From the “we told you so years ago” department comes this interesting study that might explain the 8 °C red spot in the Russian Arctic that NASA GISS always seems to have:
From Science News:
A novel form of the “urban heat island” effect might contribute to why the far north is warming faster than the rest of the globe, a study of five Arctic cities finds.
Sunlight can heat dense building materials. When night falls, buildings will release some of their solar energy into the air. This helps explain why urban centers tend to be a few degrees warmer than nearby rural areas.
“We decided that our Russian Arctic cities should also show this phenomenon,” says Mikhail Varentsov, a climatologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University. But indoor heating — not the sun — would be the major heat source, at least in winter, when the sun shines little if at all. To test that idea, he and colleagues set up weather stations to collect data in the five cities north of the Arctic Circle for about a week during the polar night (with 24 hours of darkness). Apatity, with a population of about 59,000, showed the strongest effect. Its city center was up to 10 degrees Celsius warmer than outlying areas. Murmansk, with more than 300,000 residents, showed a similar, but smaller, in-town increase of about 3 degrees Celsius. Varentsov shared his team’s findings January 28 at the international Arctic Frontiers conference.
They used a vehicle mounted weather station and drove transects through the city, much like I’ve done in the past with my own research. A similar technique done in Svalbard shows UHI is present there too.
Here is the paper:
M. Varentsov et al. Experimental research of urban heat island effect for the biggest Arctic cities. Arctic Frontiers conference, Tromsø, Norway, January 28, 2016.
P.I. Konstantinov, M.Y. Grishchenko and M.I. Varentsov. Mapping urban heat islands of Arctic cities using combined data on field measurements and satellite images based on the example of the city of Apatity (Murmansk Oblast). Izvestiya, Atmospheric and Oceanic Physics. Vol. 51, December 2015, p. 992. doi:10.1134/S000143381509011X.
Another Stevenson screen parked beside the boiler flue discharge no doubt.
I would have thought this would have far more to do with combined heat and power CHP , which I believe is common practice in arctic Russia.
Domestic heating is provided via pressurised steam pipes from a central power plant that run throughout the city. These are often poorly insulated and maintained. Even if “well insulated” there will be significant heat loss to surrounding air.
I don’t see that the warm walls due to solar heating will be the main effect here. The study method would clearly not distinguish by driving a car across a city.
For a 1980s soviet cartoon illustrating this steam-pipe effect, see here:
https://mygardenpond.wordpress.com/2015/10/22/soviet-era-cartoon/
@ Mike: Absolutely right… as article itself points out!
‘“We decided that our Russian Arctic cities should also show this phenomenon,” says Mikhail Varentsov, a climatologist at Lomonosov Moscow State University. But indoor heating — not the sun — would be the major heat source, at least in winter, when the sun shines little if at all.‘ (emphasis mine).
Mike:
I, too, agree with your point. However, combined heat and power (CHP, also known as cogeneration) does make sense in those climes and made especial sense in the Soviet era.
Much energy is of the fuel is ‘lost’ from power stations: the overall coal plant efficiency ranges from 32 % to 42 %. Hence, about 60 % of the heat from the fuel is ‘thrown away’ as waste heat from e.g. the cooling towers.
CHP uses the waste heat for urban heating. The waste heat is distributed in pipes as low temperature steam. Optimum provision of heat through the pipes reduces the generating efficiency of the power station. Also, as you say, there is often significant heat loss to surrounding air from the pipes.
However, CHP can raise the overall fuel efficiency of a power station to about 80 % (i.e. the fuel efficiency is doubled). Heat losses from the distribution pipes reduce the efficiency gain, but an efficiency gain of about 20% is obtained if half the distributed heat is lost from the pipes.
Urban buildings near the power station require heating and the distributed heat reduces the need for heating fuel. In Northern Siberia cost of fuel is expensive because e.g. transport costs are high. And waste heat from the power station is very cheap.
Hence, CHP has great potential as a provider of cheap urban heating near Northern Siberian power stations.
And CHP was especially desired in the Soviet era because soviet bureaucrats controlled who obtained fuel(s) and how much. Use of CHP made the bureaucrats job easier, and the recipients of CHP heating obtained more secure heating supply.
Richard
@Smokey, my point was that it’s not indoor heating but “outdoor heating” that is being seen.
@richard, yes, CHP makes a lot of sense when the conversion of random movement ( heat energy ) to directional energy ( rotation or electricity ) is inherently very inefficient and is deemed always to be so because of basic laws of thermodynamics.
Some french nuclear sites had to shut down or curtail production in 2003 because they dump all that “useless” heat energy into the Rhone river, raising it by several degrees.
Since they are limited as to how much they can heat the fish they had to shut off.
Did a study on using waste heat from Diesel powered electricity for district heating in the North for Sask Power back in the 80’s. It was cost effective for limited distances. Since people wanted those noisy diesel generators far away from their houses, it was marginal at best for residential housing but viable for work camps and apartments like you see in some northern locations (like Russia).
This may not be apparent to everyone, but even if the heat generation and distribution system were 100% efficient and 100% insulated, all the energy will be lost to the environment (as heat). Unless it is a magic system, the heat escapes somewhere. In this case, you hope it is delivered and escapes at the place you desire (inside homes etc, before it leaks to the environment).
From an engineering point of view, except for what is delivered to desired destination, everything else is loss. In fact, it is all converted to heat unless it is radiated away (into space) as light, radio wave etc. But for all practical purposes, all energy consumed on earth is converted to heat and radiated into the environment.
Mike, the study method does distinguish because the study was conducted at a time of year when these cities get NO solar light/heat at all…”solar night”. They measured a significant atmospheric temperature increase in these cities while there was no direct solar influence.
Which made me wonder if the reason that temperatures in areas with large populations might not “cool” as much at night (as AGW studies suggest) is not just because of the urban heat island effect from asphalt/concrete building material retaining daily solar heat longer after nightfall, but because of the actual heat being radiated from INSIDE the buildings. Anthony, do urban heat island studies explore this heat SOURCE as well?
How would the dynamics in cold places, like the Arctic, work with that consideration? As heat “rises”, is it possible that cities with tall buildings would be able to heat the air far above the ground while leaving the ground stations showing little, if any, increase in temps from that “rising” heat? Just thinking out loud…
There is absolutely nothing wrong with urban heat islands, and they pose no threat to the environment, or to humans.
Where they do rear their (ugly) heads is when AMMGWCCC alarmists like Hansen for example, take the Temperature in a UHI and use that Temperature as representative of some large area that can be 1200 km away from the UHI.
Those folks need a remedial course in the general theory of sampled data systems, and the Nyquist theorem.
Did I already say, that my lap top desk top (It’s behind this memo) is that classic photo of the official weather station paraphernalia, including a Stevenson screen (I think it is) across the street from the front door of the Dept. of Environmental Science at the U of Aridzona; a perfect UHI.
