Looks like they’ve discovered what great heat sinks asphalt and concrete make:
From the National Resources Defense Council via press release posted at investorideas.com (h/t to Mark)
WORST SUMMER EVER? NEW ANALYSIS OF 2010 SUMMER HEAT TO HIGHLIGHT LITTLE-DISCUSSED “DARK SIDE OF CLIMATE CHANGE”: RECORD NIGHT-TIME TEMPERATURES IN U.S.
New Focus on Sweltering Highs in Night-Time Temperatures to Outline Risks to Human Health, Environment; Record Night-Time Highs Seen in More than Three Dozen States: AL, AZ, AR, CT, DE, FL, GA, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MS, MO, NH, NJ, NM, NY, NC, ND, OH, OK, PA, RI, SC, SD, TN, TX, VA, WV, and WI.
WASHINGTON, D.C./NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL – September 15, 2010 (Investorideas.com renewable energy/green newswire) – While it is common knowledge that the summer of 2010 posted record-high temperatures across the United States, almost no attention has been paid so far to the equally disturbing trend of pervasive record high night-time temperatures where evening cooling did not occur this summer, according to a new analysis to be released at 11 a.m. EDT Thursday (September 16, 2010) by Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).
More than three dozen states (and a correspondingly significant share of the nation’s population) contain weather stations that recorded record high night-time temperatures, the “dark side of climate change” under which temperatures do not cool off overnight. The NRDC analysis breaks out the number of U.S. counties and their respective population that experienced these record night-time temperatures.
The 37 states with record high night-time temperatures highlighted in the report are: Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
News event speakers will be:
- Dan Lashof, director, Climate Center, Natural Resources Defense Council; and
- Kim Knowlton, senior scientist, Health Program, Natural Resources Defense Council.
The NRDC analysis outlines the danger of heat deaths and other impacts that are linked to the growing problem of summer temperatures that do not drop overnight.
TO PARTICIPATE: You can join this live, phone-based news conference (with full, two-way Q&A) at 11 a.m. EDT on September 16, 2010 by dialing 1 (800) 860-2442. Ask for the “worst summer ever?” news event.
CAN’T PARTICIPATE?: A streaming audio replay of the news event will be available on the Web at http://www.nrdc.org as of 3 p.m. EDT on September 16, 2010.
CONTACT: Ailis Aaron Wolf, (703) 276-3265 or aawolf@hastingsgroup.com.
ABOUT NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL
The Natural Resources Defense Council is a national nonprofit organization with more than 1.3 million members and online activists. Since 1970, our lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists have worked to protect the world’s natural resources, public health, and the environment.
NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Livingston, MT, and Beijing. Visit NRDC on the Web at http://www.nrdc.org.
=========================================================
Here’s an infrared photo of before and after at a USHCN climate station in Fayetteville, NC
Here is what you see in visible light:
Here is what the infrared camera sees:
Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C. This was shortly after a rain, about 2 hours before sunset. The rain did nearly nothing to cool down the concrete.
“Its darker than we thought!”
I ran the initials NRDC through my text to speech programme. It pronounced it as “nerds”. I think I will stick with that.
Pretty easy to see this. Compare summertime Manhattan to Eastern Long Island or the North Bronx. It even holds true in the winter time, it would be raining in Manhattan, and I’d take a 30 min subway ride to the Bronx and it’d be snowing there. There is a serious amount of heat stored in the city concrete, and everyone who tries to escape New York in the summertime knows this.
I like this study, it shows how much heat is held in by our infrastructure, which is why nightime record highs are probably being set more often since the infrastructure holds the heat in. Because of this effect, it’s likely that the ‘warming’ going on is not CO2 related, or if it is related to CO2, there is much stronger case for it being the concrete/asphalt that has caused a lot of the manmade warming
Think this might have something to do with it? http://www.nightearth.com/ . And let’s not forget the heat from power lines, and all forms of mechanical transportation as well as that from millions of air conditioners, etc. that is hidden in the glare of the city lights. I’d say the entire USA is one giant UHI.
You folks may be hot in USA, but……You might be interested to know that in most of central, east and SE Australia we have been getting lowest winter and spring temps in many areas for at least 10 to 20 years or more. Wettest for 10 or 20 years or more or much longer. The Murray River main river has been flooding. Water restrictions are being mainly lifted. Dams are filling or full. flooding has occurred in many areas. September so far is well below max temps in most areas, rainfall is already past the Sept mean in many areas. The Centre of Australian desert areas resemble the green pastures of England and nare full of wildflowers. Salt Lake Eyre is good for boating, and at present tasmani is suffering heavy snow and 130km/hr winds!
Cheers
http://www.weatherzone.com.au/news/
Scan all these for details of Australias return to the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s weather this winter and spring!
“…While it is common knowledge that the summer of 2010 posted record-high temperatures across the United States,…”
“Across the United States” makes it sound like the entire U.S., but here in Washington State we have had a very cool summer. In the lower southestern valleys of the state we are 1 month behind in the production of tomatoes because of the cool summer. In the Walla Walla Valley we have had only a couple of days of reaching triple digit highs when we usually will at least have a week or two of consecutive triple digit highs during the summer.
Yep, it’s worse than we thought.
CO2 is more powerful at night.
Gee, I have been intimately familiar with this phenomenon since moving to St. Louis in 1971. The old city environment was one gigantic heat sink. When a modest skyscraper was added to the environment, the heat trapping effect was noticeably increased. The worst part of the phenomenon was that the environment did not cool at night. This effect does not exist in the newer suburbs, 1960’s and later. The newer suburbs usually have some green material between any two concrete structures. This heat sink effect creates UHI. The UHI causes higher temperatures for longer periods at night. If the thermometers are in these areas then there is your global warming, so-called. By the way, the city in which I reside now recorded record highs this summer. I made the trip to the airport and discovered that the thermometer sits right on a runway.
