I think it might be worth noting at this point that the thread has been derailed since way back here, so as a sort of public service let me navigate the path of derailment and maybe bring it back on track.
FX made the pronouncement that climate models are basically useless, and provided a series of reasons that I debunked in the above post. (And then started this thread based on a fundamentally wrong premise made all the more delightful by the fact that it references a paper whose main conclusions are based on climate models, and which cites another paper also deriving its conclusions from models.)
But FX chose to ignore the climate model rebuttal, and focus on denying that he has a consistent pattern of getting major scientific facts wrong. When I linked to a list of examples, suddenly, out of the blue, that tack was abandoned as well, and we got a completely new digression about solar UV variations.
I provided here a bit of scientific background on solar UV, at which point FX throws in a paper which, as pointed out, confirms exactly what I had just finished saying.
Undeterred, FX throws in another one, which he didn’t link (he accidentally linked to the first one again). But it’s from an NRC workshop report that I’ve read and I quoted salient parts from it above, and again, it’s consistent with everything I’ve been saying.
So the digression about solar variations ultimately adds nothing to the discussion about AGW and can be concluded thus: TSI varies around 0.1% between solar maxima and minima but is overall remarkably constant across solar cycles and within geologically short timeframes, specifically the post-industrial era in which climate is being discussed and closely scrutinized. It varies more over much longer periods, but that is completely irrelevant to this discussion. Additionally, UV varies by larger amounts in a spectrally-dependent fashion, and these effects are interesting from the standpoint of stratospheric heating and photochemical effects, which could affect regional weather and have implications that should be considered in climate models – but they all fall within the tightly bounded energy constraints of total incoming solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere, the TSI. The fallacy here is in disingenuously focusing on words like “changes” and “climate effects” without understanding their contextual meaning, to try to imply changes that have statistically significant persistent impacts on global mean surface temperature, which is manifestly not what either of those papers is saying and is obvious to anyone who has read and understood them. Anyone who doubts that has only to look at the Changes in Solar Irradiance part of the latest IPCC AR5 forcings summary, which incorporates most of the relevant recent research.