I posted one link earlier, peer reviewed, showing models have forecast accurately. Perhaps you could look it up. There is more I could post on that subject but it will have to wait till I have time. Sorry but you'd have to substantiate your complete joke statement - if you look at the climate record this sort of "pause" is not uncommon in an ongoing uptrend. In addition there are charts that net out the impact of shorter term natural and fairly random ocean oscillations (ENSO), sunspot activity and volcanic activity, all also random. That work shows that adjusted for those factors the underlying warming trend has continued over the last 17 years. I'd have to dig that out to post, but it showed no change whatsover in the underlying warming trend. Over the last 17 years it has kept on warming.
re clouds, there is uncertainty, but it has been studied. stevos paper is one of several.
for example,this model verification versus physical cloud observations. There is as much evidence for positive feedback of clouds as there is negative. And given that overall models, despite what you believe, do track reality pretty well, I think you have to come up with some other reason to argue uncertainties are significant.
"As demonstrated by this figure, iRAM pattern most closely matches the CERES observational pattern, which indicates that iRAM simulates recently observed cloud cover changes in this the eastern Pacific more accurately than the GCMs. iRAM also successfully simulates the main features of the observed interannual variation of clouds in this region, including the evolution of the clouds through the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle. Given these conclusions, the logical assumption is that iRAM will also model future cloud cover changes more accurately. Operating under this assumption, the authors conclude as follows.
\"All the global warming cases simulated with iRAM show a distinct reduction in low-level cloud amount, particularly in the stratocumulus regime, resulting in positive local feedback parameters in these regions in the range of 4–7 W m-2 K-1....The GCM feedbacks vary from -1.0 to +1.3 W m-2 K-1, which are all less than the +1.8 to +1.9 W m-2 K-1 obtained in the comparable iRAM simulations. The iRAM results by themselves cannot be connected definitively to global climate feedbacks, but we have shown that among the GCMs the cloud feedbacks averaged over 30°S–30°N and the equilibrium global climate sensitivity are both correlated strongly with the east Pacific cloud feedback.
To the extent that iRAM results for cloud feedbacks in the east Pacific are credible, they provide support for the high end of current estimates of global climate sensitivity."
There are other cloud studies discussed here. Yes this is what stevo would call a pro AGW site. That is somewhat unavoidable when you reference climate science papers, given the science is pro agw
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=313
