Some supporting research conducted at New York City follows the news item below. h/t to WUWT reader Phil (not the grouchy one) -A
Heat islands: Cities heat quickly, cool slowly
By DEEPTI HAJELA
Associated Press Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Hot town, summer in the city? No kidding.
The high temperatures blanketing the Northeast and mid-Atlantic regions of the country are making many people miserable, but those in New York City, Philadelphia and other dense, built-up areas are getting hit with the heat in a way their counterparts in suburbs and rural areas aren’t.
Cities absorb more solar energy during the day and are slower to release it after the sun sets, making for uncomfortable nights and no real relief from the heat. And because they haven’t cooled down as much overnight, mornings are warmer and the thermometer goes right back up when the sun starts beating down the next day.
Scientists have known for years about so-called heat islands, urban areas that are hotter than the less-developed areas around them.
Cities are just “not well designed to release that summertime heat,” said William Solecki, geography professor at Hunter College and director of the City University of New York’s Institute for Sustainable Cities.
The lack of nighttime relief can make the daytime high temperatures even more difficult for people to take as the days pass and the heat continues, he said.
That’s “where you start to have real problems, if your body’s not cooling down,” Solecki said. “You’re not getting that break.”
Deaths blamed on the heat included a 92-year-old Philadelphia woman whose body was found Monday and a homeless woman found lying next to a car Sunday in suburban Detroit.
The heat-islands effect is significant in the East because “we have a large population living in heavily built-up areas with lots of concrete and lots of steel, good absorbers of heat,” National Weather Service spokesman Sean Potter said.
full story here at Tampa Bay Online
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Here is some supporting research from NASA (not NASA GISS).
Keeping New York City “Cool” is the Job of NASA’s “Heat Seekers”
Jan. 30, 2006
The “heat is on” in New York City, whether it’s summer or winter. This is due to a phenomenon called the urban heat island effect that causes air temperatures in New York City and other major cities to be warmer than in neighboring suburbs and rural areas. And, in a big city, warmer air temperatures can impact air quality, public health and the demand for energy.
Image to right: A thermal satellite image of New York City captured by NASA’s Landsat satellite on August 14, 2002 at 10:30 a.m., shows the locations of the warmest air temperatures as seen in red. The blue indicates areas with cooler air temperatures. Click on image to enlarge. Credit: NASA
Recently, several innovative approaches developed by scientists, public officials, environmental activists, community organizations and others have been put in place to take a bite out of the Big Apple’s temperature problem. NASA researchers, using NASA satellite observations, weather pattern data and computer models, have recently assessed how well those strategies are working. Their study results will be discussed during the 2006 American Meteorological Society’s annual meeting in Atlanta, Ga., Jan. 29 through Feb. 2.
“We need to help public officials find the most successful ways to reduce the heat island effect in New York. With ever-increasing urban populations around the world, the heat island effect will become even more significant in the future,” said Stuart Gaffin, an associate research scientist at Columbia University, New York, and a co-author of the new NASA study. “The summertime impacts are especially intense with the deterioration of air quality, because higher air temperatures increase ozone. That has health effects for everyone. We also run an increased risk of major heat waves and blackouts as the heat island effect raises demand for electricity.”
In cities, the urban heat island effect is caused by the large number of buildings, sidewalks and other non-natural surfaces that limit the amount of land covered with vegetation like grass and trees. Land surfaces with vegetation offer high moisture levels that cool the air when the moisture evaporates from soil and plants.
Image to left: This image indicates case study areas in New York City used in the NASA study, and weather stations. Click on image to enlarge. Credit: NASA
In large cities, land surfaces with vegetation are relatively few and are replaced by non-reflective, water-resistant surfaces such as asphalt, tar and building materials that absorb most of the sun’s radiation. These surfaces hinder the natural cooling that would otherwise take effect with the evaporation of moisture from surfaces with vegetation. The urban heat island occurrence is particularly pronounced during summer heat waves and at night when wind speeds are low and sea breezes are light. During these times, New York City’s air temperatures can rise 7.2 degrees F higher than in surrounding areas.
In the recent project, NASA researchers set out to recommend ways to reduce the urban heat island effect in New York City. They looked at strategies such as promoting light-colored surfaces such as roofs and pavements that reflect sunlight, planting “urban forests” and creating “living roofs” on top of buildings where sturdy vegetation can be planted and thrive. Using a regional climate computer model, the researchers wanted to calculate how these strategies lower the city’s surface and close-to-surface air temperatures and what the consequences of these strategies would be on New York’s energy system, air quality and the health of its residents.
The researchers conducted a city-wide case study over the summer of 2002 to measure changes in air temperatures. They also used six smaller case studies during the same period in places like Lower Manhattan, the Bronx’s Fordham section, Brooklyn’s Crown Heights section and the Maspeth section of Queens. The areas were chosen for the different ways land is used and their nearness to areas with high electrical use. They also had warmer-than-average near-surface air temperatures called “hot spots” and boasted available spaces to test ways to reduce the urban heat island effect.
“We found that vegetation is a powerful cooling mechanism. It appears to be the most effective tool to reduce surface temperatures,” Gaffin said. “Another effective approach is a man-made approach to cooling by making very bright, high albedo, or reflected light, on roof tops. These light-colored surfaces, best made using white coatings, reflect the sun’s light and thereby, its heat. Interestingly, more area is available to create the lighter surfaces than to add vegetation in a city such as New York.”
This project is being conducted by and funded by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). For more information on the NYSERDA’s Environmental Monitoring, Evaluation, andProtection (EMEP) project, please visit on the Web: http://www.nyserda.org/programs/Environment/EMEP/project/6681_25/6681_25_pwp.asp.
Reference
Rosenzweig, C., W. Solecki, L. Parshall, S. Gaffin, B. Lynn, R. Goldberg, J. Cox, and S. Hodges 2006. Mitigating New York City’s heat island with urban forestry, living roofs, and light surfaces. Presentation at 86th American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting, Jan. 31, 2006, Atlanta, Georgia.
We weren’t so lucky. Yesterday, our paper talked about the heat wave and couldn’t stop themselves from quoting Michael Mann, who is God to them. Of course Mann played up the global warming thing and said that this is just a “taste” of things to come.
Wow Anthony – your message has got across. Instead of global warming warnings, journalists are acknowledging and explaining the urban heat island effect. Congratulations on changing the discourse – a scientific triumph for you!
REPLY: Thanks but I doubt it, if Seth Borenstein had been assigned to the story, it would have been far different. -A
Okay, but I tend to see a lot of commentary about the failure of climate scientists whenever it’s cold (“Climate Skeptic”) and generally news coverage to that effect.
Wouldn’t it be great if we all just played fair and admitted that weather is different than climate…
Well I don’t disagree with the heating part of it; but hot things do not cool slower than cold things; so nyet on their slow nightime cooling theory.
The trouble is most of those city buildings run their Temperature control systems all the time; and you often find those buildings with their lights on all night.
The building I am working in right now; has both the heating and the air conditioning running all the time.
If they let those office buildings cool down at night; like they would of their own accord; it simply takes too long to bring them up to the normal level in the morning; so they simply don’t let them cool down.
A very few office buildings have intelligent window designs. A good example is the Monsanto “Gold Brick” building in the suburbs of St Louis Mo (out by the Airport); which has gold plated windows; that reflect heat from the outside of the glass.
Too many buildings simply use absorptive tinted glass, which means the glass itself gets hot; and then reradiates inside the building.
But those buildings in the big cities cool slowly because they don’t let them cool.
Joe Romms hates this. Too much truth. His histrionics outburst ommitted the cold weather in San Diego. Even in the plains, large areas are wet and very cool.
The southwest should be only hot and dry.
I have a deck on the west side. In the evening i can feel the heat coming off the brick and imagine what it is like with huge buildings that soak up heat from the sun.
When I drive from the city to the country in the afternoon, my car thermometer drops 4-8 degrees.
Zilla – howdy stranger, you must be new around these parts otherwise you might have seen the phrase “weather is not climate” used a bit, because most folks contributing realise that this is indeed the case and articulate it regularly. By your standards then, we must be a pretty fair-minded bunch – it is great that you have realised it.
Over here in England the weather forecasters are too fond of saying that temperatures will ‘reach a high of….’ meaning that the highest temperature will be, say 28C, in London which is one of the biggest heat sinks of all. Look at the rest of the UK and you’ll see that temperatures are anything up to 5C less.
George,
You say hot things don’t cool more slowly than cooler things, but that’s only true in one sense and not the one which is being talked about. It’s true that a hot object will release more heat and thus cool more than a cooler object, but the question at hand is how soon a given object will cool to a certain temperature (one that is comfortable to humans in this case.) For this question the answer is that a hot object will take longer than a cooler one to reach a given temperature.
Your other points have some validity, but if you work the numbers you’ll likely find the majority of excess heat at night in a city is from more difficult path heat must take to escape from the city rather than absorbing windows or AC venting.
We are approaching the first 90 F. weather in NE Oregon, like the Rattlers in the high rimrock shedding their skins, the Warmists will wiggle from under their wet rock,
and start bleating:Gaia! Algore! Saaave us!….
