Wood Romances

One of the more fun aspects of debunking pseudoscience claims is finding humorous ways to replicate the logical flaws of crank theories. The crank theories of Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) are among my favorites, and I just found what I think is a fun illustration of how their thinking can be so wrong while superficially looking convincing to the unskeptical. Simply stated, NZ took some data points about several rocky planets and moons and performed a curve fit for "Relative ATE" as a function of mean surface atmospheric pressure. It looks like this. Since they got the curve fit to work without including the impact of greenhouse gases (GHGs), their conclusion is that atmospheric composition and concentrations of GHGs are irrelevant to the global mean surface temperature on any rocky planet or moon. They then developed a model that reports to be able to predict the mean surface temperature of any rocky planet or moon with just three data points: TSI, albedo, and mean surface atmosp...

Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) published a "paper" ( this link downloads a pdf) in 2011 that claims to be a "unified theory of climate" (UTC). In it they offer the nuts and bolts of what they think is an alternative explanation for the greenhouse effect (GHE). Instead of greenhouse gases (GHGs), they argue that long-term climate changes are caused by changes in atmospheric mass that change atmospheric pressure. The change in pressure changes global temperature via the ideal gas law (IGL). This concept has already been debunked ; there's nothing resembling a working theory here. They seem very confused about the fact that it's work applied to compressing a gas that increases its temperature (and pressure); at hydrostatic equilibrium, pressure doesn't do work, and so pressure doesn't cause temperature to increase. If pressure could perform work to increase temperature, it would violate conservation of energy. Pressure changes as a result of the work that inc...

This is a follow up to a post about Nikolov & Zeller here , updated on 4/14/2025. In a recent manuscript [1] "published" on the so-called Science of Climate Change blog, Nikolov and Zeller (NZ) articulate how they believe that the Earth's temperature remains warmer than its effective temperature. Without getting into whether that amount should be considered 90K or 33K, it's clear that for them the long-term baseline temperature of earth is determined solely by total solar irradiance (TSI) and atmospheric pressure (P). Here it is in their words: NASA planetary data indicate that the radiative “greenhouse effect” does not exist in reality. That’s because, across a wide range of planetary environments in the Solar System, the long-term (baseline) global surface temperature on rocky planets and moons is fully determined by the mean Total Solar Irradiance (i.e. distance from the Sun) and total surface atmospheric pressure. Variability on this long-term baseline temper...

Even though there is no theoretical basis for the Beer-Lambert formula, ∆RF = αln(C/Co), it has been accepted by the scientific community as a reasonable approximation. In this paper we propose an improved mathematical approximation that... has no theoretical basis. ~ H. Douglas Lightfoot A paper was published in Energy & Environment by Lightfoot & Mamer back in 2014 (LM14)[1] arguing that we should toss out decades of research establishing a theoretical basis for and quantifying the logarithmic relationship between changes in CO2 ( ∆CO2) and radiative forcing ( ∆RF ) for no good reason. In it's place, they sought to replace it with the results of a curve fitting exercise for no good reason except to generate an equation that would conform with a climate myth that was conclusively refuted in the 1950s. A theoretical basis for the near-logarithmic relationship between  ∆CO2 and  ∆RF was established beginning in 1896 with Arrhenius' landmark paper. Arrhenius quantified ...

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...

Update (12/29/2024):  The paper I discuss below was retracted a couple days ago, citing failures in the peer-review process. "Subsequent to acceptance of this paper, the rigor and quality of the peer-review process for this paper was investigated and confirmed to fall beneath the high standards expected by Applications in Engineering Science . After review by additional expert referees, the Editor-in-Chief has lost confidence in the validity of the paper and has decided to retract." A paper published earlier this year is the latest in the long history of attempts to show that CO2 is already "saturated" in the atmosphere, and therefore increased CO2 cannot cause any more warming. The latest in a series of these kinds of papers from Kubicki et al 2024[1] attempts to make this point by modeling the atmosphere in a couple different experiments. The result of their experiments suggested to them that we should question whether "additionally emitted CO2 in the atmosp...

A recent paper[1] published in the MDPI journal Climate by Frank Stefani provides a wonderful illustration of why we should never treat papers from MDPI journals as having any competent, let alone robust peer review. This paper argues that TCR = 1.1°C (0.6°C - 1.6°C) for doubling CO2. I'm not going to evaluate the entire paper here, since that would take too much time. The paper does make some counterfactual claims, like there's a "nearly perfect correlation of solar activity with temperatures over about 150 years." That's objectively false, but the correlation between CO2 forcings and GMST has an r^2 = 0.88. There's also some comical contrarian alarmism in this paper: "we fear that the huge Milankovitch drivers will—perhaps much too soon—massively interfere with the solar and anthropogenic factors that were considered in this paper." There's a lot we could say about this paper, but I want to focus here on some elementary math errors that would ...