Above: NOAA Satellite IR image showing UHI of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, DC
Above: A trend comparison slide from my tour, courtesy of my friend, former California State Climatologist Jim Goodridge.
Simon at ACM writes:
So reads the headline on the ABC website, as if it’s something we don’t know. Obviously, as cities increase in size, the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect will also increase. However, the latest “research” bolts this on to the IPCC’s incorrectly exaggerated warming predictions, to give some even scarier scenarios:
Dr Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the UK’s Met Office, and colleagues, report their findings in the journal Geophysical Research Letters [although I cannot find the article there right now].
Betts and colleagues found not only do cities retain more heat than rural areas do but hot cities will grow even hotter as the climate warms and cities grow.
By mid-century, night-time temperatures in cities could rise by more than 5.6°C, they say.
At stake are the comfort and health of people who live in cities around the world, especially those who don’t have access to air-conditioning.
“If you’ve been exposed to hot temperatures during the day and you expect relief over night, that becomes increasingly difficult as temperatures at night get warmer,” says Betts. “We have to prepare to live in a warmer world.”
In a concrete jungle, roads and buildings absorb sunlight and trap heat, which also flows as waste out of cars, air-conditioning units and even just the breathing of millions of people crammed into a busy grid of streets.
As a result, cities create their own, warmer microclimates – a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect.
Unfortunately, this is another GIGO* case, where the results from the IPCC’s incomplete models, which vastly overstate the sensitivity of the climate, are plugged into further models of UHI effects (which may or may not be accurate). However, satellite temperatures are continuing to diverge from the IPCC’s predictions, which means that research based on them is the stuff of fairytales.
Read it here.
* Garbage in, garbage out
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“heat, which also flows as waste out of cars, air-conditioning units and even just the breathing of millions of people crammed into a busy grid of streets.”
But lets not even mention the possibility that this heat may be responcible for the entirety of the “global” warming… naw, this heat is totally inconsequential except that it will make city people less comfortable.
I just can’t believe they took IPCC numbers polluted by UHI and then added in further UHI!!! But, of course, we’re all goin’ to die, its worse than we thought, where can we run? (how about Antarctica…)
Western cities will keep having to grow and use more power and become hotter because of the scale of immigration (legal and illegal) that the so called progressives don’t want slow or prevent and yet they’re the same group saying we have to beat global warming, become energy independent, etc.
A little fact : London’s indigenous population is 40% lower than it was in 1940. The overall population including all immigrants is still half a million less than 1940. So Londoners have been very environmentally friendly without being forced and would have been very energy secure if they had a sensible immigration policy much earlier.
Let’s also not forget that cities are hotter today because the air is cleaner than it was a century ago which allows much more sunlight to penetrate to ground level to heat up asphalt, brick, metal and concrete. Not many kids getting rickets today because of blocked sunlight.
I have yet to see a single climate model or temperature reconstruction which takes this into account and subtracts heating caused by it.
That Goodridge 1996 chart you have up there is – in my opinion – the best, clearest, most visually arresting example I have ever seen of why the Hockey Stick … philosophy…is so very wrong. It simply smacks you in the face. The assertion, “Who can argue with that?” was seemingly made for this chart.
So, the formula for climate “scientists” seems to be to take something bleedingly obvious to anyone with half a brain, pretend to discover it, and then use their sacred GCMs to “predict” something “worse than we thought” down the road concerning that one “newly-discovered” aspect. The amazing thing is that they get paid to do what an uneducated monkey could do.
To Al Gore’s Holy Hologram; sadly, Rickets and Tuberculosis, formerly associated with Victorian overcrowding and poverty, are on the rise again in UK cities. Rickets is very hard to cure in Asian and Black populations as their skin colour makes them more resistant than white children to sunlight and its curative properties; inner-city poverty and overcrowding still remains a problem which speeds the spread of Tuberculosis.
Has industrial decline and substantial depopulation had any influence on the temperature trends in Detroit? One might expect a ‘negative UHI’ effect – if there is one it would support the causation link between population growth and rising urban temperatures. I can’t think of anywhere else that has experienced such a big decline in human activity.