From Prof. Ross McKitrick’s (University of Guelph) “Response to Independent Climate Change Email Review”:
(http://1488276005495550431-a-1802744773732722657-s-sites.googlegroups.com/site/rossmckitrick/McKitrick_ICCER_response1.pdf?attachauth=ANoY7crFNFaDa4re2gBSL1SQzWkUz0CI3-orUA0UrpbzeodWqfMnMzS1279TBIUsZEgqO0CIG8TX_r-IqxVxqmGufJt6JtNISAXg480BiB43I8yjBPaMly4FzvwW7gMWsgZsPlPuZM7HoF25YiG2KmCStTiqyTQwvM62gv7qx-nLPioYWB5wDhsqjrgoraMuuVHXyP-EDUYC0YG6su0tXLtedY7sE1Q54w%3D%3D&attredirects=0)
From Prof. McKitrick’s response (2nd hollow bullet point on page 2):
From the Muir Russell report (http://www.cce-review.org/pdf/FINAL%20REPORT.pdf) on page 72, paragraphs 12 and 13:
From the Muir Russell report, Footnote 7 on page 72:
It’s July 8th. Yesterday, we turned on the furnace again. I’m wearing my fleece-lined jacket when I go out. Where is all this Global Warming when we need it? It’s a travesty…
Can someone please ask the native Americans how hot it was on Manhattan during the MWP?
George, no!!
Well, what you say may be true, I’m no physicist, but I’ll be dammed if I can get my house cooled off at night this week. With daytime highs of 35C (feels like 43), and nighttime lows of 24C, my bedroom was at 31C last night as I lay there panting like a St. Bernard. I find that my house temperature goes up a 1C step for everyday of a heatwave, and simply does not cool down until the big heat ends (sorry for the metric system folks 🙂
Zilla said at 10:04 am
Wouldn’t it be great if we all just played fair and admitted that weather is different than climate… and:
Peter Plail said at 10:15 am
…“weather is not climate” …
Peter, yes we are a “pretty fair-minded bunch” and that phrase is thrown in a lot around here – but that doesn’t make it correct AND that is different than the phrase “weather is different than climate” which phraseology wise IS technically correct but I’m sure is not Zilla’s meaning.
“Climate” is the term we have agreed on to mean the summarization of “weather” over a period of time and generally over a broader area than what we identify for weather. They are “different” ONLY in that “weather” is what is happening right now all over the world! “Climate” does not happen! The sum of weather (climate) changes ONLY when the weather over the defined period and area changes! “Climate” does not exist. Climate is a figment of the human imagination and if we fall into the AGW trap of thinking it is something differant, something that actually does exist, something “different” from weather, we weaken our position. Without weather there is no climate. Without climate – – well, look out the window…..
They are now skiing Australia. Go there if you want to escape the summer heat. Anyone? Buller, Buller?
http://www.mtbuller.com.au/Winter/Snow-Report/Snowcams
If cities heat quickly and cool slowly they are predestined to be used as solarthermal power plants.
Australia video snow report;
http://www.mtbuller.com.au/video/MtBuller-daily-video.html
Have we heard from Phil Jones on this? Has he called in to explain that, according to his gold plated research, there is no significant urban heat island effect? I just cannot wait to read or hear what he has to say.
Again, from the “weather is not climate” department:
Also, note that official readings apparently only started at the airport during the 1940’s. Before then the station was closer in to Buffalo and Lake Erie (so I’ve heard).
No mention of global warming but a complete acknowledgement of the Urban Heat Island effect.
I know, I know — the models already compensate for UHI. But do the model compensate correctly? We may never know since the raw data isn’t available.
A bit of trivia: In the Southwest US, people sometimes paint their roofs white to avoid absorbing as much heat. A number of years ago, in a neighborhood near an airport, people were asked to paint their roofs black, because the white roofs reflected too much light and made flying more dangerous. We should be careful of employing simplistic widespread solutions to a problem, because they can very easily lead to something else becoming a problem. The alligators don’t always take kindly to draining the swamp.
Dont worry, Yesterday CNN countered this story with their own, adding in global warming.
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/07/stone.city.heat.wave/index.html
What’s weird is — we found when putting instruments on the moon back when, the moon and other bodies behaved much the same way — The moon rocks absorbed the heat from the sun during the daylight phase, and gave it up slowly when it got dark. It was as if the rocks stored the heat and released it slowly. It’s a wonder no one has figured that part out. But — Either the moon has a greenhouse, with no atmosphere, or there was something wrong with greenhouse theory — turns out it was a broke theory.
Using the Stefan-Boltmann equations NASA proved there was no such thing as greenhouse effect, very much like what the recent research of Dr Richard Lindzen concluded. Rocks, water and soil store heat, strange as that may be.
There is no better solar heat collector than an asphalt parking lot.
Everybody fights to park alongside the one little ornamental shrub for shade.
Your car seat will burn you.
Pets or kids can not be left in the car.
I’m so glad we have NASA to keep us up to date on these things- my observations were done without satellites or surcharges, so obviously they’re not pee revue.
Will they soon tell us that moslems invented the Garkad Tree?
Well, in the Pacific Northwest it just turned warm after the July 4th long weekend. Up til then, it has been cool and rainy almost constantly since January! Earlier in the winter we were reading all the regular “low snow-pack” stories, predictably tied to “Globaloney”, but now the reservoirs are full and the snowpack in the West in general is above normal. Hardly a peep about it.
Making lemonade out of lemons, weatherwise, I have been baiting my favorite Globaloney-fearmonger at work. She shut up about it for a while, as she complained on and on about the winter lasting into June! And every time she complained I just looked at her and smiled – she knew exactly what I was thinking, so she started doing her complaining out of my hearing – the plan worked! I’ll bet after a week of warm weather, she will be back to her old Gore-worshiping self, though!
Phil:
Your posts are long, and your explanations are wordy and full of blocks of quotes and marvelous wisdom.
“In addition, observed warming has been, and transient greenhouse-induced warming is expected to be, greater over land than over the oceans (Chapter 10)”
Observed = From which data set?
Transient? Quantify please?
Expected? Quantify please?
Greater? By what gradient for which temperature change from which data set?
Global warming from CO2 from humans can’t CAUSE EVERYTHING and fit EVERY EXPECTATION.
I have YET to read the AGW paper that says “contrary to our expectation, X happened instead of Y.” where X is against the fundamental concept of AGW. NEVER. NOT ONE.
That is a magically conspicuous element of experimenter bias. Large bodies of researchers publishing things honestly ALWAYS produce research that is decidedly inconclusive, disproves the original hypothesis or validates an alternate viewpoint, and an honest scientist does well by himself to point it out. 100’s of papers that say “this is in-line with expectation but requires more research” is n-rays.
Unfalsifiable hypothesis is unfalsifiable
Bad news…truth will prevail:
y=sin x
♫♫♫
What goes up must come down
spinning wheel got to go round
Talking about your troubles it’s a crying sin
Ride a painted pony
Let the spinning wheel spin …………….♫♫♫
Theo Goodwin said @ July 8, 2010 at 11:23 am:
“Have we heard from Phil Jones on this? Has he called in to explain that, according to his gold plated research, there is no significant urban heat island effect? I just cannot wait to read or hear what he has to say.”
David Parker already said it in Journal of Climate:
“Parker 2006:
The main impact of any urban warming is expected to be on Tmin on calm nights (Johnson et al. 1991). However, for 1950-2000, the trends of global annual average Tmin for windy, calm, and all conditions were virtually identical at 0.20°C – 0.06°C decade^{-1} (Fig. 4a,b and Table 1).”
No room for UHI in CAGW…
Climate: The weather in some location averaged over a long period of time.
The question is: how long a time? I suggest at least a thousand years. The whole problem of CAGW has arisen because of the short term memories of humans.
that temp is a normal summers day in sydney, we would be all down at the beach or at the local pub all having a good time . at the moment it is real cold down under . bring on summer
Well at least they are finally talking of something real in this article.
Have you ever wondered what effect the common mirror finished buildings with special IR reflecting coatings is doing to the cities. These coated and mirrored finishes are great to keep nearly all heat out of the buildings and lower their A/C bills but all of that heat does go somewhere.
If the buildings were matte white at lest a large portion of the reflected heat would go upward back to space but these mirror buildings reflect it nearly 100% downward to the streets below. That is probably the biggest factor of why UHI keeps increasing as building after building add these new finishes in the name of efficiency.
You can have it both ways, physics won’t allow it.
Buffoon says:
July 8, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Well said.
On a related point, it’s also noticeable how the “errors” which have been admitted (melting Himalayas, dying Amazon, flooding Netherlands) have always erred on the hysterical side.
Another sign, if one is required, that the IPCC process is institutionally biased to big up CAGW.
“We found that vegetation is a powerful cooling mechanism.”
Well worth the price of the study, no doubt. Cities are great for commerce, life, not so much.
To follow Leon’s “weather is not climate”, here in Central MN, we’ve had a 90 degree day or two in 15 months. After what duration may we start talking ‘climate’ anyway?
The strange thing about AGW is that it affects cities first.
Oh, another one:
If we want to know how the world will look like in the year 2100, we only need to look at New York today.
While over in Australia:
Western Australia’s big chill is continuing with Perth marking a record-breaking 12 consecutive nights of temperatures below 5C, according to the WA Bureau of Meteorology.
Temperatures dipped to a wintry 0.3C in the city overnight, with Jandakot recording a freezing minus -1.4C at 5.22am.
The bureau says it is the longest cold snap on record, beating a July 1997 stretch of nine straight nights of 5C or below.
Perth Zoo pampers animals with hot rocks, sun lamps and heated enclosures
…….
WA is currently experiencing the third driest winter on record, while Antarctica has record snow.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2548850/posts
I do a bus transfer each day in downtown Dallas. There are a lot of glassy buildings here, and those window-walls reflect light and heat into the streets. Shading the rooftops with vegetation isn’t going to help people on the streets. How can they get the walls to reflect the light up and out?
Maybe NASA should remember the Apollo mission, when they deployed the reflectors that sent laser light back to the ground stations no matter what angle they came from. Seems to me such surfaces would send the radiation back up at the sun at any hour of the day.