Well I think I have described the location about right, but if not Anthony or someone can correct me. Where the heck is that place ??
G
Mike, throwing in my lot with RichardS as well.
For numbers, the ‘Soviet era’ power stations built, let’s say after 1960, are about 35% efficient in terms of electrical power. The rest of the heat (in long winter zones about: 9 months) is circulated through a series of pipes and heat exchanger stations to various industrial and commercial buildings, plus apartment buildings in most cases.
The main reason for building them was efficiency. Simple as that. The Swedes do it for the same reason. The return temperature of the water is much lower than I expected when I first looked at them and ‘guessed’. It is often below 30 degrees C. The efficiency is very high, certainly more than 80%. There is precious little heat left in the return supply. To put numbers, the output of typical small city unit was 180 MW(e) which needs 514 MW of energy. With the water leaving at 300 C and returning at 30 C the overall efficiency is about 93-94% minus losses from the reticulation system.
Obviously the condition of the systems varies greatly. I have seen the systems in Dushanbe, Bishkek and Ulaanbaatar, all examples of the standard Soviet models of the same era. The condition is from not bad to really awful. Rather than worry about what it is now, worry about what a great idea these systems are for saving energy. People connect and pay for ‘heat’ based on the MJ taken from the passing flow. It uses a heat meter just like a water meter and bills electronically.
In Toronto a similar piping system is used in summer to cool large buildings based on water drawn from Lake Ontario. People pay to have their heat taken away by a centrally managed system. The idea is spreading because it is so efficient.
Societies progress when people cooperate for mutual benefit. Townhouses achieve this by having shared walls. Access to and application of waste heat is perfectly sensible. Three Mile Island – what are they doing with the waste heat?
Mike @ 3:16 AM The outdoor heat is coming from the heat sources that are inside. If the heat didn’t escape to the outside through roofs, windows, walls and doors there would be no need for the heaters to keep coming on when it’s cold outside.
A “urban ” heat sensor on top a Suburban 4X4, works for me.
I was wondering about compensation for the EHI (Engine Heat Island) effect.
Well you could knock me down with a feather.
I used to tell my kids when they stood with the front door open talking to their mates that I wasn’t paying to heat the street as well as the house. I didn’t realise just how much it could affect things.
Why is South Australia (Adelaide) showing up as hotter than say Queensland (Brisbane) or New South Wales (Sydney) given Adelaide is a very small city?
Temperatures have been ‘corrected’ a bit better in Adelaide.
BTW that is not “hotter”, it’s temperature anomalies not temperature.
So what you are saying is it’s bullcarp?
Also that has nothing to do with Adelaide. That warm spot goes up as far a Alice. UHI comes from initial urbanisation rather big cities getting bigger.
There is a whole lot of nothing between Adelaide and Alice.
There’s a whole lot of nothing plus some small communities with the odd meteo station that are probably in the semi-rural development stage most prone to UHI.
It’s semi-dessert so more prone to climate extremes than temperate, green rural sites. Since BOM will be “homogenising” like mad between coastal stations, a few road houses on the Stewart Highway and a site at Alice Springs in the middle of the continent , it’s probably like you said BS.
Very little to do with the size of Adelaide was my main point.
Mike. I like to get the Australian weather reports from Chopper Reed. A ytube must see
https://youtu.be/ooaQoBSD52k
“There is a whole lot of nothing between Adelaide and Alice.”
You must admit, that’s a good place for it.
Patrick MJD
“There is a whole lot of nothing between Adelaide and Alice.”
A contest competitor might offer that there are the following between Adelaide and Alice:
Ae
Af
Ag
Ah
Ai
Aj
Ak
Some of these are popular words!
“Af” is a command to a dog in German.
South African use “Ag” a lot: “Ag shame!”, “Ag yah…”
“Ah” is a popular expression of realisation.
“Ai” is frequently yelled during attacks in certain cultures.
“Ak” is popular in some comic strips.
I know what a lice is. What does it mean to be de-laide? If that is possible, I have customers…
“James Francisco
February 10, 2016 at 7:02 am”
Too funny!
Brisbane is warm all the year around – though when it gets down to 25 people “feel the cold”! Adelaide is not too far off the Southern (aka Antarctic) Ocean, and in winter can be blasted parky.
In those 30 years, both cities grew, but Brisbane did not get much warmer – except through added a/c units. Adelaide both got warmer in winter (heaters) and cooler in summer, so similar a/c units to Brisbane. Hence Adelaide shows up with a large anomaly, Brisbane with little.
I used to live there. We got hot winds from the central desert (brickfielders) warming the place, and southerly busters from the Southern Ocean cooling it. The temperature extremes seemed to be greater than in Brisbane, where I live now.
Adelaide is a largely contiguous urban sprawl on a plain between a range of hills ( up to 1000 m) and the sea with modest open parkland and is relatively flat. It is also in a dry, hot, southern part of the continent. The UHI from the coastal area or even the port area (Port Adelaide) to the CBD is very significant, several degrees. I know from personal experience. Brisbane ans Sydney are both subtropical cities on the east coast which is wettest in our summer, both have large areas of green covered hills and large waterways (in the case of Sydney two very large ones and a couple of smaller ones to the north and south). They are very different climates and geography.
Its not so much the size of the city but the relative density of UHI influencing things like concrete and bitumen as well as the relative density of greenery, especially trees and such like.
The main issue here IMO is in which direction was the wind blowing at the time of this “study”?
It’s Russia…so I doubt any wind from Australia was a factor. 🙂
Have a look at real station data.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/australian-stations-now-available/
Have an educated guess-
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/01/forgotten-historic-hot-temperatures-recorded-with-detail-and-care-in-adelaide/
http://www.adelaidenow.com.au/messenger/east-hills/bureau-of-meteorology-moving-weather-station-from-kent-town-to-adelaide-city-because-of-concerns-about-observation-quality/news-story/b2b6dfb11aa2405cf744b9aee951ece5
“Bureau of Meteorology regional director John Nairn said the bureau was concerned future development around Kent Town would impact on the quality of weather observations taken at the site.”
But trust them there has been no impact whatsoever of moving one of the world’s longest serving Stevenson Screen records from the West Parklands to Kent Town east of the city’s tar, cement and aircon cooling towers that all sprang up since 1979. No matter they’ll compare some temp readings for a couple of years and do the usual snake oil adjustments and it will all be worse than we thought folks.
When you use anomalies instead of Temperatures, then colder can come out hotter.
That’s exactly why all that ice around Vostok Station can melt, by just warming up 2 deg. C from -94 deg. C, all the way up to -92 deg. C
g
I live here -the UHI effect is very pronounced. I learnt this riding a bicycle to work across the parklands into to the built up city and back again, for years. On some days, particularly hot ones the difference between city and parkland was without a doubt 5 degC.
Here meaning Adelaide. Sorry.
I thought the existence of urban heat islands was proven many decades ago.
