in a debate with Andrew Dessler regarding as to whether the feedback from clouds is positive or negative. He has a post with a title taken from a 2005 paper "Why Most Published Research Findings are False". Since I had already decided that both Roy and Andy were wrong, this gave me a tag to hang my thoughts on.  In case my post did not appear on Roy's blog I took a copy and am posting it here. So far it is there, so I await any reaction, but here is what I wrote.
 
Dear Roy,

If it is true that most published research findings are false, then it could be argued that most of the two recent papers published by yourself and Andy Dessler are false, viz. both!

It seems obvious to me that cloud feedback on solar forcing is negative, and solar forcing is effectively the only source of heat to the climate. Thus Andy is wrong.

However, your idea, that because clouds produce a negative feedback, we need not worry about the effects of increased CO2, is equally fallacious. It is well known that in the geological past the climate has been much warmer than it is today. How can this be possible if clouds produce a negative feedback. Would they not have prevented temperatures rising in the past just as they do today?

Above you state that global warming is "a one-of-a-kind event", but we know that the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum was caused by a sudden increase in greenhouse gases. Why did the negative feedback from clouds not prevent temperatures from soaring then?

Clouds are not the only phenomenon that affect planetary albedo. Ice coverage is another. When the Arctic sea ice disappears, melted by rising levels of carbon dioxide, then the global temperatures will rise until the cloud cover has increased to compensate for the loss of albedo caused by the melted ice sheets. The radiation at the top of the atmosphere must balance.

Most research findings on global warming are based on the concept that the greenhouse acts by re-emitting radiation back to the surface, but that is false. Carbon dioxide absorbs the heat radiated by the surface, and warms it. Enough CO2, then you have enough heat to melt the surface ice. That is how the greenhouse effect of climate change operates!

Cheers, Alastair.