From new story http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/42196/title/Urban_heat says in part:

Cooking by day and night

In one sense, urban heat islands have been around as long as urban areas have: They just started out small and grew as cities did. Buildings and pavement typically are made of materials that have a lower albedo — that is, they absorb more of the sun’s radiation than does the natural landscape — and, during the daytime, reach higher equilibrium temperatures than surrounding objects do. At night, the buildings and streets release much of that heat. The boost in both daytime and nighttime temperatures raises the average temperature in the city.

Another often unrecognized factor that boosts urban temperatures is the proliferation of impervious surfaces, says David J. Sailor, a mechanical engineer at Portland State University in Oregon. As the proportion of rain-shedding surfaces such as roofs, pavement, sidewalks and streets goes up, the water that previously would have soaked into the ground — and later would have soaked up heat as it evaporated — simply drains away into sewers or streams (SN: 9/4/04, p. 152). Areas swaddled with impervious surfaces, in essence, heat up because the ground has lost its ability to sweat.

The size, shape and arrangement of buildings, particularly in a downtown core dense with skyscrapers, can also influence urban temperatures, Sailor said at the AMS meeting. If the heat-soaked facade of a tall building can’t “see the sky” at night — in other words, if it is surrounded by other tall buildings — any heat it gives off at night ends up warming nearby buildings rather than radiating back into space.

Finally, says Sailor, human activity generates immense quantities of heat. Burning a kilogram of gasoline generates about 45 million joules of energy, enough to melt 60 kilograms of ice and bring it to boiling. So, each car on the road with moderate gas mileage — say, 10 kilometers per liter or 24 miles per gallon — releases enough heat to melt about 4.5 kilograms, or a 10-pound bag, of ice for every kilometer it travels.

Much of the energy used in buildings — for lighting, heating and producing hot water, for example — eventually makes its way into the environment as heat.

As a rough guide, Sailor notes, one-third of the anthropogenic heat contribution to an urban heat island comes from transportation, one-third comes from buildings and one-third stems from industrial processes. Nevertheless, all cities are different: The heat island in Houston, for example, is substantially aggravated by the large number of nearby oil refineries.

Although urban heat islands are nothing new, scientists haven’t conducted many detailed investigations of the phenomenon, says Brent Hedquist, an urban climatologist at Arizona State University in Tempe. In April 2008, he and his colleagues used portable weather stations and thermal imaging cameras to carry out a round-the-clock study in downtown Phoenix. Some studies, Hedquist says, have shown that the core of that city, one of the fastest growing urban areas in the nation, is on average between 7 and 11 degrees Celsius warmer than the surrounding countryside.

A first look at the Hedquist team’s field data qualitatively confirms what many lab studies might suggest: Facades of dense concrete and brick, some of which reached temperatures of 45°C, or 113°F, during the day, retained heat well into the night, while glass and metal cooled rather quickly after the sun went down. The details of that warm-up and cool-down, however, will be the topic of intense analyses. “The situation downtown is very complex,” Hedquist notes, with daytime heat absorption and nighttime heat loss depending on factors such as the angle at which the sun strikes building facades, the distance between the buildings and the speed and direction of prevailing winds.

Also on that page I’ve put a link to a 2005 report by Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation titled “Building a future on knowledge from the past: what palaeo-science can reveal about climate change and its potential impacts in Australia”.

In that report, I’m particularly intrigued by a graphic on coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef re Sea Surface Temperatures from 1600, uploaded to http://www.waclimate.net/imgs/csiro-palaeo-temps.jpg

The report authors best summarise what the top of the graph means:

“Annual records of sea surface temperature for regions around northern and western Australia have been derived from coral records (Figure 4). Current integration of these records suggests that, in contrast to the Northern Hemisphere temperature reconstructions (Mann and Jones 2003), SST in the tropical southwest Pacific during the latter part of the Little Ice Age (17th-19th centuries) were as warm as the early 1980s (Gagan et al. 2004).”

It looks remarkably similar to your graph re 25 Australian land temperature stations since 1882.

Gagan has interesting research re coral records and Australian climate history, including an abstract from one of his pages at the Australian National University: http://rses.anu.edu.au/people/gagan_m/index.php?p=abstracts

“Abrupt decrease in tropical Pacific sea surface salinity at end of Little Ice Age
Hendy EJ, Gagan MK, Alibert CA, McCulloch MT, Lough JM, Isdale PJ (2002). Science 295: 1511-1514.

Abstract:
A 420-year history of strontium/calcium, uranium/calcium, and oxygen isotope ratios in eight coral cores from the Great Barrier Reef, Australia, indicates that sea surface temperature and salinity were higher in the 18th century than in the 20th century. An abrupt freshening after 1870 occurred simultaneously throughout the southwestern Pacific, coinciding with cooling tropical temperatures. Higher salinities between 1565 and 1870 are best explained by a combination of advection and wind-induced evaporation resulting from a strong latitudinal temperature gradient and intensified circulation. The global Little Ice Age glacial expansion may have been driven, in part, by greater poleward transport of water vapor from the tropical Pacific.”

The IPCC is a political body that has advanced the climate ball, I believe, and you are obliged its reports, but its own confirmation bias is well established by now.

Are you not the tiny bit suspicious of studies emanating from the AGW grouping where the data to those studies is not made available to the wider scientific community, Manns Hockey Stick being an example. No such activity occurs within the skeptical community. I suggest you visit Climate audit to see how scientific data should be archived.
Do you actually believe without question the data emanating from the IPCC.