Pardon me for being a broken record, but this startling new information would have been known long ago if meteorologists and climate scientists did not have the absolutely weird habit of recording a contrived temperature for each day and place. What they do is take the average of a daytime and a nighttime reading. Is that weird or what. Folks, we are scientists. Stick with the facts. Record an actual measured temperature for day and another actual measured temperature for night. Do not average them. Do not report an average. The average is worthless to science.
I’m sure glad these folks want to educate me. The only way we can get tomatoes to ripen on the vine here in Calgary, is to create a micro climate that keeps the night time temperature as high as possible. I use the south side of my house and place the plants against the concrete foundation. It is still hit and miss however. Last year lots, this year a few. Now is that a heat island inside a heat island? I wounder if my wife will let me paint the thing black?
I’ll never forget a trip I made to Los Angeles about 15 years ago as a tourist. We were driving around downtown L.A. ( where the tall buildings are ) and it was boiling, around 94 F. We had a brand new Mustang convertible as a rent-a-car. It was so hot we decided to head for Venice Beach, another tourist hot spot. Well……..as we left downtown, the temperature dropped , so much so that we ended up pulling over and putting the roof up, and when we got to the beach, it was about 68 F. We went to the beach like idiots and found a hollow in the sand and laid on the towels and wondered why no one else was there too…….( too cold ) . However it did highlight to me the effects of (1) how the ocean as it cooled the beach and (2) the immense effect of an urban heat island. It was quite a reversal of extremes.
Gee, what remarkable conclusion. Working on air conditioning across the US for 25 years, it didn’t take much to notice the temperature drop moving from th city to the suburbs to rural areas on the same day.
I guess their flop of a movie on “ocean acidification” which was cross-promoted across the country along with NOAA, was not effective enough….so they resort to this.
Also, anyone notice where their offices are?
NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Livingston, MT, and Beijing.
Beijing?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
So if we simply ban night, along with CO2, everything will be OK!
After years of belittling UHI, it’s now embraced to highlight record high low temps.
Now I’m sure that some rural locales experienced record high low temps. In itself that proves nothing. It happens. But citing UHI night time temps as a metric of anything proves nothing, other than letting the local residents know that it’s hot and uncomfortable.
Now how about a story about record low high temps? Where can we hear about those? Oh, that’s right, nobody covers those stories like WUWT.
Rocks on mountains/deserts/anywhere hold heat…. its NOT artificial (ie Mann made, haha), ONLY its “Natural” UHI, is probably mostly natural ROCK or “cement” if you like, so nothing special here guys/gals move on.. Imagine the whole “Andes”, Himalayas etc… heat effect in summer idem same thing chao/
I see NJ on the list.
I didn’t notice any such thing, and I usually take a little stroll around the grounds at night.
I was not tempted to sleep outside ( which is what I usually think of when it is hot at night )
Hate to personalize and anecdotalize this but my observations of 2010 were,
that there was an extended cold period, that was cold for a long time, but not out of range at all and not approaching memorable lows.
And in the summer, there was an extended hot period, that lasted ( With no rain)
for a long time but did not break or reach any records. I did NOT notice any extreme night-heat. ( and I am looking for it)
Just weather. Nothing to see here.
I’d like to see a comparison between urban and rural t data.
Also, what about cloud cover over these areas?
If we have higher dew points, the temps drop less at night time.
The NDRC has done good work in the past decade in trying to make the US government face up to its role in allowing overfishing on the Georges Banks. A series of lawsuits has forced the government (viz the National Marine Fisheries Service) to set targets for rebuilding the fish stocks – larger stocks will mean more fish for future fisheries. Unfortunately, a court challenge has allowed the NMFS to weasel out of targets for rebuilding the cod and a few other important species.
At least they are focussed on something other CO2 as a cause of warming here. Lovely pics both from the study and from Anthony.
In the IR photo, note the heat of the pipe atop which sets the instrument….. looks toasty.
Thanks for posting the link to the NRDC. I have always distrusted them, but never had a reason to visit their websiste before. I visited the site for a laugh, but got a scare instead!
The NRDC is a highly organized, well funded (and dangerous) eco-totalitarian organization using good old fashioned economic blackmail and coercion in government offices and corporate board rooms around the world. I guess that I shouldn’t be surprised that they’re using another recent news event to create a new straw man scare tactic out of “the growing problem of summer temperatures that do not drop overnight” in an attempt push their agenda.
Do some people actually use those form letters?
How many record nights do you have to have to make that list? One? We did NOT have a hot summer here in ND. Nothing like we’ve had other years. Just how stupid do they hope people are?
I don’t doubt the UHI component to this.
I am curious, tho, to what degree C02 and feedbacks add to this particular problem. By that, I mean, do we get more heat-trapping at night because of C02 and associated positive feedbacks, even if UHI is the primary storer of that heat during the day?
Climate Change is a great big complex problem with lots of moving parts.
HEAT ISLAND? Noooo. Who woulda thunk it? I’m perplexed. What about the tree ring data? (/sarcasm)
Seems like this is just a reflection of the persistent weather pattern we’ve had since spring; cooler than average in the west and warmer than average in the east. But of course the announcement didn’t say anything about the cool western summer.
Henry chance says:
September 15, 2010 at 6:47 pm
If we have higher dew points, the temps drop less at night time.
And if we have asphalt/concrete jungles we retain mucho heato! Have some dewpoint data you’d like to share?
Of course, if you re starting out warm in the morning, chances are you are going to be warmer during the day as well , thus the record highs. So, the logical solution to this truly human induced warming is that we destroy all the cities, re-vegetate these areas & go live in caves, right?? That would solve the problem. I am sure the NRDC would love that.
I work in the 1st tier suburbs here in MSP and drive back to my house in town every night at around 10pm (fyi I’m a 20yr+ meteorologist working in the field). Most nights the temperature diff from my office with it’s grassy’er surroundings is on average about 3F+ cooler than when I drive past the airport/mall of america and the vast expanse of concrete there. I’m just south of the river valley and once I climb up to the valley to this nearly solid area of concrete/asphalt the temp rises several degrees.
