As someone who's career included much use of Fourier Transforms, a quick skim of this paper finds an 'empirical harmonic model', which is very closely related. My first reactions have to be 'DUH!' and 'No **** Sherlock!'. Of course its hindcast is going to be excellent, that is what these transforms do. But it is merely a deconstruction of the periodic features of the measured function, and will force fit any nonperiodic features into the coefficients of the periodic elements. It doesn't do squat to forecast nonperiodic features, in fact it will fail miserably. I'll have to see if a deeper reading changes my first reaction.
This may come down to my imprecise language. When I say 'models', in my head that means based on physical mechanisms. Specifically, not based on fitting multivariate curves to some time-varying process. Scafetta does it with orbital motions of other planets. Mojo's previous similar offering was sunspot # which at least had the advantage of being a process that does affect things on earth. Yes these are both models in the broader sense, but lack mechanistic basis. The Mizkloski (I spell it from imperfect memory) humidity model was mechanistic, but with two important weaknesses. The physics was incorrect, and the presumed secular changes in humidity were of the wrong sign. So that one strictly qualifies. It performs an important service as a bad example, so I correct myself and put it on the list. Lindzen has published several models, so overall, I was wrong to say 'none'.
A new paper on solar effects on climate Solar activity not a key cause of climate change http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo2040.html By their models, the effect is not much. It is always good when some process can be shown as minor (on this time scale) especially one so unpredictable as solar output. We still have unpredictable volcanoes, semi-predictable ocean circulations, and well-known anthropogenic aerosols and CO2. The paper is paywalled but I have every reason to suppose that Schurer would send a copy. In fact, I just asked.