On the other hand, I bet those yankees like that extra warmth in the winter…
DirkH says:
“If we want to know how the world will look like in the year 2100, we only need to look at New York today.”
… if we don’t act NOW! (sorry, forgot that bit.)
Correction to wayne says: July 8, 2010 at 12:26 pm :
You can’t have it both ways, physics won’t allow it.
jorgekafkazar says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:50 am
“It’s July 8th. Yesterday, we turned on the furnace again. I’m wearing my fleece-lined jacket when I go out. Where is all this Global Warming when we need it? It’s a travesty…”
All of the global warming is in New York, Philly, and Baltimore right now. (Oh, wait up… that’s not global.)
It is refreshing to see UHI discussed by the MSM. (Oh, wait up… 1 article isn’t “global” either. Sigh…)
vigilantfish says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:02 am
Wow Anthony – your message has got across. Instead of global warming warnings, journalists are acknowledging and explaining the urban heat island effect.
VILLABOLO:
URBAN HEAT ISLAND EFFECT?
SO THAT’S WHY THE “HEAVILY URBANIZED” ARCTIC SEA ICE CAP WAS 4-9F ABOVE AVERAGE!
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2010/060810.html
Hellooooo! I live in Los Angeles where, in the past, we’ve had record breaking temps of 122F in my neck of the woods. It’s 64F right now. From what I last noticed, in my almost 40 years of living here, this is the prince(ss) of Urban Centers. So where is my Heat Island Effect?
And before I’m told some nonsense about variability which is true in general, but absolutely irrelevant in this specific issue, why don’t we simply see the forest for the trees?
Having accused us of ignoring “coolness”, an absolute falsehood since all regions, cooler or warmer, are automatically incorporated in GLOBAL AVERAGES, what about your failure to acknowledge the heat waves throughout Asia? And before you insult my intelligence and ramble about Australia ad nauseum, why don’t you go back to square one and realize what GLOBAL AVERAGES are intended to measure?
This January through June has been a record setting period according to those satellites. That is the GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE versus the egocentric and infantile “It’s snowing in my backyard! It must be the same throughout the planet!”
Have you gathered data together for an assessment of average temperatures throughout the GLOBE? It’s already done for you by those very satellite images that are on NASA’s web site. You know, like the ones that are posted on this thread?
And please don’t tell me about how inauthentic you believe NASA’s data is. Other than mere paranoia, why should one believe that they are legitimate or illegitimate at the convenience of the person using it?
Bottom line, this January through June has been a record setting period according to those satellites.
It’s more than an albedo problem and more than a lack of evaporative cooling by vegetation problem. The air is stagnant, there’s a million vehicles with hot motors and exhaust pipes pouring out heat and another million air conditioners also pouring out hot air. All of it trapped close to the surface by multi-story buildings. Even CO2 is elevated in a densely populated city as all the vehicles and millions of large mammals inhale oxygen and exhale CO2.
The only way to get an honest temperature reading absent land use influences is to place the thermometers well inside land that has not been altered by human activity.
So one needs a retractable white roof. You roll it out during the summer, and reel it in for the rest of the year, leaving the regular darker roof to absorb sunlight when it’s cooler
The foks who adapt are the ones that survive.
DirkH writes:
“If cities heat quickly and cool slowly they are predestined to be used as solarthermal power plants.”
No, they would be used as “hot water bottles,” you know, in bed. The causes of UHI are many and complex, but there is a simple model that might help explain matters. Take an old city such as Baltimore or St. Louis. They have a high number of row-houses built between, say, 1870 and 1940. When they were built, those row houses might have cooled reasonably at night. But now they are loaded down with air conditioners, dryers, and a bazillion more modern appliances. They are surrounded by asphalt, usually black stuff. So, they produce a lot more heat than they were designed to produce. But the air moving among them is probably less than what it was in 1940. The main mechanism of cooling for those old neighborhoods, moving air, simply cannot perform the task that it once performed. So, temperatures are higher at night and stay high longer. Yet it has nothing to do with global warming.
“This January through June has been a record setting period according to those satellites. That is the GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE”
That is also a very short-term perspective, i.e., not climate, comprende?
In Breckenridge, CO, the transition from asphalt and concrete to forest is abrupt. I notice the temperature drop almost instantly as I walk on pavement in town amongst condos and hotels onto a trail leading into the forest, then on my return I feel the warming as I step back onto asphalt from dirt. So the effects of UHI are very obvious even in the tiny town of Breckenridge, although with cool and wet weather almost every day here there isn’t much “heat” for the “island”.
Wow! Just. Wow!
That landsat picture is a fantastic tie-in to the earlier story about record temperatures at BWI.
Why?
Well do you see that dark red blob in the lower right. Above and to the right of the nice blue, cool, islands of Jamaica Bay. That blob is JFK airport.
I’m expecting a huge inner city Homo Sapiens dieback anytime now.
A quantum physicist might disagree with that.
@Nuke
The “models” don’t compensate for UHI. They claim there is no significant influence on the outcome due to it. The official story from our good buddy and paragon of scientific integrity Phil Jones at East Anglia Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China is that “these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time”.
Really, Phil? The number of automobiles and air conditioners and cement structures didn’t change between the years 1900 and 1999? Ooooooooooookay. I’ll believe that. NOT!
ONe thing I found interesting from the landsat image was, even in an area as heavily developed as NYC, the hottest locations were still the airports. Both JFK and LaGuardia have the deepest reds visible in the photo.
zilla,
looks like you are new here.
welcome. if you stick around, you will find that
1: most folks here are fair
2: and they are smart and generally sort through multiple causes & effects.
and yes, everyone knows weather is not climate.
And that’s why in many central european villages grapevines have been grown to cover south facing walls for centuries. In the summer the leaves shade the walls and help to cool the house by evaporation. In the winter the leaveless vines let the sun through to help warm the walls. And in the fall you can harvest the grapes to make the wine that helps you get through the winter. One old vine that covers a medium sized 2-story house can produce up to 300 Liters of wine/year.
Show me another air-conditioning system that can do that.
gary gulrud says:
July 8, 2010 at 1:40 pm
“This January through June has been a record setting period according to those satellites. That is the GLOBAL PERSPECTIVE”
That is also a very short-term perspective, i.e., not climate, comprende?
VILLABOLO:
“ERES TU QUE NO COMPRENDES.
Why are you emphasizing longer term climate than the one I Mentioned when the CONTEXT was the cherry picked REGIONAL climates such as Australia and the Eastern states? Do you “comprende” that the very topic of this thread is, to put it in your own words, “. . . a very short-term perspective . . .” in both time and space?
You can actually measure the difference very roughly using a car with an inbuilt thermometer that measures outside air temps. I have noticed in the city of Memphis a 3c difference from the city centre to the edge of the city where I live on sunny days. Try it for yourself it gives you an idea of how much of a difference there is.
tarpon says:
July 8, 2010 at 11:59 am
I’m really getting tired of seeing that link. SB is merely an equation tying together temperature, surface (emissivity), and flux. If you want to include thermal inertia, it takes more physics and heat transfer away from or to the surface.
Somehow I got the wrong link into the Phil Jones article. Here it is:
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2008/2008JD009916.shtml
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 113, D16122, 12 PP., 2008
doi:10.1029/2008JD009916
Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China
Urbanization effects in large-scale temperature records, with an emphasis on China
P. D. Jones
Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
D. H. Lister
Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Q. Li
National Meteorological Information Center, China Meteorological Administration, Beijing, China
Global surface temperature trends, based on land and marine data, show warming of about 0.8°C over the last 100 years. This rate of warming is sometimes questioned because of the existence of well-known Urban Heat Islands (UHIs). We show examples of the UHIs at London and Vienna, where city center sites are warmer than surrounding rural locations. Both of these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time. In the main part of the paper, for China, we compare a new homogenized station data set with gridded temperature products and attempt to assess possible urban influences using sea surface temperature (SST) data sets for the area east of the Chinese mainland. We show that all the land-based data sets for China agree exceptionally well and that their residual warming compared to the SST series since 1951 is relatively small compared to the large-scale warming. Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1°C decade−1 over the period 1951–2004, with true climatic warming accounting for 0.81°C over this period.
Nuke says:
July 8, 2010 at 1:52 pm
wayne says:
July 8, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Correction to wayne says: July 8, 2010 at 12:26 pm :
You can’t have it both ways, physics won’t allow it.
A quantum physicist might disagree with that.
LOL! Ok, you got me, I’ll bow to that!
In Rocky Mountain National Park, snow closed trail ridge road overnight.
George E. Smith says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:07 am (Edit)
The building I am working in right now; has both the heating and the air conditioning running all the time.
Is this some kind of integrated system which uses heat from the A/C exhaust to heat the parts of the building which are underground or something?
The IPCC will tell all those city dwellers that they are imagining the heat … after all, Phil Jones told them so.
“”” Dave Dardinger says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:37 am
George,
You say hot things don’t cool more slowly than cooler things, but that’s only true in one sense and not the one which is being talked about. It’s true that a hot object will release more heat and thus cool more than a cooler object, but the question at hand is how soon a given object will cool to a certain temperature (one that is comfortable to humans in this case.) For this question the answer is that a hot object will take longer than a cooler one to reach a given temperature.
Your other points have some validity, but if you work the numbers you’ll likely find the majority of excess heat at night in a city is from more difficult path heat must take to escape from the city rather than absorbing windows or AC venting. “””
So what you are saying Dave is; that hot things are hotter than cold things, and always will be; izzat about right ?