At sundown after a sunny day, if you can stand with one bare foot on your lawn and one on your sidewalk that has been in the sun all day you’ll feel the tremendous temp diff.
Good Gosh Y’all. I wish I could find some of my old reports from the late 70’s that dealt with this issue and heat sinks. How can this be a “new” finding? We have known about heat sinks for years. That is why we insulated the runway at Rankin Inlet, NWT, put in a metre of gravel to keep the heat out of permafrost. For some installations we used “heat pipes” to carry the heat away. I am amazed that this should be considered new information when it has been in the literature for years. It is why even when it is 30 below outside I can keep a 2000 square foot house heated with just two fires a day because of the mass of the masonary fireplace – two very hot, smokeless fires.
Haven’t we got years of night time temperatures showing this? Is this a surprise? Or perhaps my engineering memory is fogged by the present. As a meteorologist though, I imagine Anthony noticed this a long time ago.
It’s been remarkably cold along the coast of California. Here in Carlsbad, we hardly had a summer at all. We keep telling each other that it will get hot soon… but it hasn’t yet. The ocean is much cooler than usual. The tourists are much cooler too, and rather grumpy about it.
Oh, and the UHI apparently wasn’t obvious to the people who do studies? Where would you rather sit on a hot evening… on the sidewalk that was in the sun all day, or a nice cool lawn? Up against a west facing building, or where it has been shaded since before noon?
Someone should hit them with a clue bat. Metaphorically, of course.
In central Florida it was unusually cool the beginng of summer. Then when it finally heated up (mid July) about 95% of the days had afternoon clouds and thunerstorms which cooled everything nicely As a comparison, I take my daughter swimming in the local lake almost every evening. Last year the lake was very warm all summer. This year the lake has been cool even now. That thunderstorm thermostat really works.
vigilantfish says:
September 15, 2010 at 6:54 pm
The NDRC has done good work in the past decade in trying to make the US government face up to its role in allowing overfishing on the Georges Banks.
=============================================
Well if they had actually just focused on legitimate causes like that and not adopted the typical modern environmental flag waving, they might have gained more supporters, like me.
Unfortunately….they lost me on their national “ocean acidification” tour.
In a similar vein, I would support the ACLU in principle (civil liberties), but in practice they represent just one one-dimensional and extremely far left, political agenda.
So…they alienated me from the start. No chance of supporting that.
Point is, I applaud their efforts to halt overfishing.
But it is sad that all their other more vacuous agendas throw the good baby out with the dirty nasty bathwater.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Um, I live in Oklahoma and it has been the mildest August this year. We have had cool nights since early in August. Quite often September is quite warm but not this year. I am running the heat at night half the time. We never saw anywhere near 110 degrees all summer. And we close in on that pretty often too.
Wayne Delbeke says:
September 15, 2010 at 7:08 pm
Cynical me says…
Its a “NEW” discovery so that you can get money to do research on it…
no one is putting up money to research old (i.e. known) information.
, many previously known things will be “newly” discovered so that research funding
can continue to flow…
cheers J
A little known 2004 NOAA aerial survey reported that US manmade surfaces (Impervious Surface Area) are about equal in area to the state of Ohio. That’s a pretty big heat island!
The survey includes a national map. For more info see:
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/09/10/guest-post-large-scale-climate-modification-agriculture-urban-heat-islands-are-changing-regional-and-continental-climates-by-bill-dipuccio/
Sorry, but I gag whenever I see “NRDC”. They’re the doofi who talked Clinton into canceling the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR). If not for that, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
What we’re seeing is the reframing of climate change as a “public health issue”. This was discussed on WUWT a couple of months ago:
Notice that in the The Dark Side of Climate Change press release, NRDC is not discussing melting ice caps, species extinction, or the usual alarmist global warming themes we’ve come to expect. Instead they state:
Suddenly they’re concerned about our health and welfare. It’s an unusual about-face for an environmental advocacy group that normally places human needs last in their hierarchy of values. I’ve been seeing an increase in these sort of “public health” stories ever since reading the aforementioned climate change strategy. For example, in California there was a recent news story that interviewed nurses protesting at an appearance by Carly Fiorina (who is currently running against Boxer for the CA senate seat) over her support for Proposition 23 which seeks to overturn California’s disastrous AB32 climate change statute. Here is what the article stated:
This raises several important questions: Which group or groups is mobilizing these idiot nurses to protest at pro Prop 23 rallies and what are their motives? How does a harmless trace gas that we exhale and which is essential to all life on Earth contribute to an asthma epidemic in California? How will limiting CO2 emissions in CA prevent asthma in children? These questions are never actually discussed in the article, which you can read here:
http://marinscope.com/articles/2010/09/15/mill_valley_herald/news/doc4c90fb5e38aeb843796984.txt
Steve the shark
NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Livingston, MT, and Beijing.
___________________________________
Livingston, Montana!!!! Interesting. Militia central. Some very interesting people in that region. Maybe its just coincidence, but an office in place with a population of 7,000 people versus those other places with millions. No offense to Livingston. It is a nice place that I have been through often.
It’s worse than the growing urbania problem we thought it was.
Where’s the data on the 50 state average, or any other hard numbers?
Surfacestation.org has already outlined the siting issues and lack of proper coverage.
The US does not consist entirely of the concrete & asphalt jungle.
But most of the stations are located in it.
Minimum temperatures don’t measure night time temperatures, they measure early morning temperatures (which is when the daily minimum temperature generally occurs), and while warmer nights may be the cause of increased minimum temperatures, increased minimum temperatures could equally well be caused by increased early morning sunlight reaching the ground due to decreased near horizon haze and particulate pollution, which has certainly occurred in major urban centers over the last 30 years.
