The impact of recent forcing and ocean heat uptake data on estimates of climate sensitivity

I suspect this paper will be hailed on skeptical blogs everywhere but dismissed in the scientific community. The part of the paper that’s right is not new, and the part that’s new is not right. The impact of recent forcing and ocean heat uptake data on estimates of climate sensitivity is an article authored by Nicholas Lewis and Judith Curry, published in June 2018 in the Journal of Climate, operated by the American Meteorological Society. The article asserts that the global temperature will increase by 30-45% less than predicted (by 1.33-1.66°C), based on the actual warming as compared to the IPCC's models (which predict 1.9-3.3°C of warming).

Coverage
The article received coverage on all the usual "climate skeptic" sites: the Cornwall Alliance (which started it all), Reason magazine, Cato Institute, Heartland Institute, CNS News, Investor's Business Daily, Roy Spencer's blog, Watts Up With That, Climate Audit, PatriotPost.us, TheGlobalDispatch.com, cliscep.com, ClimateTheTruth.com, FabiusMaximus.com, Longroom, and both of the author's blogs.

Reality
In short: the Lewis and Curry models don't account for different warming between different locations.

In fact, the estimation method used by the authors has already been discounted by other scientists. Lewis and Curry's 2018 article is itself an updated version of their 2015 article, "The implications for climate sensitivity of AR5 forcing and heat uptake estimates", (commonly called "LC15") which was panned in the blogosphere by Richard Miller and Roz Pidcock.

In both their 2015 and 2018 papers, Lewis and Curry used an "energy budget" or "energy balance" model to estimate climate sensitivity (the warming that one would expect given a certain change in, for example, carbon dioxide concentration). This method has been critiqued by numerous papers, such as Marvel et al. 2018, Knutti et al. 2017, Richardson et al. 2015, Armour 2016, Richardson et al. 2016, Cawley et al. 2015, and Shindell 2014.

In particular, Dessler et al. 2018 responds to Lewis and Curry's 2015 paper (and others) directly. Dessler et al. 2018 already critiqued the methodological upgrade made between the 2015 and 2018 Curry and Lewis papers. In the 2018 paper, Curry and Lewis assert that something Dessler describes as "pattern effects" (ie, the different warming in different areas) doesn't impact their results. However, as Dessler notes, this is not substantiated by the literature, which seems to suggest that pattern effects have a significant effect on energy budget models. As a result, Curry and Lewis felt that Dessler et al. 2018's critque merited a response, which Dessler has also responded to.