So why do the car companies make the radiators of their cars so hot; when the aim was to cool down the engine so it doesn’t melt. They even pressurize the water jacket to raise the operational boiling point of the cooling water, so it can carry off more heat.
Maybe we should be putting ice in our radiators, instead of hot water.
But the bottom line is Dave; there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with Urban Heat Islands. The crime comes in reading the Thermometer in the owl box in one of these heat islands; and then assuming that is a perfectly good temperature reading to represent some place that is 1200 km away from the thermometer; that is where the problem lies.
Anyone familiar with communication engineering; including high capacity digital data transmission, is fully familiar with the Nyquist Sampling theorem; which tells you how often; and at what intervals (in however many variables you have) you have to take samples, in order to be able to recover the original signal.
And in the world of climate; recovering the origininal signal doesn’t mean being able to replicate the original Temperature readings; but it does mean sampling at the correct intervals so that at least the average value (DC VALUE) of the function is recoverable. You only have to violate the Nyquist criterion by a factor of two in the direction of two low a sampling rate, in order for the spectrum folding caused by the aliassing noise; folds back all the way to zero frequency; which is the value of the function average that you were trying to determine.
Twice a day (min/max) temperature sampling; already violates Nyquist by at least a factor of two; so you cannot even recover the correct daily average temperature from a min/max regimen (the daily temperature cycle would have to be a pure sine wave to allow that). So who was it who said the temperature rises rapidly after sunup, and then decays slowly after sundown. Now hands up everybody who believes that is a description of a sinusoidal function. Ergo the daily temperature cycle is NOT sinusoidal; therefore it must contain at least some second harmonic component (12 hour period) since we are talking about a repetitive cyclic change here; so you need at most a six hour maximum time between temperature readings to be able to properly get the true daily average temeprature; min/max will not do that.
And let’s not even talk about the sampling errors in the spatial sampling. The total number of Temperature measuring stations in the Arctic (above +60 deg North Latitude); is not even enough to properly sample the Temperature map of a small area like the San Francisco bay area nine counties region or however many counties we actually have; so it is laughable to claim they are properly sampling the Arctic temperatures.
Oh I forgot to mention the clouds; how the hell do you get a true daily average temperature when you have clouds running around all the time, blocking out sunlight for minutes to hours. So it’s a joke to claim you are properly sampling even the true daily temperature of any single location; let alone the entire planet.
And if you could get the correct answer; it would be meaningless; because nobody has ever shown any causal relationship between the global mean temperature, and the net energy balance of the planet.
Other than that, I generally agree with your points.
“”” tallbloke says:
July 8, 2010 at 3:04 pm
George E. Smith says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:07 am (Edit)
The building I am working in right now; has both the heating and the air conditioning running all the time.
Is this some kind of integrated system which uses heat from the A/C exhaust to heat the parts of the building which are underground or something? “””
Not that I know of; that’s just the way it works; same goes for my automobile (Ford Taurus), if my AC is not turned down to the lowest setting, than both hot and cold are running together.
My son is a building (Plant) manager, who has to deal with those sorts of issues, and he says that system is quite typical; well at least in Silicon valley buildings. They mix hot air from the heater; with cold air from the refrigerator, since both of those things tend to produce air at just one Temperature either cold or hot; and the building Tempoerature control simply adjusts the air mixture to produce air at a set temperature. Depending on the ambient of course; the AC or the heater; will be cycling more or less often; so one will consume less power if it is needed less.
Office workers take a dim view of climate control systems; that simply blast freezing air or boiling air in bursts as needed in order to warm or cool their office cube; they want the air coming out of the system to be always at the comfort temperature; whatever that is set to.
Adn I believe you can prove on thermodynamic grounds; that when you mix cold air/water with hot air/water to reach some desirable Temperature set point; the resultant energy usage is higher, than if you simply supply enough heat or cold to counterract the ambient tendenccy.
The proper way to set the hot water heater in your house; is to adjust the hot water Temperature setting down until you can comfortably take a shower in hot water; with ZERO cold water running. Of course hopefully your dish washer has a built in heater; to cook the dishes at some autoclave Temperature.
If you have to mix cold water with your hot to get a comfortable shower; then your hot water setting is TOO HIGH.
And the lost heat due to having the hot water hotter than needed, and then pump it aound in pipes where it will lose more; also dictates that you should set the Temperature as low as it takes to comfortably shower in pure hot water with no cold.
Of course if you are like me; and take a cold water Navy shower instead; then you never find out how hot the hot water is; since you never have to use it.
I know this is off topic and I realize that these polls are worthless but MSNBC is running a poll on the public’s opinion concerning the vindication by the British panel of so the insultingly called “climategate” scientists.
WUWT is already on the warpath telling their members to chime in. The current results are 42% in our favor and 58% against.
http://msnbc.newsvine.com/_question/2010/07/07/4630892-are-you-satisfied-with-the-british-panels-conclusion-that-while-climategate-scientists-were-not-always-forthcoming-their-science-was-sound#comments
Dave Springer, thanks for the following quotation from Phil Jones:
“these UHIs however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time”.
Thanks also for the abstract to a Jones study in which he cites London, Vienna, and a Chinese city as part of his study. All of this makes me want to say three things to Phil. Number One, Phil, it is all in how you pick them. Neither London nor Vienna have experienced, since the end of WWII, the kind of increase in wealth experienced by most American cities. Neither London nor Vienna is adorned like a Christmas tree with air conditioners, dryers, and the many other baubles of modern technology. Those cities might show no UHI effect. But just try the average city in America, Japan, the Shanghai region of China, and all other places that have experienced revolutionary growth in wealth. Number Two, some cities cannot show a UHI effect because they are located in natural wind tunnels. Chicago is the best example, though Denver and many others pop to mind. In Chicago, the wind is always blowing and blowing hard off the lake. If you go downtown to celebrate the 4th, a coat and a blanket might leave you freezing your patootie off. I think your Chinese city fits in this category. Number Three, be precise about your measurements. After all, when measuring UHI we are dependent on measurement stations that might be years old or brand new. I could easily pick and choose measurement stations or make “adjustments” to all of them to show no UHI effect in St. Louis when there is overwhelming empirical evidence of a large UHI effect.
Finally, notice that Jones says “Both of these UHIs [London & Vienna] however do not contribute to warming trends over the 20th century because the influences of the cities on surface temperatures have not changed over this time.” Is this supposed to be an empirical claim, a universal generalization? Is he claiming that all of the heat coming from cities has not contributed to warming in the 20th Century? Please note that the claim is irrelevant to the question whether UHI exists. Please note that the claim, if true, makes the question of UHI quite unimportant to climate science. So, why is it in an abstract of a study done to show that there is no significant UHI effect? Why bother? Why not just explain that UHI, if it exists, is irrelevant to questions of global warming? Is this another case of Jones dreaming up another matter and tossing it out in case his criticism of UHI does not persuade us. If so, it is symptomatic of a serious problem.
@ George E. Smith
July 8, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Now George, that’s a real efficient system (cough), run the heat and A/C at full tilt 24/7 and just adjust the mixture to get the correct temperature. Now if that accurately describes most high-rises no wonder this globe is using so much energy and office rent is through the ceiling!
( But I take it you surely jest, could your building manager just be off his rocker or maybe just lazy? )
Everyone talks about the weather, and it used to be the polite thing to do, starting conversations and such. Nowadays, we all still talk about the weather, but with supposedly “vilified” agendas.
By the by, what’s happening in the Northeast right now is weather, not climate. Give it another ten or so days………. This stuff happens all the time people!
Here in Florida we had a heat spell for a week in June with temperatures measured at my station in the ~98 degree F. range and heat indexes all the way up to 117 degrees F. Ten days later, 5-straight days of rain with max temperatures in the high 70’s~low 80’s (love that rain in the summer). Today, not a cloud in the sky and hot again, but not as much – 86 degrees and 96 heat index – it is what it is!!!!
Jose
Jose
KLA says:
July 8, 2010 at 2:12 pm
And that’s why in many central european villages grapevines have been grown to cover south facing walls for centuries. In the summer the leaves shade the walls and help to cool the house by evaporation. In the winter the leaveless vines let the sun through to help warm the walls. And in the fall you can harvest the grapes to make the wine that helps you get through the winter. One old vine that covers a medium sized 2-story house can produce up to 300 Liters of wine/year.
Show me another air-conditioning system that can do that.
___________________________________________________________________
HMMmmm, Great idea except my lawnmowers (goats & sheep) LOVE grape leaves. I have been harvesting wild grape leaves to feed a baby goat I have penned up. She lost her mom at 4 weeks of age and refuses to nurse from a bottle. (and yes she is doing just fine growing before my eyes)
The other problem with some vines is they do a lot of damage to the outside wall depending on the plant and the wall
@george Smith
To be fair, min/max should work fine if you’re looking for a trend instead of a near perfect measure of the average temperture. The climate boffins are very quick to point out that the story isn’t about whether the global average temperature was exactly 52F in 1980 and it’s exactly 53F today. The story is that it’s exactly 1 degree warmer now versus then. For the CO2 narrative to work the daytime maximums should be a tad lower while the night time temperatures should be more than a tad higher. This reflects the fact that CO2 in the upper atmosphere slows down daytime heating by absorbing IR coming in from above and radiating a portion of that back out into space while at night the CO2 in the lower atmosphere slows down night time cooling by slowing down IR from the ground trying to work its way back out into space. The difference that makes the average of the nighttime and daytime day higher is the conversion of visible wavelengths by the ground into infrared. CO2 is transparent to the visible wavelengths so during the day a majority of those (depending on albedo of the ground) reach the ground and heat it up. At night the stored heat is released at a frequency (or rather two narrow bands, three if you count a band that overlaps with water vapor) where CO2 is not transparent to it.