They have been proven to exist decades ago RoHa, but this is the first time it’s been noted/measured in the Arctic regions.
It was the problem is in the name. Small rural villages can have just as much if not more of a heat island effect than a major metropolitan city.
Latest from BBC
Climate change will make flights from Europe to America longer, while flights from America to Europe will be faster. Reason: the jet stream is speeding-up.
Where from in America and where to in Europe? Because some routes don’t follow the Gulf Stream at all! Say LA to London for instance.
Sorry, jet stream.
here is the link to full article
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35533761
and the associated science
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/2/024008
This was on the CBC (Canada) so it’s GOT to be true…..
Ian M [sarc off]
If you read the article the round trip is estimated to be 76 seconds longer which is around 0.1% increase, all based on simulation. Moreover he asserts that as the analysed trip is longer then many more will be, ignoring the fact that many may also be shorter.
I can’t believe this is science.
Time dilation !!
g
I recall reading that some of those huge, centrally-located heating systems overheated apartment buildings, and there was no way to turn down the heat without shutting down the whole system, so people just opened their windows.
It never made a lick of sense to spread the land-based temperatures out over the water, to begin with. I’ve never in my life headed out to sea, and seen the surface temperatures not be greatly altered by the temperature of the water. (I’m not talking about temperatures five hundred feet up).
If you insist upon “homogenization”, it makes far more sense to spread the ocean’s surface-temperatures inland. We see sea-breezes end our heat waves every spring in New England, moving more than a hundred miles inland, and call them “back door cold fronts.” I’ve seen temperatures drop from the nineties to the fifties in a matter of an hour, without clouds or thunder.
Very good point Caleb. Ocean temperatures rule land temperatures not the other way around. Projecting , krigging or frigging the land data out over the sea or worse over ice is scientific BS. But , hey, if it gives the “right” answer you know the method is sound.
At some point the “right” answer steps over the line into absurdity.
Caleb:
I don’t know the truth of what you recall but it would make sense. You say
CHP provides those “heating systems” with heat that would otherwise be dumped to the air via cooling towers. If too much of it is provided to buildings then it makes sense to dump the excess to the air e.g. via open windows.
But, importantly, as Gerry Parker says above in this thread
This is true of all energy used to heat any building by any method in any place.
Richard
I really like the old political cartoon from Russia with the palm trees growing above the heating pipes. That says a lot, from the motherland itself.
High altitude mountain climbers (Everest or K2) have died from overheating (cooked their insides) because they were wearing insulated clothing to stop their arms and legs from freezing solid and breaking off, and their torso was unable to get rid of the internal heating that resulted from the fact that they were physically working at a very high energy level (climbing the darn mountain) using energy provided by their food (calories (actually kilocalories)).
Since the inner organs often don’t have any nerves there, you can’t detect that you are cooking your innards, till it is too late.
g
I never heard of that.
What? I don’t believe that. Do you have links to support this claim?
A climber suffering from heat exhaustion would eventually pass out/slow down to the point where he/she would cool off again long before they reached an inner temperature that could possibly “cook their insides”, or it would be noticed by other team climbers. I’ve never heard of a climber dying from hyperthermia. I call BS
” Cook ” is a figure of speech.
I take no responsibility for anything that anybody else hasn’t heard/read/learned/whatever.
And I don’t provide links, since I can’t vouch for anything anybody else writes/posts/copies/dreamsup/has coprighted/whatever.
G
Yes, cook IS a figure of speech. In the way you used it, a FATAL figure of speech.
“And I don’t provide links, since I can’t vouch for anything anybody else writes/posts/copies/dreamsup/has coprighted/whatever.”
Thank you for clarifying that made a statement that you cannot, or will not, validate with evidence.
And I used it to mean “fatally”. In fact I said “they died from overheating”.
No they were not served up with roast potatoes, and green peas, with a touch of mint source.
So they were not cooked to the same degree that one might prepare a Chateaubriand.
Evidently you don’t know what one of the most important functions of the human skin; the largest organ of the body, actually is.
You probably wouldn’t believe me, If I claimed there are some places so humid (not hot) that a person will die there in just a few minutes, unless equipped with the proper protective equipment. Some are so dangerous, that their location is kept secret to prevent ignorant idiots from stumbling in there and dying (getting ” cooked ” )(FOS). And I’ll give you no references for that either.
You might try doing your own investigation sometimes, instead of simply asking for a link, to some alternative source, for which you can have no greater expectation of getting the truth.
So we’ll all wait with bated breath while you post a few links to references you found that contradict mine.
g
I know exactly what the human skin does. You seem to be completely unaware of how insulated clothing works. (Hint….it doesn’t keep human skin from working properly.)
“You might try doing your own investigation sometimes, instead of simply asking for a link, to some alternative source, for which you can have no greater expectation of getting the truth.”
Alas, I did my own investigation, there are no known deaths among extreme climbers that resulted from overheating of internal organs. You’re the one who made the claim, so the burden of proof for that claim is on you. Not me.
“You probably wouldn’t believe me”
WHY should anyone just “believe you”? You’re just a stranger on the internet, and you might as well claim you have a donkey that lays chocolate eggs. I wouldn’t believe THAT either, and for the exact same reason. No evidence.
“If I claimed there are some places so humid (not hot) that a person will die there in just a few minutes, unless equipped with the proper protective equipment.”
You can CLAIM whatever you like, but that doesn’t make it FACT. Have you ever been swimming? Or diving? You know….surrounded by WATER=basically 100% humidity…and yet people don’t DIE (not DYE) from being completely immersed in water for HOURS…let alone “just a few minutes”. You can’t “cook” (overheat) someone with humidity!
“Some are so dangerous, that their location is kept secret to prevent ignorant idiots from stumbling in there and dying (getting ” cooked ” )(FOS). And I’ll give you no references for that either.”
WHAT? You make no sense. If an “ignorant idiot” stumbles into ANY location like that, it would stop being a SECRET….especially if that person “dyes” (you mean dies) in that location!! Not telling people what is located where does not stop people from “stumbling into” such places!!! (Unless keeping the location a secret also renders them completely invisible!)
“So we’ll all wait with bated breath while you post a few links to references you found that contradict mine.”
Really? How do you know what “all” will do? I doubt most of “all” give a rat’s rear end about it. I found all kinds of references (medical) that contradict your claims, but none that verify it. Say hello to your chocolate dropping donkey for me too. 🙂
Well I make it a rule to never get between someone and a precipice they are determined to walk right off. It’s more fun to stand aside and watch.
So I wrote ….. stumbling in there and dying …..
And an incognito stranger on the internet claims that I wrote DYE; even capitalizing it to be sure everyone notices. No I typed ” dying ” and also wrote ” die “, and even ” died “.
If you are going to critique what I write, be sure that you read what I write first.
