Wood Romances

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...

  A study was published last year that used two independent methods to estimate the rate at which the Earth's Energy Imbalance is increasing between mid-2005 and mid-2019. The first method used in situ measurements to calculate the planetary heat uptake. This method found the trend for 0–2,000 m ocean heat content anomaly to be 0.43 ± 0.40 W/m^2/decade. The second method used satellite measurements to calculate a CERES TOA energy flux of 0.50 ± 0.47 W/m^2/decade. These two trends were statistically identical to each other - the difference between them was 0.068 ± 0.29 W/m^2/decade.  The average value for EEI for the entire study period was 0.77 ± 0.06 W/m^2. In a previous post , I used three different estimates for EEI, this paper, one from Hansen (2005-2010) and one from von Schuckmann (2011-2018). I plotted all three of these values in the center year for the estimate in yellow as "studies."  In the above graph, I plotted the values for CERES and in situ measurements as...

In a previous post , I calculated ECS (accounting for increases in GHGs and aerosols) to be about 3.3 C.  The calculation was based on CO2 causing 2.11 W/m^2 increase in radiative forcing with a total increase, after accounting for GHGs other than CO2 and aerosols, of 2.17 W/m^2 (aerosols cancel out most of the effects of GHGs outside of CO2). One weakness of that approach is that it used a value for EEI that was an average for 2011-2018 with forcings that were current through 2020. I've been thinking about a way to improve this, and here's what I came up with. Transient Climate Response (TCR) Since the relationship between CO2 and temperature is logarithmic, I decided to plot the relationship between temperature and ln(rCO2) to see what that might be able to tell us about sensitivity from empirical data. So in the above graph, on the y-axis I plotted GMST from HadCRUT5 using a 1850-1900 baseline to match the IPCC's approximation of preindustrial levels. On the x-axis, I pl...