I think the climate boffins understand the physics of it at least this much. Few of the unwashed masses do even though anyone who got a passing grade in high school physics should be able to figure out how it works. An interesting phenomenon that emerges and is an acid pass/fail test for CO2 warming is that the lower atmosphere should be warmer and the upper atmosphere cooler as a result of CO2 greenhouse heating. If that isn’t true then CO2 ain’t the bogeyman. Changes in water vapor and cloud cover will leave a different fingerprint. If I’m not mistaken it’s been known for many years that the layers of the atmosphere aren’t behaving very much in the way of CO2 induced heating. Thus the climate boffins made up a story about a little extra CO2 causes a significant increase in water vapor and that extra water vapor is the culprit. The problem with that story is that if there’s a significant positive feedback from CO2 then it would drive a runaway greenhouse and in billions of years of the earth’s history there has been up to and over 10 times the CO2 concentration of today and there was never a runaway greenhouse. On the other hand, there have been plenty of runaway glaciations. The bottom line appears to be the climate boffins have the polarity sign wrong on the water vapor feedback mechanism. The suspicion amongst honest folks who understand all this is that clouds are the negative feedback. High white clouds that work just like painting your roof white does for the structure underneath – it reflects visible wavelengths of light before they get a chance to be absorbed by what’s underneath. The earth, it appears, has a rather fast acting thermostat limiting the maximum global temperature. The thermostat response on the minimum temperature on the other hand appears to be rather slow so we get global glaciations that last for tens of thousands or sometimes millions of years. Interestingly enough it’s CO2 that comes to the rescue, eventually, of a frozen earth. With the surface covered in ice the carbon cycle pretty much screeches to a halt. Over the course of geologic time volcanos continue belching out CO2 until its greenhouse effect is great enough to start thawing the planet. The thaw has a positive feedback associated with it so once it starts thawing it thaws fast and then the clouds quickly return to limit the maximum temperature, the carbon cycle returns with a fury, and all is well until the next runaway freeze.
More along the lines of cloud albedo being the negative feedback that comes with increasing CO2.
Unfortunately measuring the earth’s average albedo is something for which we have no paleo data to reconstruct its history. In the past decade there has been an ongoing study to track it by precisely measuring the brightness of the moon when it’s in the earth’s shadow and the only thing lighting it up is sunshine reflected from the lit portion of the earth (starshine is negligible).
Interestingly, there was a trend found but with less than 10 years of data any correlations with global average temperature are tenuous. The earth’s albedo has been rising. It went up about 1% in the past decade. That is what we would expect from a negative feedback mechanism associated with rising CO2. Unfortunately studies of high altitude cloud formation also indicate that solar magnetic field activity throttles them and there’s a fair amount of correlation with paleo-temperature reconstructions and several hundred years of more or less constant sunspot counting. This complicates the picture. There are about a zillion other complicating factors like amount of mixing of the vast cold deeps of the oceans with warmer surface waters and that is known to vary with periodicities ranging from years to (at least) decades.
The bottom line, near as I can figure, is that whatever global warming is driven by CO2 the signal is buried so far in the noise of those myriad other factors (some factors known and some unknown) it’ll never be pulled out of the noise with any degree of confidence.
NoAstronomer says:
July 8, 2010 at 1:41 pm
Wow! Just. Wow!
…
Well do you see that dark red blob in the lower right. Above and to the right of the nice blue, cool, islands of Jamaica Bay. That blob is JFK airport.
Ok, I see it, red JFK. But look at the red island at the top about 15 miles due north and to the east of the Queens. The red blob below the island is Laguardia Airport and I wonder what is on that Rikers Island just to the north that makes it so bright red (120+ºF). Mostly high-rises? I do see lots of asphalt. Most of the other islands are much cooler and tend to the blues. Are you that familiar with New York City?
Thanks Anthony, that is a cool (I mean hot) IR picture.
I have been bothered by this paper. How on Earth did they separate the solar heating from the heat released by energy usage, which we all know always eventually devolves into heat energy? I also am dubious about their assertion that cities absorb more solar energy than elsewhere. How can they determine that, in light of electrical usage being higher during the day when the Sun is up, both in doing business and air conditioning?
One of the biggest problems of climate science is separating the multitudinous factors involved. Here we have another example of specifically ignoring the real complexities and presenting a fabrication that sounds logical until you really think about it.
Or is this mostly elaborate opinion and spurious conclusions?
Gail Combs
Hop vines will work better than grape vines. They won’t damage the building because they don’t use tendrils. The downside is you have give them some strings running from the eve to the ground to climb otherwise you’ll get a ground thicket instead of a vertical sheet. If you live at a latitude higher than (IIRC) 35 degrees you can harvest the cones in the fall for beer making. Fresh hops are far superior to dried hops for the beer quality too. If you live further south than that the cones won’t set. They are long-day bloomers and if you don’t get over (again IIRC) 15 hours of daylight durin the year they’ll still grow fine but the cones won’t set. Hops are also extremely fast growers in the spring so by the time you want the full shade from them they’re providing it in spades. They die back to the ground in the fall and reemerge from the roots in the spring. They come in male and female flavors. Only the females produce cones. Propogation for cone production is only rarely done by seed but rather by digging up the thickened portions of the roots of females with known characteristics in the cones. The digging up is routine maintenance in hops farms as the thickened root nodes tend to spread out beyond the neat rows or circles from which want the vines to emerge. March – April is generally the time to buy your roots for planting. You need to order ahead as quantities are usually limited and they don’t store well. They can also be propogated by cloning of the desireable females but they’re very hard to find selling as potted clones.
Just some interesting trivia. I live too far south for cone set but I did consider them for the beneficial effect of shade on the house only in the summer. Harvesting the cones is quite labor intensive so be forewarned about that if you want to make some homebrew. You also need a few different varieties as few beers are made with a single variety of hops. My understanding is you add one kind early in the brew and another kind late in the brew.
Just for general information… the UHI effect where I live, as I measured it
the other evening was 4F at 0200 DST. Wind was SW at 7, humidity 82%.
My house is in a residential neighborhood less than 1 mi from the city limits.
I drove out into the country about 2 mi and then back to my house, so 3 mi overall. It was 80F when I left home and dropped to 76F just as soon as I left
town. I continued westbound for another 2 mi before turning around. Back at the house it was still 80.
The town I live in is in rural mid state Mo….population 2500. The nearest
towns are about 6 mi east and west with populations of less than 500.
Seems a town doesn’t have to be very large to exhibit the effect. In addition we are CONSISTENTLY 5 to 7 degF cooler than St. Louis which is about 50
air miles away. Oh! BTW the pavement temp in front of my house was still
88 deg F at 2 o’clock in the morning.
More info on earth albedo measurements:
http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Palle_Goode_2008_ASP.pdf
This is worth reading. It’s essentially a blunt indictment of the global circulation models that are being used to frighten the sheeple into global energy use governance.
Several key statements in it are:
1) There is no reliable way to accurately measure the earth’s albedo. The few methods being used are often in “unsatisfactory disagreement”.
2) GCMs assume that albedo is constant but the one conclusive thing found by experimental measurements is that the earth’s albedo varies a lot and it changes quickly.
3) GCM assumptions of albedo vary by as much as 7% from one model to another.
4) A variance of 7% changes the earth’s energy budget by more than all greenhouse gases combined!
Incredible. A climate forcing that can’t be accurately measured, that has an effect potentially greater than all greenhouse gases combined, and the global circulation models just throw a constant arbitrary number in there for it and then pretend like it isn’t a problem. I’m stupified. I mean I knew about the large effect that albedo can have but I wasn’t aware of the problems in measuring it with great enough accuracy to factor it into the GCMs for back-calibration.
Was just flipping through some TV channels and on, Canada’s CTV network, they were running a blurb which stated that an unnamed ‘Canadian climate expert’ said that ‘extreme heat waves like the current one are likely to become more frequent in the future due to climate change.’
So… the beat goes on.
wayne says:
July 8, 2010 at 4:12 pm
@ George E. Smith
July 8, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Now George, that’s a real efficient system (cough), run the heat and A/C at full tilt 24/7 and just adjust the mixture to get the correct temperature. Now if that accurately describes most high-rises no wonder this globe is using so much energy and office rent is through the ceiling!
( But I take it you surely jest, could your building manager just be off his rocker or maybe just lazy? )
—————————-
wayne,
you got a little carried away there, adding “full tilt” in your portrait of the idiot engineer.
Biology has counterparts to this simultaneous, antagonistic and counter-intuitive arrangement. Your nervous system (and probably even Michael Mann’s) works on the same principle; it’s charmingly referred to as the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems; akin to driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. It needs to be a little more subtle than “full tilt” to really work properly!
Here in Western Washington we’re having a little mini heat wave. All sorts of records “shattered”, some from way back in 1952. But, in a couple more days, we’ll be back to the 60s f. Lovely summer we’re having.
VILLABOLO:
“ERES TU QUE NO COMPRENDES.
Why are you emphasizing longer term climate than the one I Mentioned when the CONTEXT was the cherry picked REGIONAL climates such as Australia and the Eastern states? Do you “comprende” that the very topic of this thread is, to put it in your own words, “. . . a very short-term perspective . . .” in both time and space?
—————-
Tu no comprendes, yes, but your Spanish grammar is faulty and undermines your intent to impress, as does your lack of civility.
Oliver Ramsay says:
July 8, 2010 at 8:30 pm
wayne,
you got a little carried away there, adding “full tilt” in your portrait of the idiot engineer.