“””””….. Have you ever been swimming? Or diving? You know….surrounded by WATER=basically 100% humidity…and yet people don’t DIE (not DYE) from being completely immersed in water for HOURS… …..”””””
Yes I have been swimming; and diving. Probably a lot more than you ever will. Last time I checked, the thermal conductivity of water is orders of magnitude higher than that for air, so yes it is very efficient at cooling the skin. What does that have to do with evaporative cooling of the skin under high humidity conditions.
And thousands; perhaps millions of people HAVE actually died from being ” completely immersed in water for HOURS…” and that even in the warmest ocean waters on the planet. Cite me some references that claim that is NOT true; but never happens; as YOU claimed here.
“””””….. ….especially if that person “dyes” (you mean dies) in that location!! Not telling people what is located where does not stop people from “stumbling into” such places!!! (Unless keeping the location a secret also …”
You finally said something that is true; I did mean (die, dies, died, dying …) which is exactly why I never said ” dyes ” … YOU did.
And one of those 100 % humidity places where people have died from inability to evaporatively cool their skin (sweat) is an underground cave full of giant crystals. Somewhere in Latin America; I believe Mexico. And it’s location is kept secret, and you have to get special permission to ever be allowed to go in there, and then only if and when you are properly equipped for that condition. I believe they enforce that rule, because other people have had to risk THEIR lives, to retrieve the bodies of (yes idiots) who deliberately went in there, ignorant of how dangerous that was. Even National Geographic reporters, were not allowed into that place until they were properly equipped to survive in there, and then, only for a very few minutes of photography.
But I don’t actually care whether you or anyone else believes ANYTHING, I might write; that’s not why I write.
“””””….. I found all kinds of references (medical) that contradict your claims, but none that verify it. …..”””””
Well I have already read ALL of the ones that you have posted here; thank you for that information.
G
Yep. You are correct. It’s dying. My bad. Oh the shame.
You specifically said “If I claimed there are some places so humid (not hot) “, and the Crystal Caves in Mexico aren’t just humid, they are 136F, because they sit over a magma chamber. It IS possible for someone to “cook to death” in an underground cavern that averages between 136F and 150F, but it’s from the outside in, not the inside out. The highest recorded internal temperature for a human being is nowhere near that (and the person survived). Their location is also not a secret, and no idiot can just stumble into them because they are hundreds of feet underground and only reachable with help from the mining company that owns the land. The only known person to have died in them was a crystal thief who got trapped under the crystal he was attempting to steal, and he did “roast”… from the HEAT, not the humidity.
People sit in steam rooms, with temps around 115F, often with near 100% humidity, on purpose, and in drier saunas with temps between 160-200 F but humidity between 10 and 30% all the time. And hot tubs. The inability for sweat to evaporate makes your skin feel hotter, but it does not HEAT you internally.
And yes, millions of people die after being submerged in water…from drowning and hypothermia, NOT the humidity levels. But we weren’t talking about drowning or being too cold, we were talking about internal overheating remember?
Your point was that extreme climbers “cook” their insides due to insulated clothing. But insulated climbing clothing wicks moisture away from the skin because being cold AND wet, not hot and wet, on Everest can kill you. And HEAT exhaustion does not increase INTERNAL body temperature. There’s a reason the internal organs don’t have a lot of nerves that could sense internal temps rising…they don’t NEED them. The human body regulates internal temps just that well. Both hypothermia and hypothermia are “outside in” processes, not inside out.
Well Aphan you still haven’t provided ANY links or citations of ANY of the medical reports that you claimed you found that refute the story I posted.
Yes I know it was 136 deg. F in that cave. and it can get that hot in the north African and middle Eastern Deserts. Got nearly that hot in Iraq for some of our troops who did not die from that Temperature, as they could sweat and have it evaporate from their skin.
Do you recall, we were talking about EVAPORATIVE (sweat) cooling of the body through the skin; and NOT heat removal by water immersion, which is far more efficient.
I have stated categorically on these pages many times: ” I do not make this stuff up. ”
I don’t write fiction. Don’t read it either except for mathematics.
So that means that EVERYTHING (except in humor) I post here, is SOMETHING that I read, saw, heard, was told from some source or other.
Some of that information goes back at least 70 years, when I first started studying Physics (and other science). Back in those days, it was expected that we would LEARN what we were told/taught, so that we could remember it and hence use it later.
We were taught much more than how to spell ” google ”
I have also stated here that in early 1961, I lost every single scrap of written learning materials, textbooks, exam papers, lecture notes; all gone and totally irreplaceable.
Some that I needed to work with, I was able to reconstruct; but the bulk of it was lost.
Well of course, except for that I actually learned.
One thing I did not bother to learn was any citation for the origin of every single item or factoid that I learned in school (or since).
So that means that the high altitude hyperthermia deaths story I mentioned has an origin in something, I read, saw (on TV) or was told (news). At least one of those stories was actually not on Everest, but on K2, which is considered much more difficult than Everest.
NO I can’t give you a citation to the source from which I learned about it; and it WAS a result of the non use of Goretex type breathable insulating clothing, and I don’t have the kind of fruitful imagination that can dream up such a story.
But then you haven’t given us any citation of any of the medical reports that you said refuted my story. It’s not common to simply write papers that say something doesn’t or hasn’t or can’t happen.
There are many things that I wish I could cite references for; but even with google or Wikipedia or anything else I have not been able to recover original papers or publications.
One scientific scandal shook the Physics world in the 1960s relating to a totally bogus theory that purported to calculate the value of the fine structure constant (alpha).
That is a fundamental physical constant, that is a function of several other fundamental constants. 1/alpha has the value 137.0359895 (+/- 0.045 ppm)
So it is experimentally known to 5 parts in 10^8. This bogus theory computed that number to less than 3 parts in 10^8, from nothing.
Just a mathematical formula (involving Pi) that calculates that value; but contains no observable physical quantities to connect it to the real universe. It was embraced, because you couldn’t get that close by just *ing around with numbers, so people believed the theory even though they couldn’t understand it.
Within a few months, computer geeks concocted a list of numbers using the same formula format, but with different numbers (all small integers and Pi). All of them were closer than the standard deviation, to the best experimental value. One of the new ones was closer than half the error of the original ones. Nothing but messing with numbers.
The papers and letters related to it, were either in the Journal Applied Optics, or the Journal of the Optical Society of America. I followed it circa mid 1960s, but have never been able to find it again.
The fine structure constant had already had one scandal, because 1/alpha used to be much closer to 136, than to 137.
Sir Arthur Eddington published a paper proving it was exactly 136. Well until experimentally it got closer to 137. So Eddington published a new paper proving it was exactly 137. Well it clearly isn’t either.
That earned him the nickname: ” Professor Adding One “.
But I’m digressing. I didn’t write my story as a work of fiction, so at least one origin source exists or used to exist. If that source itself was a work of fiction, it should still exist.
But these multiple sources you found that say it doesn’t/can’t/didn’t happen; well show us one of those.
