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...