I’m sure many got a smile of that one (darn, forgot that happy face at the end!). The “full tilt” was the punch.
I was joking. I don’t doubt some systems, such as hositals and hotels/motels, run on that type of instant demand system, hot or cold, it’s still seems not very efficient unless throw away heat from the HVAC is the heating side, then, no loss, but then again, everyone is always comfortable. Please, take it a little lighter, it was mean that way. I have the highest respect for all engineers I have come across and if they say it may not appear that way but is more efficient, then to me it’s more efficient.
villabolo says:
July 8, 2010 at 2:21 pm
gary gulrud says:
July 8, 2010 at 1:40 pm
“ERES TU QUE NO COMPRENDES.
Disculpe Usted. Indeed, I do not understand what with the ocean’s heat capacity being 3000 times that of the atmosphere and here we have 30 years of satellite data covering 95% of the earth and a recent record spike displaced the average almost as much as the prior negative dip having aborted El Nino Grande 2007 and now we look forward to a similar decline in 2011 and here we’re all droning on about local weather trends.
If you’re a Cal Tech physics jock I might care to listen though.
Anybody got a picture of New York kids playing in the water from a hydrant opened by a grinning fireman? Seems you hardly ever see that anymore. Possibly the water losses in the tunnels north of the city, the ones that have drowned at least one small town, have made it infeasible to cool a neighborhood street and the associated kids with water from a hydrant. Here in the intermountain west, an area larger than the overheated east, it’s been a cool beginning to summer. Spring snows and greater than normal rainfall have filled the irrigation ditches with cold water. Today, when my thermometer read 98f at 1500, I fired up the pump and lowered the surface temp of my lawn 12 degrees in less than an hour. The grass loves it.
The idiots at the Seattle Times beg to differ. It will be warmer in 30 years, they promise.
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2012308276_apussciheatwavesfuture.html
Prepare now for a temp increase of almost nothing. About the same as putting on a shirt.
Oliver Ramsay,
Thank you for confirming that Villabolo is a fake, unable to write correct Spanish grammar.
He’s like the 54 year old white professor who is a 14 year old girl …on the internet.
DonS: Or it could be that evil CO2 emitting, mountain top removing, dirty coal burning, electricity is powering air conditioners in each home. It would be best for the government we lived in the earth’s temperate zones, like caves.
George E. Smith says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:07 am (Edit)
It’s a poor explanation for the phenomenon. The granite, contcrete, asphalt, and brick of the cities has much greater heat capacity than the earth. As a result, they do not cool as fast at night as the surrounding fields. It’s not because they are hotter, it is because they have stored up a lot of heat during the day.
Charles Higley says:
July 8, 2010 at 6:04 pm
I have been bothered by this paper. How on Earth did they separate the solar heating from the heat released by energy usage, which we all know always eventually devolves into heat energy? I also am dubious about their assertion that cities absorb more solar energy than elsewhere. How can they determine that, in light of electrical usage being higher during the day when the Sun is up, both in doing business and air conditioning?
One of the biggest problems of climate science is separating the multitudinous factors involved. Here we have another example of specifically ignoring the real complexities and presenting a fabrication that sounds logical until you really think about it.
Or is this mostly elaborate opinion and spurious conclusions?
I don’t think they are fabricating anything in the story, they are just ignoring a tiny factor that can safely be ignored.
Just get out your calculator and punch in a few numbers. I’m going to take a normal house lot from around my area and imagine a city totally filled with houses, no parks or gaps. Let’s say 120’ x 70’ lot or ~780 m^2 area per house. From comments from neighbors most electric bills go up about 2 to 3 times normal in the hottest part of the summer. That’s 800 kWhr to 2400kwHr or 1600 kWhr excess per month or 1600 kWhr / 780 m2 = 2 kWhr/m2/month or ~2.7 W/m2. See tiny compared to the insolation and low albedo causing extreme heat in the cities so no fabrication of facts, it’s the asphalt, concrete, buildings, roofs and for that matter anything vertically built, they all cause heat capture and retention if not white enough and low to the ground. But does the HVAC energy increase it, yes, but nearly immeasurable compared to the larger effects mentioned. You can add other energy use as cars, machines, etc to that but I think you will also find it is so tiny it’s ignorable compared to the sun’s influence.
You might also question why I mentioned any vertical structure. The only way for heat to escape is where you can visually see the sky. The infrared photons see the same thing that your eyes see. If you have tall buildings around you see very little sky. Walla, that’s why it’s so hot in the city! The infrared photons find it hard to escape as they bounce from structure to structure.
And the moisture mentioned in the NASA article, it’s key too. A fine water mister is what I use on the hot patio in the summer, drops it 20 degrees at least.
Hope that helps you see the exact subject of the articles, UHI from structures in the summer sun.
This, I think, is an example of warm nights in cities compared to more rural areas around them. Yes, it’s the famous Darwin again. Bureau of Meterology data as sold to the public. Minimum averaged monthly temperatures are plotted at 2 locations about 15 km apart. The biggest difference in this example appears to be in the winter months (Southern Hemisphere, remember)
http://i260.photobucket.com/albums/ii14/sherro_2008/Darwinoverlap.jpg?t=1278676356
wayne says: about calculating heat effects
As a favour, can you please select an airport with a weather station, use the area inside the perimeter for sq m, calculate the energy needed to lift X aircraft (daily) to a height of 100m using say 100 tonnes per aircraft, then turn it into watt per sq m at ground level, then temperature change? Please?
Maybe it should then be doubled because aircraft land and use reverse thrust too.
There is a lot of talk about heat around airports, but mainly about jet wash and asphalt near temperature sensors. The above calculation would show if there is an underlying effect of general heating from fuel, and its magnitude. I have not seen this calculated before.
I wouldn’t be so quick to discount vehicles. In a busy city they’re producing as much waste heat as air conditioners. Lots of BTUs in a gallon of gas or diesel. Also don’t forget that almost the total electric bill ends up as waste heat. Very little of it is converted to stored mechanical or chemical energy. Commercial and industrial use is much greater than residential as well. Plus when you mention tall buildings you can multiply the residential rate calculation you used by the number of floors in the building as residential is usually limited to one or two stories. They are also packed much closer together.
Good point on the taller buildings blocking infrared escape. I had mentioned the air being stagnant as they tend to block the winds and hadn’t considered them blocking infrared radiation as well.
Phil Jones flippant dismissal of all that by saying the urban heat islands have been unchanging urban heat islands for the entire 20th century so while it effects absolute temperature but not the temperature trend is so stupid and wrong I can’t believe he got it past peer review. The average height of buildings, density of construction materials, the amount of energy (which turns into waste heat) consumed per capita, and the population density have all been steadily climbing the past century. UHI effect has NOT been anywhere close to constant.
My last comment was in reply to
wayne says:
July 9, 2010 at 12:53 am
Forgot to put the addressee at the top of it.
@willis
re; rate of things cooling at night
To make it more clear in general it’s the density of the materials. Grass and dirt are a lot less dense than concrete, asphault, steel, and glass. That’s why they store more heat during the day and emit more at night. Plus the grass and dirt presumably have some water content so they don’t get as hot during the day as dry, non-porous materials. As they heat up the evaporation rate increases and water vapor carries away a lot of heat in form of latent heat of vaporization.
Speaking of latent heat of vaporization it seems that’s another big missing factor in GCMs. The water cycle is essentially a heat pump that transports heat from the surface through the densest portion of the greenhouse gases near the surface and releases that heat when the water vapor condenses back into clouds. The surface layer of greenhouse gases below the clouds then acts as an insulator keeping the heat away from the surface instead of trapping it there.
@Wayne – Riker Island is a fairly well known prison complex, i.e., mostly low-rise concrete building and asphalt (though there are some open grass areas on the eastern end)
@Wayne and @David Springer – Looking again at the infrared photos, the areas of Manhattan with the highest high-rises (Midtown around and south of Central Park) and the Wall Street area at the southernmost tip) are actually cooler than the areas with much lower building heights, such greenwich village and soho. Also, note that Brooklyn and Queens, with much lower building heights, generally show up as much hotter than Manhattan. Therefore, the tall-buildings are trapping the heat theory doesn’t seem to be the case.
(note – you can use maps.google.com or maps.bing.com to locate the various areas I am referencing)
What are some features of the areas that show up as having the highest heat – lots of asphalt and/or low-lying buildings with flat tar or asphalt shingled roofs. It should also be noted that fairly wooded areas, such as the middle portion of Staten Island, show up as blue. Therefore, the reports conclusions regarding much more reflective (white) or cooling (plants) roofing materials seems to make a lot of sense.
Willis Eschenbach said:
“It’s a poor explanation for the phenomenon. The granite, concrete, asphalt, and brick of the cities has much greater heat capacity than the earth. As a result, they do not cool as fast at night as the surrounding fields. It’s not because they are hotter, it is because they have stored up a lot of heat during the day.”
I would disagree. Certainly, asphalt concrete gets considerably hotter in direct sunlight than the others, considerably hotter. Burn your bare foot if you step on it hotter. And, the newer it is (or the less time it has been since the surface was restored with a slurry of asphalt and fine aggregate or thin overlay) the hotter it gets in comparison.
In addition, paved surfaces, to the depth paved, conduct heat better than uncompacted earth does, so even lesser depths than the depth of pavement (including aggregate with a relative compaction of 95%), the temperature at a given depth of paving will be higher than at the same depth of uncompacted earth, but lower than near the surface temperature of the paving material.. Well compacted earth or aggregate also has considerably greater heat conductivity than loose earth or aggregate. Compacting removes the small insulating air spaces that uncompacted soil has.
