Wood Romances

The graph above shows annual values and 11-year running means for TSI[1] and GMST anomalies[2] from HadCRUT5. It's very clear that 11-year running means for TSI have varied by very little. The brightest years differ from the dimmest years by only about 0.5 W/m^2, and some of the dimmest years have begun after 2010. However, GMST began to warm around 1910, and after a brief pause from 1940-1970, GMST has increased by an an average of 0.2°C/decade. There is not much evidence for correlation in this graph. If I plot both so that they are similar from 1850 to 1910, they part ways a little after 1910 and then diverge in trend after about 1960. Of course, you could argue that I've chosen a scale for TSI to exaggerate the differences, though this could only potentially be true from 1910-1960, but we can get past this objection by plotting annual TSI values on the x-axis and annual GMST anomalies on the y-axis. Here it's clear that annual TSI is a terrible predictor of GMST anomali...

Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have published a new paper (NZ24) in the quasi-predatory MDPI journal geomatics [1] which claims to rule out the effects of greenhouse gases as a cause for the increase in GMST in recent decades. Their paper concludes, 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. They produce a graph that they believe supports their claim, which sure enough shows a decrease in the Earth's albedo over the last 24 years and a corresponding increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). Let me be clear here at the beginning that there absolutely has been both a decrease in albedo and a corresponding in c...