The take away points are,
The only way to determine if night time temperatures are increasing is to look at temperatures at fixed times (midnight, 4am), and this data doesn’t exist for more than a few places.
Highly paid climate professionals don’t seem to know that minimum temperatures don’t occur at night, which is symptomatic of the pervasive ignorance of the basics in the realm of the climate
I live in a rural area 8 miles from the nearest town (pop 3200) and drive 55 miles to the nearest large city (pop 200,000). Many mornings on the way to work, the temperature will increase as much as 10 degrees F (according to the temp display on my rearview mirror so not very reliable but close enough). This is all before the sun comes up, so not much can be attributed to direct solar.
John
Theo Goodwin said:
September 15, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Pardon me for being a broken record, but this startling new information would have been known long ago if meteorologists and climate scientists did not have the absolutely weird habit of recording a contrived temperature for each day and place. What they do is take the average of a daytime and a nighttime reading. Is that weird or what. Folks, we are scientists. Stick with the facts. Record an actual measured temperature for day and another actual measured temperature for night. Do not average them. Do not report an average. The average is worthless to science.
Amen. “Weird habit” is right. This practice makes absolutely no sense. But they then compound it by averaging the averages! The ability to compare these numbers in any statistically meaningful sense is lost. What really matters is heat content, which could be measured using an integrated set of recorded temperatures over time. I have never understood how a daily high (which, in a hypothetical example, might have only been the temperature for a brief period of time) can be averaged with a daily low (when the temperature over 24 hours could hypothetically have been at or near the low for much of that period of time) to generate any meaningful measure of the average temperature for the day. This penchant to produce averages is very peculiar.
Is even the opening statement correct? “While it is common knowledge that the summer of 2010 posted record-high temperatures across the United States….” Where? My impression was that while this past summer had its hot moments in the South and East, overall it was relatively moderate. Parts of the west coast felt they had missed summer altogether due to the body of cold Arctic water lurking just off the coast.
Claude Harvey
Moratorium cities.
savethesharks says:
September 15, 2010 at 7:28 pm
I’d have to agree with you. While I admire the NDRC’s work on overfishing, I’d never give them a dime, for all the reasons you state. It’s a shame that all environmental organizations just won’t let go of their political, ecototalitarian agendas. They still have the good-will of the sheeple, and could do so much good if they focussed on real problems and practical, non-punitive solutions.
More publicity for Penn & Livingston is here:
Sunspots could soon disappear for decades: study
September 15, 2010 by Lin Edwards
http://www.physorg.com/news203746768.html
The comments at physorg are hilarious.
The Arizona Daily Star carried a story about the summer’s heat in Arizona titled;
Summer was extra hot here; blame the nighttime temps
Some excerpt;
The lead sentence in the closing paragraph…
In response to question about trends this was offered..
What really strikes me is that what is cited is regional warming in an area quite susceptible to the ENSO and other natural events. But…. not a word of those realities. Misinformation or propaganda?….. let the reader be the judge.
Here is a link to the complete article..
http://azstarnet.com/news/science/environment/article_976f6920-74b4-5241-8a51-b40e1e605d44.html
To our friends in Oz- we here in NW USA are looking at that White Witch of a La Nina
and thinking-those who have lived through that time period of-the 50’s 60’s and70’s
we are are going there again….
I’d like to see a green Australia.
The NRDC is truly a disinformation organ, I trust nothing they say. UHE is real. But that” greenfields” effect is too..
“ETHICIST” Donald Brown of Penn State is a huge warmist, and he replied to me thusly when I questioned the occurence of CAGW.
“-Even though one should be suspicious of climate models, they are now working to predict what we are seeing and can be used to explain prior temperatures the Earth has experienced.
-2010 is the hottest year so far and the last decade is the hottest on record.
-Number of record highs is 2x record lows
-Growing seasons are lengthening
-Nights have warmed more than days (this is very important to rule out the sun as the cause of the warming.
-Oceans have warmed steadily since 1970 and more importantly they are warming in a way that makes recent global warming very likely not attributable to ocean cycles.
-More wildfires are being seen around the world
-Droughts and floods are increasing in intensity and frequency
-Storm damage is rising as predicted.
-Snows are melting earlier
-Fire seasons start earlier and are harder to contain
-The world is loosing snow cover
-The globe is losing frozen ground . permafrost.
-World’s glaciers are loosing ice each year
-Sea ice is declining
-Volume of sea ice is declining
-Greenland is loosing ice
-Antarctica is loosing ice
-Sea level is rising at the fastest level on record
-Oceans are becoming more acid
-Plant and animals are moving up slope and north 3.0 miles/decade
-Timing of flowers, butterflies emergencies are appearing earlier, ”
http://rockblogs.psu.edu/climate/2010/08/the-worst-ethical-scandal-in-the-us-congress-climate-change.html
Note the 4th item on his list of long since debunked proofs.
Thing s the higher nighttime teems are showing up in rural data, too. I downloaded 10 years of university of mo data last winter, and I found that for most locations high temperatures were Actually falling, whilenlow temperatures were higher, driving the averages slightly up. I really think that more cloud cover and higher humidities go a long way to explain this, but, that doesn’t make for scary enough headlines.
can’t recall this on WUWT. nearly 500 comments. some interesting bits, some anti-population stuff:
7 Sept: Marketwatch: Paul B. Farrell: Forget going green — Earth doesn’t care
Commentary: Hybrids, recycling, solar won’t halt species extinction
Cover story: “The Earth Doesn’t Care If You Drive a Hybrid!” Or recycle. Or eat organic food. Or live in a green house powered by solar energy. Or squander commodities. The Earth just doesn’t care how much you waste.