Over the period of time since just after WWII, vast areas of surface in and around urban areas have been paved with asphalt concrete which previously had not been paved at all other than with relative loose gravel. And most streets, roads and highways which were once paved with Portland cement concrete (“white concrete”, we highway engineers called it many years ago) have been either overlaid or replaced with asphalt concrete.
http://wapedia.mobi/en/Heat_capacity?t=5.
Specific heat capacity of building materials
Substance/ Phase /cp J/(g·K)
Asphalt solid 0.920
Brick solid 0.840
Concrete solid 0.880
Glass, silica solid 0.840
Glass, crown solid 0.670
Glass, flint solid 0.503
Glass, pyrex solid 0.753
Granite solid 0.790
Gypsum solid 1.090
Marble, mica solid 0.880
Sand solid 0.835
Soil solid 0.800
Wood solid 1.7 (1.2 to 2.3)
“”” Willis Eschenbach says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:05 pm
George E. Smith says:
July 8, 2010 at 10:07 am (Edit)
Well I don’t disagree with the heating part of it; but hot things do not cool slower than cold things; so nyet on their slow nightime cooling theory.
It’s a poor explanation for the phenomenon. The granite, contcrete, asphalt, and brick of the cities has much greater heat capacity than the earth. As a result, they do not cool as fast at night as the surrounding fields. It’s not because they are hotter, it is because they have stored up a lot of heat during the day. “””
Well I don’t disagree with your comment; but that adresses a quite different aspect of the situation.
Hey a 100 Ampere-hour Automobile lead acid battery will take a lot longer to discharge if you leave the lights on, than would a pair of AA cells. Is that supposed to be a surprise ?
And not coincidently; it takes a hell of a lot longer to recharge that 100 Amp hour car battery in the first place, than the AAs in my Mouse.
That doesn’t escape the issue that the higher the temperature of ANY object; the faster it will radiate energy (cool).
And who is it who turns on the “cool” switch at night ? Those dense concrete and granite buildings do their best “cooling” in the heat of the mid-day sun, when they are hottest. We just don’t notice because the sun is replacing that heat as fast as the building is losing it. We only notice the cooling at night because the sun shuts off the heating.
I guess my point; if I was even trying to make a point, is that heat islands of their own accord are NOT a climate problem. Sure they are relatively efficient absorbers and storers of incoming solar energy; as well as the various other energy releases that go on in cities as others here have alluded to; but those same properties also make them efficient re-radiators of heat energy 24 hours a day. So they take a longer time to cool, than does the immediate air on top of those buildings; and yes as a result of that time lag, the buildings will run at a Temperature bias above other surrounding materials.
None of that is a climate problem; the climate reporting problem comes when they place an official Temperature recording station in the middle of one of those structures; which of itself is also not a problem; but then they claim that their reading is a perfectly good proxy for the Temperature at some other place up to 1200 km away from those buildings.
Urban Heat Islands DO NOT create errors in weather/climate data measurements. Failure to observe well understood data sampling rules DOES.
“”” Oliver Ramsay says:
July 8, 2010 at 8:30 pm
wayne says:
July 8, 2010 at 4:12 pm
@ George E. Smith
July 8, 2010 at 3:38 pm
Now George, that’s a real efficient system (cough), run the heat and A/C at full tilt 24/7 and just adjust the mixture to get the correct temperature. Now if that accurately describes most high-rises no wonder this globe is using so much energy and office rent is through the ceiling!
( But I take it you surely jest, could your building manager just be off his rocker or maybe just lazy? )
—————————-
wayne,
you got a little carried away there, adding “full tilt” in your portrait of the idiot engineer.
Biology has counterparts to this simultaneous, antagonistic and counter-intuitive arrangement. Your nervous system (and probably even Michael Mann’s) works on the same principle; it’s charmingly referred to as the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems; akin to driving with one foot on the gas and one on the brake. It needs to be a little more subtle than “full tilt” to really work properly! “””
Now Wayne; why would I jest; I just explained roughly how the environmental controls in this building are set up; and a lot of others like it; and you’d rather believe I am joking. If my keyboard had a micophone; and a thermometer ky, I would let you listen to the airc oming out of the ceiling vent that is maybe 13-15 feet above the floor of my cube, and about a cube diagonally to the side; so that air coes down on me at about qa 45 degree angle, all day long; and my keyboard thermometer would tell you that it is warm air; not AC air, nor Hot air; but warm air; at about whatever the room temperature is.
I should add that this is a former Hewlett Packard building that is at leadsst 35 years old, and maybe 40. Back when thisa building was built; I worked for a competitive company ina different building; and that building contained NO wall light switches. It was cheaper to leave the lights on all the time; than to install the extra copper wire needed to run light switches; so you would have to go back to a breaker box to turn off any bank of lighting.
And most of the housing built here in silicon valley at least up to that time was built with basically NO internal insulation of any kind. I owned a house; that had a flat tar paper roof with white rock spread all over it; with zero insulation anywhere in the house. Fully 50% of the entire perimeter walls were glass; single pane ordinary battleship plate glass. The heating system consisted of hot water piping that was inside the concrete slab on which the house sat; so much of the heating energy went to heating the rest of planet earth. It took two weeks in winter to bring the floor temperature up to a liveable 68 deg F or so.
Power was so cheap back then, that this is how things were done. So why would I jest ?
When I lived in St Louis Mo (mid 1960s) we had an oil heater system; and I frankly can’t recall what We had when I lived in Portland Oregon before that; but Northern California; is not your typ[ical climate location. The house I am in now; has never ever had the air conditioner turned on in all the years I have lived here; and the only reason I turn the heat on is because the house has no insulation in it at all, so it goes to night time temperatures in minutes (which is fine by me; I hate living in hot air heating)
“”” Dave Springer says:
July 8, 2010 at 5:20 pm
@george Smith
To be fair, min/max should work fine if you’re looking for a trend instead of a near perfect measure of the average temperture. The climate boffins are very quick to point out that the story isn’t about whether the global average temperature was exactly 52F in 1980 and it’s exactly 53F today. “””
So Dave; why is it that ONLY in climate (or weather) “science”, does violation of the Nyquist Sampling Theorem Criterion not result in aliassing noise that corrupts the recovered signal in such a way as to render even the average value erroneously; for just a factor of two undersampling rate.
Remember that climate alarmists are only talking about hundredths of a deg C changes; so they can ill afford to be cavalier about their measurement methodology.
And you talk about “trends”; so IPCC claims that the “trend” in future warming is that the Temperature will rise at a “rate” that is proportional to the logarithm of the atmospheric CO2 abundance; with a proportionality factor (aka “Climate sensitivity”) that is by their best guess something between 1.5 and 4.5 deg C per doubling of CO2; or 3.0 +/- 50%
Wow that inspires a lot of confidence that they have any idea at all what is going to happen and why. Is a 3:1 range of the “constant” of proportionality sufficient to prove that the graph is in fact a logarithmic relationship; given that so far we have actually observed about 1/3 of one of those CO2 doublings; with any kind of measuring instruments. There probably are at least 100 well recognised mathematical functions that could represent such a data stream within a 3:1 range of uncertainty of the proportionality constant, at least as well as either a quite linear or a quite logarithmic relationship.
When the AGW proponents themselves say that the choice of their 30 year or whatever baseline reference period, influences the outcome; I think they are just admitting that their methodology doesn’t enable one to know what is happening.
I know that it is possible to construct (faultily) the value of a fundamental Physical Constant of Nature to better than one part in 10^8; by simply playing around with numbers; in a manner with no theoretical validity or basis to it whatsoever; it’s been done.
So would I believe I know what today’s temperature is outside my back door; based on what a min/max thermometer tells me. Absolutely not; so I surely won’t for any other place or time; let alone for the entire globe.
Maybe statisticians can take comfort in their trends; maybe they believe that the central limit theorem will buy them a reprieve from any transgression; well not even that, will relieve them of the necessity to comply with the simple rules for sampled data systems.
And we would not even be able to have this discussion; but for the communication networks that rely on the vailidty of those very laws for their operation.
It seems that the extreme range of surface temperatures that can be found on planet earth; more or less at the very same time (in different places), ranges from a low of about -90 deg C (183 K) to about +60 deg C (333 K) and recent posts here have cited evidence of surface temperatures as high as +90 deg C (363 K); and we are excluding the temporary output of volcanic eruptions; just surfaces that go up and down in Temperature with the normal variations of weather conditions. And we are supposed to be impressed with trends of the order of 0.6 deg C (maybe) change in 150 years.
Just because these plotted graphs seem to show a pattern; which you might call a trend; does not mean that that pattern is a real phenomenon; and not simply a short time sample of simply a noisy function. I’ve looked at a heck of a lot of noise waveforms in my career; including an inordinate number of 1/f noise patterns; and the human eye can perceive apparent patterns where continued observation demonstrates there clearly is no pattern.
Intruding on the G. Smith conversation(not ignoring the rest you though I’m admittedly a fan) heat capacity and emissivity are needed together discussing the heat evolved by materials.
Asphalt, given the chart above, has a relatively high capacity, also a very high emissivity. Asphalt therefore emits at a lower frequency than a whitish surface, i.e., at a lower temperature.
Water has about twice the heat capacity of building materials but only 2/3 the emissivity therefore is an excellent store. CO2 at STP is an exceedingly poor store.
“”” gary gulrud says:
July 9, 2010 at 12:37 pm “””
Gary, part of the problem in all of the above discussion, rests with the way the Earth energy balance is represented in standard climate science teaching; in other words; the Trenberth cartoon that NOAA peddles as representing earth’s energy balance.