I have long been of the opinion(which I stress because I can only back it up with anecdotes, not facts) that UHI, not CO2 or any other specific atmospheric component has been responsible for what is being attributed to AGW and the perception that the climate is changing (ie getting “worse” or hotter, or whatever). I believe UHI has had a specific effect on convective weather in many urbanized areas, resulting in more of it, and in some cases, more severe local weather, due to the local increase in the available heat that enters the troposphere. This would of course lead to all kinds of assertions that AGW must real – look how the weather is changing…. If the hypothesis is correct this would be to a degree true, but only on a local scale. We may be seeing a redistrbution of tropospheric heat, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean global warming. It might mean, however, that circulation patterns of heat (and humidity as a corollary) at the tropospheric level may change, or at least vary from what people historically remember, or what might be recorded from a variety of ground sensors .
My back-of-the-napkin view comes in part of having spent most of my life within a region that has urbanized dramatically over my lifetime. I have very distinct remembrances of summer storm patterns of my youth, and current experiences indicate a local change in weather that appear to be to have more to do with humidity than temperature on its own.
At the root is an apparent observed anecdotal correlation between the expansion of cities and the loss of the ameliorating effect of greenspace. Toronto, for example, was always several degrees hotter downtown at night than most surrounding smaller communities, back even when Toronto was only 150,000 people and the the surrounding communities were less than 50K (I’m old enough to remember that…:( ) I have no idea where the UHI “critical mass” to observed effect is, but I believe it to be real (disclaimer: this not an admission of an acceptance of AGW as promulgated by the illiterati…)
If the climate establishment could bring itself to recognize the reality of the UHI, it could get busy fighting beastly hot urban summers with effective and inexpensive local recommendations, rather than crusading for ruinously expensive and probably ineffective CO2 controls.
Local measures that come to mind include increased transpiration (and night radiation?) through trees, parks, and grass, and higher albedo through more reflective roofs and pavings. Steven Chu’s suggestion of lighter roofing will have roughly zero effect on global temperature, simply because roofs are such a small fraction of global area. However, it would have a big impact on city temperatures, and therefore on the living conditions of millions of people.
Every degree cities are cooled through these measures will have the bonus effect that people won’t be running their ACs as much. This reduced electricity consumption will at once reduce real (smoggy) pollution from power plants, and will directly reduce the UHI to the extent it comes from AC units.
A state of Florida publication released about 12 years ago rates different roofing materials and notes that before AC, reflective white roofing tiles were the norm instead of red ones, and that these worked very well. Unfortunately, I can’t find the link to it offhand, but California has a page of links to similar information at http://www.consumerenergycenter.org/coolroof/links.html. See also http://www.homeenergy.org/archive/hem.dis.anl.gov/eehem/94/940509.html.
But unfortunately the AGW establishment minimizes UHI in order to validate its global temperature indices, and thereby loses this opportunity to have a meaningful impact on living conditions!
I have a great idea, lets cool the world (kind of like an air conditioner) to keep the cities at a nicer temperature. Like we could paint the mountains white along with our rooftops and dump iron filings in to the ocean. Very environmentally friendly!
This seems to be further evidence that the AGW crowd is desperately grasping at anything to maintain a slippery foothold on their message. Nothing is too outrageous. Some weeks ago we were assaulted (and insulted) with this ridiculous headline:
“Over 4.5 Billion people could die from Global Warming-related causes by 2012” (http://www.agoracosmopolitan.com/home/Frontpage/2007/01/08/01291.html)
Today, this appears in my local newspaper:
“Humans will be extinct in 100 years says eminent scientist” (http://www.physorg.com/news196489543.html)
Apparently, Dr. Frank Fenner believes humans will cause their own extinction. Conveniently, Fenner won’t be around in 100 years to explain himself if his theory proves to be wrong.
I am sick and tired of this absolute nonsense from the AGW horror show. These people spin spooky stories and try to scare the pants off anyone who’ll listen.
Well, I’m weary of this game! Anyone with an ounce of common sense is not listening to this drivel anymore! Go find an island, ride out your disaster, and leave the rest of us alone!
I had an amazing discussion online with a climate alarmist who felt [not thought ? ] that parking lots and UHI should be included in global warming.
His/her feeling was that the temperature of the earth should reflect the experiences of the people inhabiting it. So the 8.3 million new yorkers should get more votes than the 1 million sheep in Montana. Do we create a new temperature index based on nerve endings exposed to it ? Do sheep even count ?