I only need to find one source; you need to find an infinite number, as Einstein explained to us.
And just today, I went for a walk in the early chilly foggy morning air, wearing several layers of insulating clothing. Air Temperature was a brisk 48 deg. F We hiked for an hour at a brisk pace. Eventually I was forced to peel off layers because I was starting to get too hot, and the Temperature still hadn’t reached 50 deg. F
So I clearly was not heating from the outside in. And no my internal core Temperature never got to any dangerous level; BUT I did actually heat up from Physical exertion.
You have said that doesn’t happen. “””””….. And HEAT exhaustion does not increase INTERNAL body temperature. …..”””””
And I never said exhaustion either. At no time was I exhausted; just hotter than was comfortable with that much clothing on, in 50 deg. F air Temperature.
Yes I do kid around on WUWT; but I don’t make stuff up either.
Yes I do occasionally misremember. but somebody always catches it if I do that so it gets corrected. And I always welcome such corrections.
If just one reader gets any benefit somehow from anything I post, I consider my efforts to have been worthwhile.
Fortunately my laptop is usually busily working on my behalf while I drop a word or two in here.
G
george.
Fascinating life history. But completely irrelevant. You don’t have to “prove” anything you say is true, then neither do I. Right? If you aren’t going to be logical and back up your conclusions with evidence, then I don’t have to either.
“So that means that EVERYTHING (except in humor) I post here, is SOMETHING that I read, saw, heard, was told from some source or other. ”
So then I don’t have to prove I’m not making up my side of the argument. I can just say that EVERYTHING I post here is SOMETHING that I read, saw, heard, was told from some source or other.
I’ve got news for you, there was no “internet” or “google” when I went to school either. And it’s an illogical/irrational argument to insinuate that people who can and do use such resources aren’t as intelligent as someone who memorized rote facts 70 years ago. Facts are facts, whether you wrote them down in your college notes and papers and text books or not. There are plenty of other sources out there that are just as complete and probably a lot more updated and relevant than whatever you might have lost.
I mentioned the term “heat exhaustion”, which is different than just regular old “exhaustion”. People who actually DO suffer from heat exhaustion, usually faint, pass out, vomit, or slow down considerably…which on Everest or K2 would result in INSTANT cooling because they would no longer be exerting themselves….at all. It’s hard to “cook your insides” without additional HEAT coming from somewhere. You peeled off those layers of clothing because as you exercised your body heated and you could peel them off and survive in that “brisk” 48F. Where I live, the teenagers wear shorts and t-shirts outside when it’s 48 F. On Everest the average temperature at the summit in the SUMMER is between -20C and -35C= -13 F- 31. Let’s just assume it would take a WHOLE LOT more exertion than your little hike to get so “hot” on Everest that you’d even want to peel off any clothing at all. And a very QUICK unzipping of a jacket would result in a great deal of cooling off. GoreTex has saved countless lives and extreme climbers swear by it.
The average summer temps on K2 are even colder. (K2 is a harder mountain to summit because of it’s steeper rockier sides. Most people that die on K2 do it from falling. It has never been climbed in the winter.)
But you keep switching back and forth between a cold, dry, extreme environment with nothing for “humidity” except sweating (and if you’re sweating, you’re cooling) and extreme humidity in HOT places, in which overheating would be due to the HEAT AND the humidity. And I don’t care WHAT you heard.
But here are some links for you anyway-
“Hot weather alone is not dangerous, said Chris Minson, an environmental physiologist at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Instead, it’s a combination of hot temperatures, high humidity, and often preexisting health conditions that can push a person’s core body temperature to reach the danger zone of 104 F. At that point, the nervous system goes haywire, the heart experiences excessive stress, and organ systems begin to fail.”
http://news.discovery.com/human/health/heat-wave-dangerous-120705.htm
High humidity and COLD-sub zero temps on K2 and Everest are the WRONG combination. High humidity WITHOUT hot temperatures=no inner core extremes either.
“Heat exhaustion is a relatively common reaction to severe heat and can include symptoms such as dizziness, headache and fainting. It can usually be treated with rest, a cool environment and hydration (including refueling of electrolytes, which are necessary for muscle and other body functions). Heat stroke is more severe and requires medical attention—it is often accompanied by dry skin, a body temperature above 103 degrees Fahrenheit, confusion and sometimes unconsciousness. ”
“That’s why it’s not just heat but the combination of heat and humidity that matters. ”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-wave-health/
“A human’s core temperature is about 98.6 degrees, but the skin temperature of the trunk is about 4 to 9 degrees colder, depending on how warm it is and how active a person is. But sweating, which helps keep the core body temperature constant, becomes increasingly ineffective in increasingly humid air, and it can never cool the skin to below the wet-bulb temperature.” (the air on Everest and K2 is NOT humid…it’s incredibly dry and thin and no amount of GoreTex on the arms and legs and hands even soaking wet, can raise the trunk temperature that much…GoreTex BREATHES…it’s not Saran Wrap for crying out loud!)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/the-deadly-combination-of-heat-and-humidity.html
george.
Fascinating life history. But completely irrelevant. You don’t have to “prove” anything you say is true, then neither do I. Right? If you aren’t going to be logical and back up your conclusions with evidence, then I don’t have to either.
“So that means that EVERYTHING (except in humor) I post here, is SOMETHING that I read, saw, heard, was told from some source or other. ”
So then I don’t have to prove I’m not making up my side of the argument. I can just say that EVERYTHING I post here is SOMETHING that I read, saw, heard, was told from some source or other.
I’ve got news for you, there was no “internet” or “google” when I went to school either. And it’s an illogical/irrational argument to insinuate that people who can and do use such resources aren’t as intelligent as someone who memorized rote facts 70 years ago. Facts are facts, whether you wrote them down in your college notes and papers and text books or not. There are plenty of other sources out there that are just as complete and probably a lot more updated and relevant than whatever you might have lost.
I mentioned the term “heat exhaustion”, which is different than just regular old “exhaustion”. People who actually DO suffer from heat exhaustion, usually faint, pass out, vomit, or slow down considerably…which on Everest or K2 would result in INSTANT cooling because they would no longer be exerting themselves….at all. It’s hard to “cook your insides” without additional HEAT coming from somewhere. You peeled off those layers of clothing because as you exercised your body heated and you could peel them off and survive in that “brisk” 48F. Where I live, the teenagers wear shorts and t-shirts outside when it’s 48 F. On Everest the average temperature at the summit in the SUMMER is between -20C and -35C= -13 F- 31. Let’s just assume it would take a WHOLE LOT more exertion than your little hike to get so “hot” on Everest that you’d even want to peel off any clothing at all. And a very QUICK unzipping of a jacket would result in a great deal of cooling off. GoreTex has saved countless lives and extreme climbers swear by it.
The average summer temps on K2 are even colder. (K2 is a harder mountain to summit because of it’s steeper rockier sides. Most people that die on K2 do it from falling. It has never been climbed in the winter.)