In that picture the earth is an isothermal sphere at a Temperature of 15 deg C, and it’s entire surface emits LWIR at the Standard Black Body Temperature rate of 390 W/m^2 24/7 everywhere on earth; and it is driven by a weak sun bringing 342 W/m^2, of which only 168 W/m^2 is absporbed by the surface.
This leads us to believe that something else must be providing at least the difference of 222 W/m^2 just to keep up with the radiativ3e losses.
Mother Gaia doesn’t see it as being anything like that; her planet earth has a solar blowtorch that stikes a smaller part of the earth surface but at about 4 times the Trenberth rate. And THAT driver most certainly does result in a very rapid warming in the mornings. No such thing would happen under the Trenberth scenario.
People look for equilibrium situations and calculations where none exist. The earth is never in thermal equilibrium; nor can it be, simply because it rotates once in about 24 hours.
And the relationship between incoming energy, and temperature is highly non-linear; so it is not at all valid to treat the earth energy balance situation as an average based on linear assumptions.
Some have claimed here that a simple min/max average is a good value for the daily average Temperature; yet the max-min difference can routinely be 30-40 deg F amplitude (I read the daily SF Bay area weather maps).
If you integrate the daily Temperature even assuming it is sinusoidal; and then apply the fourth Power of that Temperature (K) to computing a BB radiative emittance; you get an erroneous value; that ALWAYS underestimates the true daily Radiant Emittance; which you can calculate for yourself by raising the assumed Temperature function to the fourth power, and then integrating that over the diurnal cycle. The result is always a positive offset.
And the result can be even worse when computing the LWIR intercepted by CO2 since that does not depend on the Stefan-Boltzmann total emittance; but is more in tune with the spectral peak radiant emittance; and that value goes as the fifth power of the Temperature (K); not the 4th; so the offset can be even bigger. Moreover; the actual Temperature reached shifts the spectral peak wavelength via the Wien Displacement Law so that it puts the CO2 absorption band, even further down the tail of the LWIR radiation spectrum. There is a partial compensation, in that the line width of the actual CO2 LWIR absorption lines will be Doppler broadened by the higher Temperatures; but that broadening can only expected to go as the square root of the Temperature (K). It is still a losing proposition; the significance of CO2 is diminished at the real peak Temperatures that Mother Gaia sees in her laboratory experiments, when she calculates the earth’s mean Temperature.
Which supports my contention that the earth does its finest cooling at the peak of the post prandial Temperature highs in the hottest arid deserts on the planet. It is NOT the polar regions that are cooling the earth; their rates of emittance can be down by more than an order of magnitude from the real cooling places.
And if you can’t measure real actual temperatures; but rely on min/max averagesd as representative of the “Trends” than it is no wonder that you can’t determine with any precision what is really happening. Well Gaia knows; so I just let her decide what the earth’s Temperature should be; and it seems perfectly fine by me.
“””gary gulrud says:
July 9, 2010 at 12:37 pm
………………………………
Asphalt, given the chart above, has a relatively high capacity, also a very high emissivity. Asphalt therefore emits at a lower frequency than a whitish surface, i.e., at a lower temperature.
Water has about twice the heat capacity of building materials but only 2/3 the emissivity therefore is an excellent store. CO2 at STP is an exceedingly poor store. “””
Well actually Asphalt emits at shorter wavelength higher frequencies, than a white surface would; BUT ! only because it is a higher Temperature. The spectrum of the emissions is dependent on the Temeprature; and while there might be a spectral selectivity dictated by color and or material density; thermal radiation is largely dictated only by Temperature.
Atmospheric CO2 can hardly be regarded as any kind of store of atmospheric energy. CO2 acts only as a collection mechanism for gathering energy that is immediately shared with the ordinary atmospheric gases; and does not reside for any length of time in the cO2 molecule.
And CO2 molecules in the atmosphere are orphans; there are about 13-14 complete shells of surrounding molecules, before a CO2 molecule is likely to see another in any direction around it; so they do not act in concert.
“””gary gulrud says:
July 9, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Physics text, Wein’s displacement law.
Also intereting to read the theory behind the choice of material for the tiles on space vehicles for re-entry.
“George E. Smith says:
July 9, 2010 at 2:23 pm”
Whoa, much to chew on there!
“…The spectrum of the emissions is dependent on the Temeprature”
My thought was the emission spectrum at Temp T is “redder” for materials of higher emissivity. Perhaps the consequence is a wash? When the sun goes down the thick airport runways aren’t still warm in the wee hours and the asphalt approach cool?
“”” gary gulrud says:
July 10, 2010 at 4:29 am
“George E. Smith says:
July 9, 2010 at 2:23 pm”
Whoa, much to chew on there!
“…The spectrum of the emissions is dependent on the Temeprature”
My thought was the emission spectrum at Temp T is “redder” for materials of higher emissivity. Perhaps the consequence is a wash? When the sun goes down the thick airport runways aren’t still warm in the wee hours and the asphalt approach cool? “””
Gary; Black Body radiation theory; which has nothing to do with Eartha Kitt; is quite central to the Physics of weather/climate Physics; even though nothing real is a true Black Body.
The radiation is believed to arise simply from the acceleration of electric charges in atoms/molecules that are in constant motion due to their Temperature.
In Classical Physics, an accelerated electric charge radiates energy continually. This is the reason for the Stanford Linear Accelerator; because if you try to add energy to charged particles particularly electrons that are being guided around in a circle; as happens in accelerators like the LHC and “Bevatrons”, they constantly radiate energy, so if you don’t add more energy during a loop than the charge radiates; then it stops accelerating. With linear accelerators; you only get one trip in the barrell; but you don’t radiate due to circling.
But back to our vibrating atoms/molecules. One of the big successes of modern Physics is that we can very precisely specify the radiation in every way; that is emitted from a black body; even though it is only a fictional device.
And more importantly; we know that NO BODY can emit more radiation at any frequency (wavelength) than can a black body at the same Temperature.
We can actually make very close approximations to real black bodies at ceretain Temperatures; they typically are insulated cavities; where radiation can enter a small hole but can’t escape without bouncing around inside for a long time. They literally are lobster pots for photons (lobster pots don’t work either).
Although the BB radiation spectrum theoretically goes down to; but not including DC (so you can turn it on), and up to infinite frequency (pretty much); 98% of the total radiated energy is emitted between 0.5 times the peak wavelength of the spectrum; and 8 times that peak wavelength. Only 1% remaisn at each end beyond those limits. The shape of the curve is exactly the same at any Temperature; and the Planck Radiation formula is a function of a single variable; Wavelength times Temperature.
In particular the Product of the Temperature, and the wavelength at the spectral peak (Lambda max) is 2897.8 KelvinMicrons roughly.
If a body can radiate efficiently over that 0.5 to 8.0 times peak range; then it doesn’t matter much what it does elsewhere it is for most practical purposes black body like; and often its total emittance is simply that of a true BB (sigma. T^4) times a total emissivity; which is a factor less than 1.0. We would call such bodies gray bodies. And their radiation still follows the SB 4th power law.
Some bodies can have strongly spectrally varying emissivities. If they have high emissivities at low frequency long wavelengths; we would call them red bodies; and if they were strong at shorter wavelengths (and weak at longer) then we would call them blue bodies; even though the wavelengths are not necessarily visible.
Unless their spectral slectivity is quite peculiart; the total radiation will generally still follow the 4th power law. Of course youc an tailor special surfaces to make them spectrally selective in a number of ways; and thermal solar collectors are examples of such surfaces.
At the presumed gloabl average Temperature of 288 K (15 deg C) the BB total emittance is 390 W/m^2, and the peak wavelength of the spectrum is 10.1 microns; so the 15 micron CO2 absorption band is on the downslope tail of that curve.
At the polar lows like at Vostok Station; the Wien Shift of the spectral peak moves it all the way to that 15.0 micron range.
On the other hand; over the hottest tropical desert of asphalt surfaces; the spectral peak can move down to 8.8 microns or lower; which reduces the GHG influence of CO2; and puts more of the LWIR spectrum inside the water atmospheric window (where it will run into the ozone dip at about 9.5-10 microns).
But if the mean global Temperature is 288 K (15 deg C) then the surface emitted radiation that is “heating” the atmosphere; which will in turn “heat” the gound; is not even recognised by the human senses as being “heat”. I don’t know about you; but 15 deg C (59 deg F) feels quite cold to me.
So pick up your telephone directory, and hold it close to your cheek; and feel all the LWIR “heat” pouring off that surface; don’t knock it; it is at least 390 W /m^2 or about 40 Watts per square foot.
So those popular demonstrator experiments; where you use a light bulb (at 2800 K) to show that air with more CO2 gets hotter than air with less CO2; are an outright fraud. Mother Gaia, does not have a lot of 2800 K light bulbs pointing up in the air to heat the atmosphere she does it with nice cold rocks and soil, and stuff.
The 2800 K lamp is not even radiating the correct spectrum to show that CO2 absorbs earth surface emissions. Hell; it is even much hotter than the Venusian surface, and the spectrum peak would be about 1.035 microns (2897.8/2800); which probably falls right on some water absorption line.
Note I am NOT suggesting that CO2 doesn’t absorb LWIR as emitted from the typical earth surface (or atmosphere); it does; but it is nowhere near the effect shown in that fraudulent lab experiment.
And I call it fraudulent deliberately; because either the perpetrators know it is a fraud; so they too are frauds; or else they don’t know it’s a frauds; in which case they are incompetent to claim to be knowledgeable about climate science; which again leaves them in the fraud camp.
We need to reflect all those heat energy back to its source and I using white paint will do the trick. I had my house painted white because of that and it seems to reduce heat. My wife didn’t like the house being white, though. 🙁