Nikolov and Zeller: Analysis showing Earth’s climate is driven by Sun and cloud albedo now published

Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have just had a huge, paradigm shifting paper published by peer reviewed journal MDPI Geomatics. This was an invited paper, so Ned and Karl didn’t have to pay fees for it to be open access. You can freely download and share it, (local copy here). The peer review process took 45 days, with only minor revisions to the manuscript required. MDPI operate an open review process and you can see the questions asked by the reviewers and clarifications provided by the authors at the relevant links on their site.

In many regards, this paper represents the culmination and summation of the scientific work Ned and Karl have been publishing over the last 15 years. Here at the talkshop, we’ve been following and discussing the development of their empirical and theoretical work. We picked up on their first publicly available work, an extended poster on their Unified Theory of Climate written following a conference presentation in 2011. In May 2022 we published their paper analysing the CERES data and deriving climate sensitivities to various forcings for open peer review. The present paper draws it all together and fills the gap left by the IPCC in their AR6 climate report by their misrepresentation of and failure to discuss the decrease in reflected solar radiation and its effect on increases in Earth’s surface temperature. As Ned and Karl’s new paper shows, it’s the primary cause of the observed warming in Earth’s surface temperature.

The new paper also discusses how the IPCC’s central concept of ‘heat trapping’ by ‘greenhouse gases’ arises from a misconception of the reason the outgoing energy flux attenuates with altitude. This reduction of energy with height is actually largely due to quasi-adiabatic processes which reduce the per-unit-volume energy of rising air parcels as they expand into the lower pressure regime aloft.

Ned’s announcement of the new paper on X has caused a stir. Since 5pm BST yesterday, it’s been liked 4.3k times and reposted 2.4k times, with over 180 followup comments.

Here’s fig. 7 as a taster/teaser. See the abstract below the break.

Abstract

Past studies have reported a decreasing planetary albedo and an increasing absorption of solar radiation by Earth since the early 1980s, and especially since 2000. This should have contributed to the observed surface warming. However, the magnitude of such solar contribution is presently unknown, and the question of whether or not an enhanced uptake of shortwave energy by the planet represents positive feedback to an initial warming induced by rising greenhouse-gas concentrations has not conclusively been answered. The IPCC 6th Assessment Report also did not properly assess this issue. Here, we quantify the effect of the observed albedo decrease on Earth’s Global Surface Air Temperature (GSAT) since 2000 using measurements by the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) project and a novel climate-sensitivity model derived from independent NASA planetary data by employing objective rules of calculus. Our analysis revealed that the observed decrease of planetary albedo along with reported variations of the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) explain 100% of the global warming trend and 83% of the GSAT interannual variability as documented by six satellite- and ground-based monitoring systems over the past 24 years. Changes in Earth’s cloud albedo emerged as the dominant driver of GSAT, while TSI only played a marginal role. The new climate sensitivity model also helped us analyze the physical nature of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) calculated as a difference between absorbed shortwave and outgoing longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere. Observations and model calculations revealed that EEI results from a quasi-adiabatic attenuation of surface energy fluxes traveling through a field of decreasing air pressure with altitude. In other words, the adiabatic dissipation of thermal kinetic energy in ascending air parcels gives rise to an apparent EEI, which does not represent “heat trapping” by increasing atmospheric greenhouse gases as currently assumed. We provide numerical evidence that the observed EEI has been misinterpreted as a source of energy gain by the Earth system on multidecadal time scales.

Full paper here
Local copy here

Please leave your thoughts and comments below. Ned Nikolov will be around to answer questions in due course.