Was that a cover story in Mother Earth News? Or The Onion? No folks, it was the cover story in the elite American Scholar Journal by Nobel physicist Robert B. Laughlin of Stanford University. I bring it to your attention because in today’s resurgence of Know-Nothing party politics few care what scholars say about
anything …
“Nobody knows why these dramatic climate changes occurred in the ancient past. … One thing we know for sure is that people weren’t involved. There weren’t enough people around during the ice episodes to matter, and there weren’t any people around before the ice episodes.” So can we do anything to stop the “sixth species extinction?” No.
Climate change “is a matter of geologic time, something that the Earth routinely does on its own without asking anyone’s permission or explaining itself,” warns Laughlin. Earth “doesn’t include the potentially catastrophic effects on civilization in its planning. Far from being responsible for damaging the earth’s climate, civilization might not be able to forestall any of these terrible changes once the earth has decided to make them … climate ought not to concern us too much … because it’s beyond our power to control.” …
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/forget-going-green-earth-doesnt-care-2010-09-07
-Storm damage is rising as predicted. ( because of higher population density in storm damaged areas)
-The world is loosing snow cover (every summer, same old thing)
-The globe is losing frozen ground . permafrost.(darn those pipelines)
-World’s glaciers are loosing ice each year( but the owning countries told the IPCC to shove off)
-Sea ice is declining(and inclining depending on what hemisphere is freaked out over)
-Greenland is loosing ice(just not as fast as it is gaining it)
-Antarctica is loosing ice(that flows out to the sea in glacial advance)
-Sea level is rising at the fastest level on record(faster than a speeding snail)
-Oceans are becoming more acid(limestone cowboys)
-Plant and animals are moving up slope and north 3.0 miles/decade(and the ones that did are pouring back down the slopes for dear heat as winter nips thier heels)
Nice list.
“”Baa Humbug says:
September 15, 2010 at 6:47 pm
I’d like to see a comparison between urban and rural t data.
Also, what about cloud cover over these areas?””
This is a little deeper (but better) than merely rural vs urban temperatures for it shows the graphs of Dr. Spencer’s analysis using some 10,000 weather stations world-wide vs population density at each station as a proxy for the UHI effect. To me this is one of his very best articles to date and I hope he carries it to publish a paper.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/10/spencer-global-urban-heat-island-effect-study-an-update/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/04/spencers-uhi-vs-population-project-an-update/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/03/spencer-using-hourly-surface-dat-to-gauge-uhi-by-population-density/
From these do you also get the impression that with no population there is little to zero trend in temperatures? This was a really great analysis to me, the way true physicists do proper science.
Remember the Alar scare? Something farmers put on apples that was not a pesticide but improved crop size. NRDC got hold of some junk science that said Alar gave children cancer. They got the story in Oct. Instead of immediately alerting the public to the danger, they sat on the story until the next spring. Why? So they could hire a PR firm to put together an effective fund drive and to get some Hollywood actress to front an advocacy group for Alar free apples. Then they rolled out their campaign. After stressing out the mothers of America and doing serious damage to the apple growers, it was revealed that real science proved that to get sick from Alar on apples would require eating a pickup truck load of apples a day for months. No apology from NRDC is on record.
If you can find a copy of Aaron Wildavsky’s “But Is It True”, you can find out how many of these scare stories are junk science. Meanwhile, the deleterious effects of a continous barrage of stressful media scare stories on human beings is well established, even, one might say, robust, and worse than we think. Environmentalists lie!
All the Natural Resources Defense Council has to defend is the epidemic of lunacy among it’s staff.
The urban heat island of NYC is clear from a comparison with NY State. The August temeprature has a zero trend for the state over the last 80 years, but it’s 0.26 degrees per decade for NYC. See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/NewYorkAugustTemperature.htm
Remember these wise words by the great Dr. Miskolczi’s discovery:
“This discovery is proof that the IPCC has been lying to the world, along with the CRU and other agencies which have been pushing for programs such as Carbon Cap and Trade schemes. That scheme was designed to coerce peoples and governments into handing over tax dollars for the UN to manage and redistribute as it sees fit. Carbon Dioxide emissions cannot cause Global Warming. Government agencies, including the U.S. federal government and the White House, continue to push this issue as a prelude to instituting a Cap and Trade Tax scheme here in the United States, and it is based upon fraudulent science.”
Robert
“Because of this effect, it’s likely that the ‘warming’ going on is not CO2 related, or if it is related to CO2, there is much stronger case for it being the concrete/asphalt that has caused a lot of the manmade warming”
while the land record may be effected by this, dont forget that 70% of the record is SST.
And dont forget the trend we see in UHA and RSS.
concrete may play a role. but not in SST and not in UHA or RSS.
During the day, the summer solar flux can easily reach 1000 W.m-2. Some of this heat flux gets absorbed and stored by the urban infrastructure to be released after the sun sets. The increase in downward ‘clear sky’ LWIR flux from a 100 ppm increase in CO2 is 1.7 W.m-2. The means that the maximum total daily dose of flux from 100 ppm of CO2 is 0.15 MJ.m-2. This is equivalent to 2.5 minutes of summer sunshine per day, or the daily evaporation of a film of water 65 microns thick x 1 m^2. One small cloud in front of the sun for 2.5 minutes or 0.065 mm of rain per day can ruin all of the IPCC’s global warming predictions. Urban heating is controlled by land use, moisture and sunlight. No CO2 is involved. That radiative forcing constant of 1.7 W.m-2 can only warm the greenhouseland inside the IPCC models. No reality is required, just a little fraudulent math and a hockey stick.
CO2, is there anything it can’t do?
You don’t even need to compare day to night, just drive or walk. When you drive by a grassy area, it’s significantly cooler than when you drive by a parking lot.
I feel this every day while I drive through the city on my way home from work, even though I’m on the highway most of the way. In the part of town I work in, there are lots of trees and grassy areas and the air, even on the highway, is fairly cool. But as I drive through the heart of downtown, it heats up considerably.
It would really be nice if these reports used a little common sense.