But you keep switching back and forth between a cold, dry, extreme environment with nothing for “humidity” except sweating (and if you’re sweating, you’re cooling) and extreme humidity in HOT places, in which overheating would be due to the HEAT AND the humidity. And I don’t care WHAT you heard.
But here are some links for you anyway-
“Hot weather alone is not dangerous, said Chris Minson, an environmental physiologist at the University of Oregon, Eugene. Instead, it’s a combination of hot temperatures, high humidity, and often preexisting health conditions that can push a person’s core body temperature to reach the danger zone of 104 F. At that point, the nervous system goes haywire, the heart experiences excessive stress, and organ systems begin to fail.”
http://news.discovery.com/human/health/heat-wave-dangerous-120705.htm
High humidity and COLD-sub zero temps on K2 and Everest are the WRONG combination. High humidity WITHOUT hot temperatures=no inner core extremes either.
“Heat exhaustion is a relatively common reaction to severe heat and can include symptoms such as dizziness, headache and fainting. It can usually be treated with rest, a cool environment and hydration (including refueling of electrolytes, which are necessary for muscle and other body functions). Heat stroke is more severe and requires medical attention—it is often accompanied by dry skin, a body temperature above 103 degrees Fahrenheit, confusion and sometimes unconsciousness. ”
“That’s why it’s not just heat but the combination of heat and humidity that matters. ”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/heat-wave-health/
“A human’s core temperature is about 98.6 degrees, but the skin temperature of the trunk is about 4 to 9 degrees colder, depending on how warm it is and how active a person is. But sweating, which helps keep the core body temperature constant, becomes increasingly ineffective in increasingly humid air, and it can never cool the skin to below the wet-bulb temperature.” (the air on Everest and K2 is NOT humid…it’s incredibly dry and thin and no amount of GoreTex on the arms and legs and hands even soaking wet, can raise the trunk temperature that much…GoreTex BREATHES…it’s not Saran Wrap for crying out loud!)
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/opinion/sunday/the-deadly-combination-of-heat-and-humidity.html
In Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, no one was ever too hot or too cold. Only not sufficiently educated in Marxist class temperature politics! Problems started when so called democracy allowed people to “feel”!
The childishly simplistic use of kriging without proper adjustment for the lateral extent of UHI influenced readings ( either by estimating the UHI and its extent from separate evidence or by taking additional readings at the outskirts or a short distance away) simply creates a mathematical ‘salting’ (*) of the data.
* ‘Salting’ is the practice of adding gold dust or whatever to test drill cores or samples to fabricate an ore richness in order to con mug punters into investing in a prospective mine.
Peculiar report, this was known for a long time, nothing new. It’s so obvious that it surprises me to present it as something of major importance.
More important is the NASA picture indicating heat effects in the Northern Hemisphere. The imbalance with the Southern Hemisphere points out that these heat effects are not related to greenhouses gases.
JJM,
Perhaps thats why Anthony started the post with the words “From the “we told you so years ago” department”.
Since Anthony’s work has been focused on how urban heat biases the surface temperature, validation from other sources is a good thing. It wasn’t presented as something of major importance, merely of interest.
Luke Howard,an amateur meteorologist in England, first recorded the heat-island effect almost 200 years ago. Beginning in 1807, he started comparing temperatures from several sites within London with those measured a few miles beyond the city’s edge, and through the years, he noticed that the city was consistently warmer. “Thus”, Howard wrote in his book, “The Climate of London” in 1818, “under the varying circumstances of different sites, different instruments, the differennt positions of the latter, we find London always warmer than thecountry, the average excess of its temperature being 1.579 degrees”. More details I discussed in my book “Climate Change: Myths & Realities” available at http://www.scribd.com & Google books.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Very interesting. Just when a person thinks something is new or original…
Here (from here) is a map of the actual station anomalies in Russia in that month of October 2008. It shades according to the actual station readings, with color shading on the marked triangles joining them. If you go to the source, you can click for station names and temperatures. The heat throughout Siberia is pretty uniform, with a few cool spots. The data us GHCN unadjusted, so the exceptions are usually inhomogeneities. It’s hard to imagine that uniformity with UHI.
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/2/russia.png
Nice one Nick. That scale does not seem to cover the colour range fully but has a range of about 0.6 ( deg C. ?? ) . Way off the something like 8 deg C “anomalies” shown in the main post.
Maybe like 2C range? I think the scale is cut off as it does not
show orange and red but the range depicted is 0.9 (C, I presume)
so including out to the red will increase that.
“That scale does not seem to cover the colour range fully”
It’s a shot cut from a full globe picture, and shows only part of the color scale. If you go to the source, you can see the whole scale.
Nick says “The data us GHCN unadjusted, so the exceptions are usually inhomogeneities. It’s hard to imagine that uniformity with UHI.”
Seems to outline the communist blocks pretty well. Uniformity might come from a collective effort to speed up apparent heating so the west speeds its self demise? That color coded outline looks like a political boundry map.
@ Abe,
If that wasn’t written by a “bot”, you really need to change your formatting.
Abe isn’t a bot. Just….er…um….irregular.
Siberia has great natural resources, but not many people wish to go and live there. Fortunately gulags may not be there but I assume their infamy still persists in mind of many. Showing Siberia warming, true or not, is a positive and optimistic psychological impetus for ‘young man go East’.
What the satellite data show for Siberia?
I will try to help your imagination along. Perhaps a post-communist ruling system would have different artificial heating patterns than a communist one? What’s the baseline period in this visualization?
TMLutas:
The time period would probably be less than 5 years.
Under the Soviet system local officials in cold regions needed to provide justification for provision of winter fuel (it was a centrally planned economy). This need gave them an incentive to exaggerate the cold in their region.
Following the end of the Soviet system there was no reason to exaggerate the cold so rapid apparent temperature rise – especially in winter – could be expected.
Richard
The baseline in the visualization is five years? I think we’re having two different conversations.
Also, are you arguing that there’s a separate reporting failure due to Soviet officials lying instead of UHI or in addition to UHI?
TMLutas:
I don’t understand your response to me so I will try to explain my answer to your questions. If I have misunderstood your queries then please get back to me with a clarification so I can correct the matter.
I understood your “artificial heating patterns” to be the indicated distributions of reported temperatures that contribute to calculations of global average surface temperature anomaly (GASTA) and which have been distorted by the urban heat island (UHI) effect.
UHI has several components most of which pertain to urban buildings, and UHI increases with urban growth.
However, UHI can also vary with political change and it is that component of UHI which I thought you were questioning when you asked
I answered that by stating that an apparent rise in reported temperatures (especially winter temperatures) could be expected soon after (i.e. in less than 5 years) the end of the Soviet system in Northern Siberia.
I explained how and why the apparent temperature rise was likely to occur.
