
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 website.
In many regards, this paper represents the culmination and summation of the scientific work that 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 WCRP Conference presentation in 2011. In May 2022, we published their paper analyzing 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 the 2021 6th Assessment 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, the increased sunlight absorption by the Planet is the primary cause of the observed global warming since 2000.
The new paper also discusses, how the IPCC’s central concept about “heat trapping” by the so-called “greenhouse gases” arises from a misunderstanding of the reason the outgoing energy flux attenuates with altitude. The dissipation of thermal energy with height is actually due to a quasi-adiabatic process, which reduces the per-unit-volume energy of rising air parcels as they expand into lower pressure levels aloft. In this regard, the paper provides a new explanation of the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI) showing that it does not represent “heat gain” by the Earth system as presently assumed. The mainstream climate scientists and IPCC currently misinterpret EEI as “the most fundamental indicator for climate change” (e.g. von Schuckmann et al. 2023).
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.





























