The Urban Heat Island effect on temperature records is real, despite what some people wish you to believe. Peter, a sixth grader, and his dad, thought so too, and take the data from NASA GISS and show in a simple video, what we’ve been saying for years here at WUWT. Urbanization, land use, and station siting matter.
Watch Peter’s excellent video below:
They used a simple pairing of rural and urban sites to show the differences. This shows why homogenization, which smears all the data from urban and rural sites together, is a bad idea, and gives trends that don’t exist in reality.
I like the ending where he says in the rolling credits “Peter’s dad is not employed or funded by any energy or oil companies”. It’s funny that they’d feel a need to say this. No National Science Foundation funding needed either.
This video appeared in comments on WUWT, if anybody knows how to contact Peter or his dad, please advise. We are in touch now.
One wonders what the response of the well funded Hadley Centre, Met Office scientist Dr. David Parker, might be to this video.
Parker’s 2006 paper published in the Journal of Climate titled: “A Demonstration that Large scale warming is not urban” claims:
The analysis of Tmin demonstrates that neither urbanization nor other local instrumental or thermal effects
have systematically exaggerated the observed global warming trends in Tmin. The robustness of the analysis to the criterion for “calm” implies that the estimated overall trends are insensitive to boundary layer structure and small-scale advection, and to siting, instrumentation, and observing practices that increasingly influence temperatures as winds become lighter. Furthermore, even at windy sites (e.g., St. Paul, Aleutian Islands, in Fig. C1), the calmest terce and especially the calmest decile will be strongly affected by occasions with very light winds in passing ridges or blocking anticyclones, and should reveal any urban warming influence.
…the results of the present study also suggest that they have not affected the estimates of temperature trends.
Steve McIntyre gave Parker’s paper a scathing review in 2007’s article:
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GISS raw or GISS homogenized?
WOW! too cool (no pun intended)
I’ve been waiting for a larger scale comparison like this one for a while. David Archibald did one years ago with a few southeastern US sites thru 2003, and came up with similar results.
LOL at the title!
I saw it. Great job. My only concern is that since he uses r2 on the 106 year history the earlier variations may impact the slope of the regression line. As we know GW theory concentrates on the last 30 years.
A bright spot among all the depressing news.
There is hope for the world yet.
Well done Peter (and Dad!).
Thank you.
Well done, Peter, (and Dad).
The video says it all. The alarmists at Copenhagen should be made to watch it.
Give the lad a scholarship at UEA.
NOW!
Very well done.
Perhaps the climate community could learn a thing or three.
Very cool! So now we have evidence of what ordinary people have known for at least a hundred years. That is: “Honey, it sure is hot here in the city, let’s take a drive out to the country and cool off”. 🙂
re: contact. You could try sending a message via his youtube user account.
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheseData
As a layperson I have been wading through all of the explanations, theories, graphs and charts published by so many brilliant scientists, and now, thanks to one sixth grader, I can finally understand it! I realize it is very simplistic, but it sure makes more sense now. Thanks, Peter!
The best part is, getting “peer review” involves polling a few of his friends at recess 😉
Has any one ever said what the actual annual temperature should be for 2009?
How do we know we are deviating, if we do not know what we are deviating from?
Congratulations, Peter and Dad.
Why not send this to people at Copenhagen? Someone MAY look at it and be challenged, though their minds are so closed that this is doubtful.
CodeTech that was great! Recess…………….
Out standing!!!
Now if Peter could cross check the stations he used, with WUWT Surface Station info and see what the condition is for each of the Rural stations and then get some help on doing a proper correction for poor stations, my guess is we would see a cooling trend.
Stephen
Somebody give that boy a Nobel prize.
Excellent job Peter and Dad.
It sure makes the professional weather people look sophomoric.
Keep up digging into the data. Who knows you might get an honorary degree out of your work.
I love it.
And wouldn’t you think the adjustment would be negative to account for UHI … Isn’t it weird that all the IPCC UHI adjustments are the opposite?
better than this, produced by adults… maybe even a ‘scientist’…. they say GHG lower food production! submit youtube ccomments
Forgive me if this was already posted, but Dr. Bill Gray had an interesting commentary:
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/4369/Hurricane-Expert-Rips-Climate-Fears-There-has-been-an-unrelenting-quarter-century-of-onesided-indoctrination
Re Anon (13:02:50) :
But that vidio only makes claims, it does not present any data or do any analysis.
Absolutely astounding!
There is nothing more delightful than to see a sixth grader produce a better temperature study than our tax paid climate masters. They should submit a paper to the Geophysical Journal and Nature. It would be most satisfying to see a sixth grader get published. It would certainly put the state of climate research into perspective.
So if I understand, the cause of increased temperatures is, er, heating….. due to factories, aircon units, auto engines etc, and not the fantastically complicated greenhouse gas forcing effect. Can’t be – that is much too simple and logical and there are no PhDs, Nobel Prizes or Enron trading scams to be made out of it, not to mention the free hookers in front of Peter.
Re: tallbloke (12:35:59) :
Give the lad a scholarship at UEA.
NOW!
What did the poor kid do to deserve having to work with that sorry bunch?