Your response to that suggests you intended something other than I addressed. Perhaps you meant replacement time of CHP with personal heating systems? If so, then that would depend on the remaining operational life of each CHP power station.
Richard
“What’s the baseline period in this visualization?”
It’s anomaly relative to present expected value, as described here. Basically residuals relative to weighted linear regression. The weighting is exponential decay with a 30 year time constant.
That is a pretty map, but it represents, as you say, temperature anomalies, not temperatures.
The blue spots are cooler than the long-term average for that spot, not necessarily cooler than adjacent spots. Likewise with the expanse of red. The absence of temporal departures from the means does not preclude considerable variation regionally.
Are those dots actual stations with readings or interpolated fill-ins?
Also that is 2008. There has been “warming” since that time. I thought that “hot spot” was recent, not 2008.
All actual stations reporting in that month. I showed October 2008 because that is the month shown in the head post figure.
Nick, Anthony posted the temperature map in the original post, it’s NOT from the actual study, which took place recently. Note how the words “From Science News” comes AFTER the map and Anthony’s intro…he simply posted a map with the “red spot” shown on it in that area.
“comes AFTER the map and Anthony’s intro…he simply posted a map with the “red spot” shown on it in that area”
So not to be commented on? But the post is actually about UHI in Russian cities. Nothing unexpected there. But the paper itself doesn’t say anything in relation to global temperature averages. It analyses Apatity, but that doesn’t seem to be part of any major network. The only thing that makes such a connection is the intro and plot. having the station detail puts that in perspective.
For more perspective, here, with the same color scale is October, 2015. The East isn’t always red.
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/2/russia15.png
Scientists actually measure UHI and publish results.
Nick Stokes response: “I don’t care what they measured, UHI is hard for me to imagine.”
Well that’s good enough for me, I’ll just ignore their results too. 🙂
I’m simply showing what they did measure in October 2008, the month of the plot shown in the head post. What you don’t seem to know or care about is whether these locations were actually in cities, which are not so numerous in N Siberia.
Actually, what is interesting isn’t whether they are in cities but whether they are near something that provides common heating that produces appreciable UHI. How many stations are we talking about here?
Nick, every winter I see UHI in full effect in a tiny little 6,000 person town. It can be up to 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer in town than just 1 mile outside of town on cold mornings. you true believers think little 6,000 person towns are unaffected by UHI but that’s because you do not get out from behind your computer and do some hands on science experiments. Just algorithm experiments anymore.
tmlutas
If you click on the very first link in Anthony’s post above (the one that says “NASA GISS always seems to have”) it links to a story showing how very strange and “outside” Russia’s “district heating” is. Pipe all over the place above ground (rather than buried) filled with radiant heat….
“you true believers think little 6,000 person towns are unaffected by UHI”
No, your not making the connection. Are GHCN readings taken in such towns, and if so, within the UHI zone? No-one offers evidence of this. And that applies to the “steam pipes” stuff too.
I did some checking on this. There were some warm spots in N Siberia in that Oct 2015 plot. One is Olenyok. Pop 2273, 68°N, but it has an airport, and I’d expect that is where the weather station is. I’ll bet, too, that it isn’t a busy airport. NW of that is Khatanga. Pop 3450, but also with an airport, also I suspect not carrying heavy traffic. Both are rated “Rural”.
Mosher (when he wakes up) will sort this out. In the mean time think anomalies rather than absolute temps
Mosher still doesn’t get it, he’ll only say it doesn’t matter, as he’s become just as close-minded as the rest of climate science.
OK.
In a CE comment about 3 weeks ago Mosher used you, Curry and one other person (can’t remember) as positive exemplars re something or other (my memory’s stuffed) Anyway Anthony, he was praising you.
There is a discussion of Russian temperature reporting here http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/11/15/giss-noaa-ghcn-and-the-odd-russian-temperature-anomaly-its-all-pipes/, and includes some pictures of Russian infrastructure. Whilst not knowing the full details, I suspect that the majority of Russian temperature reporting stations, no matter how well maintained, are within easy reach of most cities and hence the big red patch in Nick Stokes’ map are representative of peri-urban temperatures and do show the actual temperature of the vast extents of countryside in between.
My guess is that most stations are maintained by airports for aviation purposes, but I lack the motivation to do a detailed analysis as I am weary of the desperate attempts by so-called environmentalists to spin sparse data into apocalypse.
Bjorn Lombor should be receiving an apology and be welcomed back into the environmentalist fold any day now.
Lomborg. Tablet typing stinks.
I have seen the first three laws of thermodynamics restated so:
You can’t win. (restatement of first law of thermodynamics)
You can’t break even. (restatement of second law of thermodynamics)
You can’t even get out of the game. (restatement of third law of thermodynamics)
So anytime you are trying to heat something (buildings, whatever) where it is cold, you are going to lose heat to the surrounding environment.
The real question, it seems to me, is: “Where are the weather stations/climate temperature measurement devices relative to the heat sources?”
Maybe the tiny rise in the average global temperatures are from the heat islands and since the world economy started tanking after 1997, the urban expansion slowed so the lack of growing heat islands stopped the average temperature rise. Heat from the heat islands don’t cause a continual temperature rise because the heat rises and off into space every clear night.
Urban Heat islands are the result of increasing density of population. The world’s population keeps increasing and since the surface of the earth is, for all intents and purposes, fixed, UHI’s will indeed cause a continued rise in temperature as they expand and absorb previously pristine measuring stations.
And increased density of energy usage.
ALL heat rises Ryan, whether it’s from heat islands or not. And it all eventually rises off and into space, it just takes longer when the sky is not clear.
What would be funny is to see alarmists claiming global warming is the cause of urban areas running hotter. And why not, in their world view global warming causes everything from increasing sea levels to increasing orphan kittens.
The map looks like infilling missing data points with points affected by UHI, giving a very large spread of apparent warming.
As I understand it, UHI is the deviation from the natural temperature of the native surrounding area. How is a negative UHI reading even possible? The scale for Apatity starts at -4°C.
I think -4°C is the actual temperature. Not an anomaly.
It is labeled ‘Anomaly’…
To quote Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds: this is my shocked face.
Seriously, though, this will be the usual “argument” with a warmist:
Me: “These temp readings don’t take UHI into consideration”
Them: “Listen you uneducated Koch-funded goon, REAL scientists say the science is settled, so they obviously HAVE”.
Me: “What about this new study? Did they go into the future, consider the findings, somehow ignore them, THEN publish their alarmist “science”.
Them: [Googling response from warmist website]: “You’re killing the planet, and I’m not listening to murderers”.
roflmao .
I live in the Suburbs and commute into the city everyday and have for the last 30 years and I have a thermometer in my car. In Minnesota in the winter there seems to be about a 5º difference between the suburbs and the city. Which is probably why I am and will always be a skeptic.
So, UHI exists, but it doesn’t matter?
Common sense would imply otherwise.