Matt, if this was one of those Alarmist sites or the Guardian you would be attacked personally on a constant basis or your posts would be deleted if a moderator thought your scientific evidence clashed with their world view. Be happy you found this site, it is a good place to learn and debate. There’s no thought police here because there is no political or religious approach to the subject.

I would like to draw Matt’s attention and everybody else’s too to these two plots

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c2/Vostok-ice-core-petit.png/400px-Vostok-ice-core-petit.png

where we see that the true prophecy is that the next ice age will be coming sometime sooner or later, and the expansion

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png

of the holocene period, where one sees the slow cooling of the planet from an average optimum about a degree warmer than now, and also the fluctuations of +/- 1C as time progresses.

These are records which show no runaway warming, or tipping points, unless downhill.

Humans could predict that the sun would rise in the morning at the time when they had no idea what the mechanism was, and had invented gods and chariots as a theory. The predictions were quite reliable.

Predicting from the above plots has equal reliability, we are not at the scientific level to know for sure the why and exactly how the plots are driven, though there are theories better than gods with chariots.

p.s. Matt, I happen to be an ignorant punk of a physicist with over thirty years experience in fitting models to data, in another field to be sure ( particle physics). And yes, I took it personally.

Oh yes this is such an open-minded site.

[REPLY - We do our best. We aim to please. #B^1 ~ Evan]

PS – Roger I indeed had a look at that book you linked to and will definitely read it, esp considering it’s quite up to date. But having looked, as you recommended, at the reviews attached, I don’t hold out much hope of objectivity – did you read the reviews of scientists who were misrepresented, wilfully distorted or not even consulted?

Did you see my post 04 08 02?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/03/19/despite-popular-opinion-and-calls-to-action-the-maldives-is-not-being-overrun-by-sea-level-rise/

it related to further information on Shaig who blogged you with information regarding the Maldives. If you see this it would be intersting to see your reply on the other thread.

The Aussie temperature sets look interesting. I did a follow up a little while ago on some of the records but gave up when one station in tasmania had only started recording 7 years ago and the high temperature was reported in the local paper as the hottest since records began. Technically true I suppose.

Tonyb

I think that on the whole irrationalists who visit here from say RC are treated much more gently than traffic in the other direction. Gavin et al can exhibit a level of vitriol and scorn not generally found here.

However you are right that some here do go at visiting irrationalists all guns blazing. Personally I welcome them as otherwise we tend to end up congratulating ourselves and singing from the same song sheet!

What gets me (and I suspect Smokey) are those who come here after reading a ‘how to deal with sceptics’ web site expecting us to behave like neanderthals, but then find we are really more rational than they thought.

I hope you keep posting in both places. Best regards

Tonyb

I have been aware of this place for a long time, and I don’t post that often here or anywhere else. I read broadly through a range of climate blogs, and when I have extra time, I tend to post at RC because as an AGW skeptic, that’s where I feel I can learn the most. (RC is the tautological site I accidentally dubbed WACBWAC, by the way, not Watts Up.) Granted I have to tread lightly over there as they are notoriously thin-skinned about those whose points of view are off the reservation. My point, though, is that even though I think WUWT is smarter, because I believe what it believes for the most part and so my prejudices are flattered, it strikes me that AGW proponents who visit here just as often have their motives questioned and hominems added.

Walter

Nice to see what I think is your first post.

I think that climate realists (us) and irrationalists them) fail to realise there are a number of sub groups.

Many on this blog are either scientists or highly knowlegable and have thought deeply about the subject and read a great deal of material. We weren’t born a sceptic but have become that way BECAUSE of looking at the ‘evidence’.

On this blog (and others like it) we also have a number of posters where the term ‘denier’ could be used in its real, not perjorative, sense. They tend to dislike govt, or a particular person, or otherwise have some sort of deep seated dislike of ‘them.’ They tend to shoot from the hip and it is these that tend to get sceptics tarred with the same brush (hence my use of the term climate realist to signal some thought has gone into our position.)

On the other side are the serious minded people-some of whom you will find at Real Climate- and whilst some may be open minded many others tend to think they have all the answers. Generally they are great on their interpretation of science, but poor on history and don’t tend to like it when its pointed out that few things regarding the climate can be termed ‘unprecedented.’ They do however deserve our respect.

There is a sub group of climate zealots who would believe that man is responsible no matter what alternative evidence was shown to them and if the AGW bubble deflated would merely latch on to another cause in order to find the excuse to tell the rest of us how we should live our own lives

Zealots might include Al Gores climate shock troops described here

http://www.theclimateproject.org/

I have come across them in my local high street and their zealotry far exceeds even a basic knowl;ege of climate science (co2 apparently constitutes 30% of the atmosphere)

The point is that no one has ever managed to prove that doubling co2 will cause a rise of up to 4.8c without introducing all manner of exotic and equally unproven feedbacks.

I guess that is why this prize is still unclaimed.

http://www.ultimateglobalwarmingchallenge.com/

Most of us here are perfectly rational and if this doubling hypotheses could be shown to be provable, or it was demonstrated that sea levels will rise 15 times faster than they currently are doing, or that ice levels will fall below those that occur in the arctic every 80 years or ….the list goes on.

Show us the proof and we wil all be posting on real climate urging everyone to do something before its too late to stop unprecedented climate change. As was said in 1930 and 1912 and 1817 and…

Look forward to reading more of your posts. (ps we also have a sense of humour here)

Tonyb