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This is supposed to be news? The Romans knew of the effects of building on the temperature of a city 2000 years ago, and after Nero destroyed the city with fire rebuilt Rome to mitigate the effect.
In my view we ought to acknowledge that humans do impact on micro climates but through UHI not CO2. UHI can impact as much as 5 or 6 degrees, Co2 has yet to be proven as affecting temperature yet we concentrate on the latter-over which we can do little-and ignore the former-over which we can have an influence through intelligent design.
tonyb
Isn’t this the Urban Heat Island effect?
The fascination for averaging data puzzles me too, particularly when so many supposedly well-educated people don’t understand the concept of average, an artificial contsruct that in itself has very limited use in the practical world. It is helpful in making comparisons, providing apples are compared with apples, but data from measuring any phenomenon loses much when manipulated – a daily graph of noon temps, for example, gives a very clear picture of weather for that month, particularly if one also graphs the daily rainfall and windflow. Comparing monthly peaks and troughs year by year seem much more informative to me than creating a picture that does not reflect reality.
Here in the UK, politicians berate schools and teachers for not doing a decent job because around half of the school population acheives at a below-average level. This failure to understand the concept of average suggests that educational failure in math and in logic goes way further back in time than the present day.
And we wonder why politicians at all levels have such a slender grasp of the complexities of climate!
“I’d say the entire USA is one giant UHI.”
Have you flown over the USA and looked down whilst doing so? Most of it is empty. It is a shame that most of the thermometers are located in the small hot areas where humans live.
“-Sea level is rising at the fastest level on record”
I just covered my monitor in coffee at that one. What record is this person referring to? At the end of the last ice age sea-levels rose much further and much faster than they are doing now.
Additionally, sea-levels rose faster during the first half of the 20th century than the second half.
John Marshall: Exactly, termed the UHI effect.
With all the concrete and asphalt in cities holding heat why hasn’t there been almost zero development of the Stirling heat engine? Why has this almost 100 year old invention literally been snubbed by “greenies”?
Ian Mc Vindicated said:
September 15, 2010 at 6:01 pm
I’ll never forget a trip I made to Los Angeles about 15 years ago as a tourist. We were driving around downtown L.A. ( where the tall buildings are ) and it was boiling, around 94 F. We had a brand new Mustang convertible as a rent-a-car. It was so hot we decided to head for Venice Beach, another tourist hot spot. Well……..as we left downtown, the temperature dropped , so much so that we ended up pulling over and putting the roof up, and when we got to the beach, it was about 68 F. We went to the beach like idiots and found a hollow in the sand and laid on the towels and wondered why no one else was there too…….( too cold ) . However it did highlight to me the effects of (1) how the ocean as it cooled the beach and (2) the immense effect of an urban heat island. It was quite a reversal of extremes.
The difference in temperature in LA between beach and an inland area like downtown is due far more to the (1) effect of the cold ocean on shore areas rather than (2) the heat island effect. That said, it would be interesting to know if the coastal fog there has been migrating towards the coast as a result either of overall warming or of increased urban density downtown.
The more junk food we eat the more heat we generate.
Skeptics have been pointing out this obvious effect (even to grade-school kids) for decades. Finally, the effect becomes so obvious that the climate gatekeeping elites can’t hold it back without appearing totally clueless.
But they have their butts covered; it’s all taken care of in the temp “adjustments”.
I noticed that the futher east in the US, the Jet stream seemed to be up in Canada most hot days during the summer. All of that warm tropical air pumping up the east coast. “Typical” summers the jet stream seems to swoop down the country and then turn north, just my observation. I have not seen or heard this in the MSM. I usually look at the Accuweather website to review the jet stream. In NC we matched record highs yesterday, I say not due to global warming, but the Jet Stream is north of the Great Lakes.
The UHI effect certainly affected the skillfully-stagecrafted 1988 June hearing starring Al Gore, his senatorial colleague Tim Wirth, and Jim Hansen:
http://www.nationalreview.com/planet-gore/17534/stagecraft/chris-horner
“TIMOTHY WIRTH: We called the Weather Bureau and found out what historically was the hottest day of the summer. Well, it was June 6th or June 9th or whatever it was. So we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it.
DEBORAH AMOS: [on camera] Did you also alter the temperature in the hearing room that day?
TIMOTHY WIRTH: What we did is that we went in the night before and opened all the windows, I will admit, right, so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room. And so when the- when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and double figures, but it was really hot.[Shot of witnesses at hearing]
WIRTH: Dr. Hansen, if you’d start us off, we’d appreciate it. The wonderful Jim Hansen was wiping his brow at the table at the hearing, at the witness table, and giving this remarkable testimony.[nice shot of a sweaty Hansen]”
The sad part is, if the climate bedwetters get their way, poor folks, especially more elderly ones in cities will have increased difficulty affording AC, and will be dying as a result. That is, of course, assuming they survive the winters and the increased cost of heating.
The image shows long-wave radiation from a septic tank. The source of heat is from organisms in the effluent from toilets–not reradiation from the sun.
Nevertheless, the point is well taken, that the urban heat-island effect distorts night-time temperatate measurements, leading to bogus conclusions.
Why haven’t we heard a heck of a lot more about UHI from Mann, Jones, et al? Hummmmmm… maybe it’s the money. Think it just might be the money? Does CO2 and all the other man-made gas in the world cause a little warming? You bet! Is it the problem of problems? No! In the atmosphere, H2O is the Big Kahuna. Why not recognize the science of what the problems really are? It’s an integrity thing. If you have no integrity, you just care about the money. Kind’a like the US Congress and the President talking about our money, like they are giving us something by not raising our taxes to pay for their special projects for their special friends. My Oh My! Aren’t we the lucky ones!
*******
Leon Brozyna says:
September 15, 2010 at 6:35 pm
After years of belittling UHI, it’s now embraced to highlight record high low temps.
Now I’m sure that some rural locales experienced record high low temps.
