This paper completely typifies the current state of tautological climate science research. In their work they run a 'massive ensemble' of Bern2.5D climate models and fit the output to various observational datasets. Then they use the best fit to infer the balance of relative forcing in the climate model. But, these results tell nothing about the actual world - only what the effect of relative forcings are on the Bern2.5D climate model. A better title would be 'Anthropogenic and natural warming inferred from the Bern2.5D climate model'.
I am amazed this convoluted and obfuscated paper made it past peer review into Nature. Most of the technical details in this paper give ref. 17 - which is the author's own thesis. The thesis is a collection of the author’s papers, which is fine, apart from chapter 5 is this paper itself! This has to be the most incredible example of circular referencing I have ever seen. This is aside from all the small technical details in the paper, such giving all forcing agents ‘equal efficacy’ and leaving out that troublesome last five years of constant ocean temperature that doesn’t fit into that nice upward trend etc.
I should also add that their energy-balance model is the most basic possible description of the energy budget and is very well known. If fact, NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites are in space at the moment, busy measuring the terms in ‘their’ eq. 1.
Energy balance points to man-made climate change - physicsworld.com