Urban Heat Island Boosts Local Temperatures By 3C to 12C; + "Global Warming Will Have Been And Gone By 2030"

"It seems the urban heat island effect is about an order of magnitude larger than greenhouse gas warming. Why isn't this an existential threat?"

Urban Heat Island Boosts Local Temperatures By 3C to 12C

Urban heat island enhancement of local temperatures can range from 3C to 12C depending upon geography and arid/tropical climate zones. "It seems the urban heat island effect is about an order of magnitude larger than greenhouse gas warming," writes Ryan Maue, PhD. "Why isn't this an existential threat?"

A study by 37 researchers from 18 countries has come to the conclusion that the global temperature record has been contaminated by urban warming biases.

‘The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming’ was accepted for publication in the scientific peer-reviewed journal Climate on Aug 28, 2023.

Thermometers located in towns and cities give warmer readings than their countryside counterparts. This is a widely accepted fact, one that even the IPCC concede.

While urban areas account for <4% of the global land surface, the majority of weather stations used in official global temperature calculations are sited in metropolis settings. For this reason, a growing number of scientists are questioning mainstream global warming contentions, asking “have they been skewed by the urban heat island (UHI) effect?”

In their latest report, the IPCC estimate that ‘urban warming’ accounted for less than 10% of the global temperature rise. This new study however contends that the UHI effect might explain up to 40% of the documented warming since 1850.

The lead author of the study, Dr. Willie Soon, of the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences, described the paper's implications: “For many years, the general public has been assuming that the science on climate change is settled. This new study shows that this is not the case.”

Co-author, Prof. Ana Elias, Director of the Laboratorio de Ionosfera, Atmósfera Neutra y Magnetosfera (LIANM) at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán in Argentina, added: “This analysis opens the door to a proper scientific investigation into the causes of climate change.”

Similar conclusions have been reached by other recent studies, including Connolly et al. (2023) and Katata et al. (2023).

The United States government even discuss the topic on their climate website heat.gov, writing: The term “urban heat island” refers to the fact that cities tend to get much warmer than their surrounding rural landscapes, particularly during the summer. This temperature difference occurs when cities’ unshaded roads and buildings gain heat during the day and radiate that heat into the surrounding air. As a result, highly developed urban areas can experience mid-afternoon temperatures that are 15°F to 20°F warmer than surrounding, vegetated areas.

For decades now, scientists have queried the placement of thermometer stations given this skewed warming in built-up areas. And recently, a nationwide U.S. study conducted by the Heartland Institute, 'Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed', appears to have validated those concerns.

The detailed report, compiled using satellite data and in-person survey visits to NOAA weather stations around the U.S., reveals that 96% of these official stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization, producing heat-bias due to their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects.

Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards, and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term warming trends, not in the United States but across the world. Officials in Paris, for example, have announced plans to remove 40% of the asphalt in order to “cool the city”.

“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend,” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations,” he added.

NOAA’s 'Requirements and Standards for Climate Observations' instructs that temperature data instruments must be “...at least 100 feet from any extensive concrete or paved surface”.

The new report reveals the above instruction is routinely violated and, according to H. Sterling Burnett, also of the Heartland Institute, is evidence that “the government’s official temperature record can’t be trusted.”

Watts continued: “If you look at the unperturbed stations that do adhere to NOAA’s published standard—ones that are correctly located and free of localized urban heat biases—they display about half the rate of warming compared to perturbed stations that have such biases. Yet NOAA continues to use the data from their warm-biased century-old surface temperature networks to produce monthly and yearly reports to the public on the state of the climate. … By contrast, NOAA operates a state-of-the-art surface temperature network called the U.S. Climate Reference Network. It is free of localized heat biases by design, but the data it produces is never mentioned in monthly or yearly climate reports published by NOAA for public consumption.”

Man-made global warming appears to be mostly ‘man-made’.