*******
Not in this rural western MD location — not even close. In fact, in ALL the days of highest temps here (upper 90s) this summer, the air was less humid than a typical summer, and as a result lows were always 60-66F, which are no more than avg overnite lows. Urban overnite lows at the same time were 6-12F warmer than me.
We certainly did not get our fair share of any significant global warming in Nevada this spring/summer. The tomatoes haven’t ripened yet and the grapes are struggling to raise their sugar levels. Its just not fair. May be Al Gore has been hanging around near by.
The heat stored within large metropolitan areas is enormous.
I have taken several snapshots of the local weather report at 10:00 p.m. which look similar to this. In fact, I could probably take one showing this effect almost every night. Guess where the official temperature for this area would be measured.
http://img827.imageshack.us/img827/8029/photova.jpg
As far as I know San Diego is still in the United States. They have experienced the coldest summer in at least 60 years. Here is the time series for July 1950-2010. July 2010 was so cold it literally fell off the bottom of the chart. August 2010 tied with August 1999 for the coldest in the past 60 years.
The most remarkable heat island I’m aware of is found at Reno NV, where the mean July minimum temperature has risen from 44 F to 60 F over the past 50 years since 1960. This heat island has also been documented by earlier posts at WUWT.
Over the past 50 years from 1960-2009 we have seen these trends in the annual-average of daily max/min temperature at 1st order sites in Nevada:
Trend in Degrees F Site MaxT MinT Diurnal Range ----------------------------------------- Reno +1.3 +11.2 -9.9 Las Vegas +1.5 +7.6 -6.1 Tonopah +2.2 +2.7 -0.5 Ely +1.7 +0.9 +0.8 Elko +0.7 +0.1 +0.6 Winnemucca +0.5 +1.3 -0.8Looking at only the summer and early fall period of June-October, the trend in Reno min temperature is even larger. Reno has seen an increase of 14.6 deg F from 38.0 F to 52.6 F in June-October mean minimum temperature. At the 4 mostly rural sites we see no significant change in the magnitude of the diurnal cycle over the past 50 years.
MarkA:
San Diego temperature follows the PDO. See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/SanDiego.htm
(BTW, I am located in Seattle like you)
savethesharks says:
September 15, 2010 at 6:18 pm
I guess their flop of a movie on “ocean acidification” which was cross-promoted across the country along with NOAA, was not effective enough….so they resort to this.
Also, anyone notice where their offices are?
NRDC has offices in New York City, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Livingston, MT, and Beijing.
Beijing?
__________________________________________
Of course Beijing, that is where Maurice Strong is currently residing and they would want to keep in touch with him.
“Record summer highs across the US?” Tell that to the farmers here in the Pacific Northwest, if you want to make them laugh bitterly. Average summers give us we 84 days with temps above 70. This year it’s 54 days, with predictions of a cool, wet Fall. Thermal units (which is how farmers measure the weather) are down for the 3rd year running, and a range of crops have suffered accordingly.
Please note the red rectangles in many buildings. Those are windows allowing IR to pass thru. Kinda makes you wonder about those statements that glass is opaque to IR.
Pofarmer says:
September 15, 2010 at 8:48 pm
Thing s the higher nighttime teems are showing up in rural data, too. I downloaded 10 years of university of mo data last winter, and I found that for most locations high temperatures were Actually falling, whilenlow temperatures were higher, driving the averages slightly up. I really think that more cloud cover and higher humidities go a long way to explain this, but, that doesn’t make for scary enough headlines.
_______________________________________________________
Be careful that you actually have the RAW DATA. I notices that my local temperatures (rural) were “adjusted” up any where from one to five degrees (F) by the next day. Especially the lows. This seems to be because temperatures are compared to other sites and the data mangled according to some esoteric data crunching program.
The data I am looking is at Wundergound.
One thing that is interesting is Fayetteville NC does not show any CAGW, it shows a sine wave instead.
Fayetteville NC GISS temp graph
As far as the weather here in central North Carolina.
It was cold and snowy at the beginning of the year, five snow storms when normally we get one storm every five years. The spring was down right cold. June and July were normal not really abnormally hot and August was a bit on the cool side.
As our friend in Florida said the thunderstorms cooled things off. It was a rather dry late spring and a wet summer. I have more grass than my animals can eat right now, a welcome change. The reservoir I live near is finally back to normal.
Giving away my age, I think in the oil crisis’ of the ’70’s the term “thermal mass” was taken to be a good thing. Ideas were thought of to the take advange of this to recylce the heat. Brick homes were good as they could keep you cool during the day as the brick heated and warm at night as the brick cooled. Thermal mass is an old phenomenom.
Note that the concrete surface is around 22-24°C, while the grassy areas are between 12-19°C. This was shortly after a rain, about 2 hours before sunset. The rain did nearly nothing to cool down the concrete.
That doesn’t seem to add up …
First of all, to coolest spot I see on the grass is more like 15 or 16C, and I am thinking some spots are over 20C (although it is hard to tell without better image analysis tools.) The
Then, looking at the shadows, it sure looks like the sun is more than 45 degrees up. For example, the shadow from the little white cylinder on the sidewalk and the station itself both seem to be shorter than the object’s height.
This would mean the sun was above 45 degrees in in the sky. The sun moves 15 degrees/hr, which would make this 3+ hr before sunset. And since the sun moves at an angle, that makes it even longer before sunset.
How much of this effect is from aerosols coming from planes? Where I live there is almost a constant layer of brown cloud sprayed from jets. The nighttime lows are much higher when this occurs. Does it reduce nighttime radiation?
Yaasss — current home of Maurice Strong. World’s premier promoter of Western de-industrialization/depopulation.
I’m also a bit confused in general.
Yes, urban areas are kept warm by all the concrete, etc, as the scientists who did this report are surely aware. So this blog entry seems to be starting out with a strawman argument.