If we know stations within UHIs are reading higher temps, but we can not possibly know exactly how much warmer at any given time, then why waste time adjusting these station readings, why not just eliminate them from consideration?
I suspect the answer will be: if we didn’t use those stations, who would pay the “adjusters”?
A Light In Siberia. It was posted here.
The original story available here:
http://notrickszone.com/2010/09/21/a-light-in-siberia/#sthash.NIxIBp6F.dpbs
Sure makes Nicks hand-waving above look rather…
Of course Apatity is in the west, near the Finnish border, and nowhere near Siberia where the large warming area is…
How is ‘Apatity’ pronounced? Does it rhyme with “Russian city?” Or “commodity?” Enquiring minds want to know.
There is no evidence that Apatity temperatures are used for any global average. It’s not listed in GHCN.
keep in mind that they way that ‘the powers that be’ deal with UHI is to raise the cooler rural temps to be more in line with the warmer urban areas. i thought this was well known already?
/
That Warmists say “duh, we’ve known this all along, that’s why we’ve adjusted rural stations up to match these UHI measurements, it’s basically climatstrology 101.”
So it’s heat radiation from buildings when the outside temperature is 40 below. Makes sense because it is a huge heat differential.
Combination of radiation and convection.
All energy consumed in cities, building heating, ventilation, cooling, lighting and even vehicle exhaust, ends up as waste heat, except perhaps for visible light escaping to space, and even in this instance some of that visible light leaving a window may fall on the screen for the weather instruments or nearby and be absorbed. This amounts to a very substantial fraction of the so-called greenhouse warming within the area of cities. I worked on this with a dutch physicist some sixteen years ago. I suppose I should have published it, but most likely i’d still be revising the work and fighting the “peer review”.
Even within the area of a community college campus, located a mile or so outside city limits I could observe a warmer environment than the surrounding countryside from the concentration of heated buildings and campus traffic.
Maybe this is a little off topic; maybe not. But, it makes me wonder if we’re seeing an UHI effect just from the heat that leaks out from merely heating these buildings to livable temperatures how dramatic the effect must be from the Ivanpah power plant. Instead of Urban Heat Island could that be; UII: Urban Incineration Island?
UHI is a ubiquitous feature of urban temperature fields, ESPECIALLY in the Arctic, where significantly less energy is required to heat the cold air by, say, one degree.
The same amount of energy is required to raise a thing by the same delta T, providing that there is no state change, whether it’s from cold to less cold, or hot to hotter.
for example, “Calorie is defined as an amount of heat required to change temperature of one gram of liquid water by one degree Celsius (or one degree Kelvin).”
BUT – in the artic, the temp differential between building heated for human comfort – and the outside at sub-freezer temps – is huge. Hence heat pours out of these buildings, according to Newtons Law of Cooling.
Which basically explains that the rate of heat transfer is proportional to the temp differential.
It’s the reason why heatsinks are rated in degrees/watt.
Quote from: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/heat-work-energy-d_292.html
I’m sure that you knew all this. But, for the sake of clarification – it’s the differential between inside and outside the human habitation that increases the energy/heat flow from buildings to the environment.
The same applies in reverse for losses of air-con cooled building in hot climes.
Further to, “The same applies in reverse for losses of air-con cooled building in hot climes.”
Except that this is not really analogous. Since the air-con exchanger unit dumps heat from the building into the environment, as heat flows back from the environment into the building which is being cooled.
It’s not analogous with a stove in a hut in Siberia. Which is a one way flow.
So, I shouldn’t have made that comparison, because it just confuses the issue.
Actually, I had in mind not liquid water, but a surface graybody, transferring heat to the atmosphere.
Urban-heat-island is associated with the urban area growth in terms of concrete roads & buildings, vertical buildings rise, destruction of greenery & water bodies, pollution. In urban areas with such condition, forms the temperature inversions — reverse of lapse rate. Under this, the pollution forms a layer and heats up below it — wind effect under vertical structures will be minimum at ground level. As a result the night temperature at higher layer below the pollution layer is warmer than the ground level. During the day ground temperature is higher. Thus, minimum temperature rise is associated with the urban heat island effect in urban areas. This results, more power consumption to cool the buildings in the night. Indian annual march of temperature show a higher rise in minimum temperature over the maximum temperature. Well planned cities, the urban heat island effect is felt less. In unplanned cities it is more.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
cont —
Similar to heat-island effect in urban areas,cold-island effect in rural areas is common. In the former areas more met network and in the later sparce met network. With the population growth, to meet the food needs governments built dams or water resources were developed. This resulted increased areas changed from dry-land agriculture [rainfed] to irrigated agriculture with more time of the year the greenery on the land. Irrigated area in 1800 across the world was 8 Mha changed to 40 Mha by 1900 to 100 ha by 1950 to 255 Mha by 1995 to 278.8 Mha by 2000. To rise this developed irrigation infrastructure. That means water spread and greenery spread has increased in non-linear form. This not only cools the cropped area and water resources area but also through cool breeze advection it cools the surrounding areas.
Heat-island effect is over emphasized and cold-island effect is under emphasized in the global average temperature anomaly.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
cont—
Let me give an example of change in Orography impact on local rainfall – this I presented in a book of mine in 2000 “Agriculture Scenario of Andhra Pradesh: During the last four decades”.
Orography plays a major role on Indian rainfall. For example, Western Ghats help in producing wet areas on wind ward direction [from Arabian Sea moisture] [Western parts of Ghats] and dry areas on leeward direction [Eastern parts of Ghats] during the Southwest Monsoon season. The opposite pattern is producing during the Northeast Monsoon Season – which gets copious rains with cyclonic activity in Bay of Bengal. The box effect of Himalayan Mountain ranges of the northeastern zone provides copious rains – the highest rainfall in the World is received at Chirapunji of this zone.
Thus, the destruction of Orography plays the major role in changing the rainfall around that zone. In Mumbai/India [on the banks of Arabian Sea] met stations are located in Colaba and Santacruz [airport]. Historical average rainfall at Santacruz is higher than Colaba by about 300 mm.
For the purpose of expanding Santacruz airport for a separate international airport [I was a trainee on weather forecasting, staying inside the airport for a month] cut a hillock in the windward direction of the Southwest Monsoon on the Eastern and Northeastern side of the Santacruz met observatory on the runway. This results a decreasing trend in Santacruz rainfall relative to Colaba rainfall trend. With the international terminal in operation, high rise buildings have come up that acted as hillock and then reversed the decreasing trend in Santacruz rainfall now. Few years back Mumbai receive unusually very high rainfall in one day. This is mainly associated with the change in vertical structures that have come up acted like Western Ghats.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
Here’s an interesting analysis of how UHI is being treated by climatologists:
http://realclimatescience.com/2016/02/extreme-uhi-fraud-at-noaa/
If they built a dome over the city, they could confine that excess heat and have a REAL ‘dark greenhouse’ effect.