This logic [?] is amazing to me. Silliness abounds !
You can create such an index but it is meaningless when asking how much impact CO2 has made.
soon it will be a “rite” to have air conditioning///payed by tax payers??????
Interesting. To the far west you can see Martinsburg, WV, Hagerstown, MD, and Chambersburg, PA. These cities have populations of no more than 40K (at least in the city limits), yet show up easily. Some of the visible spots in central PA have even less population.
Does this mean that CAGW is better correlated with a cars brakes and radiator than the tailpipe?
Does this mean that replacing a 4 kw petrol engine with a 4 kw electric engine has no net difference since both ultimately convert 4 kw of energy to heat?
Has anyone ever done the correlation between vehicle, air conditioner and furnace sales and global average temperature?
[anonymous comment, please ignore]
“We have to prepare to live in a warmer world.”
Considering you were talking about UHI and cities this statement should have been we have to prepare to live in warmer cities.
That´s a consequence of liberals´”free-love” promoting activities, which are highly exothermic! ☺
It’s worse than we thought.
We have finally found the warmists’ run-away condition:
1. UHI causes people to run their air conditioners more.
2. More air-conditioning causes more UHI;
3. Repeat from step 1.
I’m telling you, they’re building and building to the big punchline: “Anthroprogenic Global Warming is caused by Anthroprogenics and the only way to solve the problem is to limit the number of Anthroprogenics on this here planet!”
Sure, they’ll do everything they can the Ol’ Marxien Way to get all us little starving lemmings in our rags and tatters to buy their Party Line and spend everything we have on nonsense measures to cool the world down a little, then they’ll get us all lined up at the edge of the cliffs and once it’s obvious –even to us lemmings— that nothing else will work, they’ll get their little cattleprods out and start nudging us over the side. Of course, they will retain a few of the younger and better looking among us to clean up and serve and make the world a nicer place for them. Say “La V”.
Part of the problem in getting people to understand that they’re dealing with UHI effects, not generalized warming is that people assume that where they live is representative of the rest of the country. Unless people periodically get out of the city into smaller cities or the countryside, they can live under the delusion that the world is warming. I know of people who haven’t been outside of a large city in years and their only contact with the countryside is from 38,000 feet when they fly over it enroute to another large city.
2 years ago I lived in an apartment in downtown Vancouver and summers were brutally hot. I would go out to my balconey after midnight and still feel the concrete walls of the building radiating heat. The coolest spot around was the beach and this was fortunately a short walk away. Also, I could always go to my air conditioned office on some of the worst days. Unfortunately I didn’t have a USB temperature monitor to record daily temperature fluctations but did setup a VOM with RS232 output once to sample a thermocouple for a few days one summer to get circadian temperature profiles of my apartment.
Now that I live in Kamloops, a city of <100,000 people, the days are hotter than in Vancouver but nights cool down very quickly. Even the "downtown" section of Kamloops seems to cool much faster as the thermal mass of the buildings is much less than downtown Vancouver (which probably has a population greater than that of Kamloops). What is needed is a world temperature measure in which urban temperature records are just considered to apply in the urban area. Urban areas represent a small fraction of the total land mass of the earth and what we really need are lots of temperature profiles of cities compared to the countryside (like Anthony posted a few weeks back). What would be really interesting would be how these varied between noon and midnight.
Does the UHI affect the temperatures recorded by the satellites?
trbixler says:
June 26, 2010 at 7:30 am
Not to mention spreading soot on the ice caps and upgrading our computer operating systems! [Oh…maybe that was the last two crazes I am thinking about.]
beng says:
June 26, 2010 at 7:57 am
Of course it is warmer. Cities, large and small, are burning coal and oil and using nuclear power generated hundreds of miles away and transporting that energy in the form of electricity by the Gigawatts from there into population centers. Of course it is warmer there. As a comparator, has anyone done an IR scan of Amish country? Bet it’s cooler there than in population/size-comparable areas of modern people. Would be a neat exercise to find the answer.
In the winter, all the homes are heated and cooled with Gigawatts from elsewhere, so the UHI should show up more pronounced in the winter and summer than in the temperate spring and fall.