Further, the report is not specifically about cities getting warmer. The original report states “Even more telling is that nighttime lows were the hottest ever recorded at nearly one in four weather stations in NOAA’s Historic Climatology Network. This means that at 278 stations the average nighttime low temperatures for June, July and August 2010 were hotter than at any time since 1895. More than half the stations recorded average nighttime low temperatures among their five hottest on record. ” (Emphasis added)
This seems to be a wide-spread effect not limited to urban areas. In Arkansas, for example, 11 counties with a total population of 323,000 set records. It would be tough to characterize counties with an average population of 30,000 as “urban”. Sure, some of the records were set in counties with large populations, but many records were set in largely rural counties as well.
(It would be interesting to know how long thru the night the “heat island” effect lasts. After 8 hours of cool air and no sun, the concrete would certainly be getting closer and closer to the ambient temperature. In other words, New York City is certainly much warmer at 6 PM than the surrounding natural areas. Is it still significantly warmer at 6 AM?)
REPLY: see the Christy report on irrigation and nighttime lows here at WUWT, use the search box. – Anthony
REPLY: see the Christy report on irrigation and nighttime lows here at WUWT, use the search box. – Anthony
Thanks for the link. This report certainly seem to make sense. The large scale “terraforming” of the Central Valley for farming would certainly seem capable of changing the local climate. And the mechanism put forth (humidity, soil moisture, and darker soil) fits the data.
But I don’t see how that really addresses this report. Many rural counties in the eastern US set records. These counties have neither urban heat islands, nor irrigation/soil change. The first two hypotheses put forth do not seem to work for these areas. Looks like a different hypothesis is needed….
Ken Hall writes:
“Have you flown over the USA and looked down whilst doing so? Most of it is empty. It is a shame that most of the thermometers are located in the small hot areas where humans live.”
Spot on, Ken! Driving reveals the same truth. Try driving from Atlanta to St. Louis. You will encounter Chattanooga, which fills one big gully, and Nashville, which covers one big hill. If your vehicle were to break down, you could walk for hours without encountering an exit and many exits have no services. The USA has huge spaces that are underutilized or not utilized at all, and I am not counting the huge number of huge state and national parks.
The claim that this year has been especially warm cannot be based on actual temperature measurements. It must be based on some set of contrivances, some averages between day and night. Temperatures in my area have been lower than normal, a couple of degrees, and temperatures in the St. Louis region, my old stomping grounds, have been seriously cooler than normal. In fact, the weather in the midwest broke two weeks ago. They have been enjoying Fall temperatures since late August, and that is unusual as St. Louis usually pushes the 90’s right into mid-September.
Tim F writes:
“But I don’t see how that really addresses this report. Many rural counties in the eastern US set records. These counties have neither urban heat islands, nor irrigation/soil change. The first two hypotheses put forth do not seem to work for these areas. Looks like a different hypothesis is needed….”
I live in one of those rural counties in the East. Our local newspaper reported record highs this summer. My thermometers disagreed, as did those of most other locals. I drove to the airport. The official thermometer has been moved so that it sits about 6 inches from a runway. Voila: there is your global warming. In general, keep in mind that rural no longer means poor. Many rural counties in Florida are dotted by private airports whose runways are lined with the mansions of the wealthy retired, often military. That’s just one example. If your official thermometer is at one of those locations, it is going to read higher than any thermometer not at one of those locations.
Nebraska was left off the list of 37 states. Ignored again. On a more serious note from mid July to late August we had unusually high dew points in Lincoln, sometimes 10 F above typical. Of course more humid air will not cool as fast at night. We also had a very wet summer. Green lawns without watering for three months – almost unheard of in Nebraska.
Theo Goodwin says:
September 16, 2010 at 3:46 pm
I live in one of those rural counties in the East. Our local newspaper reported record highs this summer. My thermometers disagreed, as did those of most other locals. I drove to the airport. The official thermometer has been moved so that it sits about 6 inches from a runway. Voila: there is your global warming.
That is certainly a concern. I DO wish we had better data so we knew more clearly how much of the observed warming is from
1) real warming
2) artifacts from the location of weather stations
3) changes in equipment/calibration/collection times/….
My understanding is that even stations in “natural” settings have shown warming (but I don’t have a reference handy). Until scientist involved can be more convincing that 1) is a significant (or even THE significant) cause, “global warming” will be easy to attack.
Infrared camera readings – I have developed firmware for IR cameras previously and there is a flaw in this analysis:
You cannot directly compare IR temperatures from objects made of different materials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissivity
EMISSIVITY – Different materials will read differently in a thermal camera depending on their characteristics. A “fudge factor” has to be applied for each material type to get an accurate reading. It is necessary to apply the emissivity factor of grass and concrete. This may or may not make a large difference in the readings.
A more effective method is to use before and after thermal camera images with the camera set to a constant scale, and then calculate the change in temperature.
BETTER:
1. Setup the camera to constant IR scale.
2. Take readings at least every hour for a full cycle (24 hours)
3. Compare the changes in temperature over the cycle (apply emissivity)
If the concrete is acting as heat sink, you should see the concrete’s temperature graph lag the grass’s temperature graph.
A time lapse IR video of this effect could be a compelling example.
“contain weather stations that recorded record high night-time temperatures”
Anyone looked at where in the states these stations are contained? I suspect right next to a water treatment facility. I doubt the rural stations are showing the same issue.
almost no attention has been paid so far to the equally disturbing trend of pervasive record high night-time temperatures where evening cooling did not occur this summer,
Apparently the authors of this study do not get out that much. There was a LOT of talk about that subject in my area by the local news. It was getting tiresome to be told not only the high and low, but the records for the highest low (there was only 1 set)!
If you look at ‘degree day’ maps like this one:
http://chiefio.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/nv_41w.png
from this posting:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/degree-days-view/
You get a better idea what’s going on with the urban cement and asphalt. The rest of the place is pretty darned cold, but the cities light up nice and hot.