The Urban Heat Island effect on temperature records is real, despite what some people wish you to believe. Peter, a sixth grader, and his dad, thought so too, and take the data from NASA GISS and show in a simple video, what we’ve been saying for years here at WUWT. Urbanization, land use, and station siting matter.
Watch Peter’s excellent video below:
They used a simple pairing of rural and urban sites to show the differences. This shows why homogenization, which smears all the data from urban and rural sites together, is a bad idea, and gives trends that don’t exist in reality.
I like the ending where he says in the rolling credits “Peter’s dad is not employed or funded by any energy or oil companies”. It’s funny that they’d feel a need to say this. No National Science Foundation funding needed either.
This video appeared in comments on WUWT, if anybody knows how to contact Peter or his dad, please advise. We are in touch now.
One wonders what the response of the well funded Hadley Centre, Met Office scientist Dr. David Parker, might be to this video.
Parker’s 2006 paper published in the Journal of Climate titled: “A Demonstration that Large scale warming is not urban” claims:
The analysis of Tmin demonstrates that neither urbanization nor other local instrumental or thermal effects
have systematically exaggerated the observed global warming trends in Tmin. The robustness of the analysis to the criterion for “calm” implies that the estimated overall trends are insensitive to boundary layer structure and small-scale advection, and to siting, instrumentation, and observing practices that increasingly influence temperatures as winds become lighter. Furthermore, even at windy sites (e.g., St. Paul, Aleutian Islands, in Fig. C1), the calmest terce and especially the calmest decile will be strongly affected by occasions with very light winds in passing ridges or blocking anticyclones, and should reveal any urban warming influence.
…the results of the present study also suggest that they have not affected the estimates of temperature trends.
Steve McIntyre gave Parker’s paper a scathing review in 2007’s article:
This sort of urban-rural pairing is exactly what Jones et al. [Nature, 1990] did with Chinese data. Jones et al. claimed that the difference between urban and rural in China was negligible. China is particularly important, because it has undergone more urbanization than most other countries: so if the difference there is negligible, it is likely negligible in most other places. Jones et was cited for the crucial issue of urbanization effects in the most-recent Assessment Report from the IPCC.
The Chinese analysis is what I have alleged to be fraudulent, as discussed on WUWT previously (here, here, here).
Also, since Jones et al. got published in Nature, maybe these Peter & Pop should submit to there?
I would have expected this level of scientific analysis coming from a 6th grade Asian student, not an American student. There is still hope for our country.
That is the video that SHOULD have been played at Hopenchagen – The one with the girl having nightmares is a disgrace.
Way OT, I know but… BBC1 showing “Hot Planet” at 10:45pm (9/12/09). I hope it doesn’t suffer the same number of complaints to Ofcom, as “The Great Global Warming Swindel” did in 2007 according to Wikipedia (a fine example of peer reviewed work if ever there was one !)
avisame: or temps really fell during the ‘flat’ time and look flat cause they covered up the UHI trend
Anthony,
I hope that you have your own study out soon on the surface station project.
Speaking of tipping the scales, here is another nomination for the next week’s funny
http://townhall.com/cartoons/cartoonist/ChuckAsay/2009/12/8
Enjoy
APE
I got snipped for a “Scrappleface” style post and Michael 14:10:12 passed muster?
Should the names have been changed to protect the innocent?
Peter and Dad. Great stuff.
Here’s a humorous take on Global Warming published in the Washington Examiner:
Scott Ott’s Examiner Scrappleface: Climate summit opens with warning about giant insects
By: Scott Ott
Examiner Columnist
December 8, 2009 News fairly unbalanced. We report. You decipher.
House-straddling tarantulas, mosquitoes the size of German shepherds, ants with the speed and mass of a diesel locomotive — all of these threats and more face humanity unless delegates to the Copenhagen Climate Conference agree on the wording of a treaty that would put an end to greenhouse gases once and for all, according to two well-known climate scientists.
Phil Jones, currently on involuntary sabbatical from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, as well as Penn State professor Michael Mann, agreed that global citizens “face near-certain doom — crushed in the massive, venomous mandibles of insects and arachnids the likes of which we haven’t seen outside of science fiction movies.”
Jones and Mann recently came under scrutiny in the scientific community when e-mails surfaced suggesting they, and other leading climatologists, had attempted to distort, hide and even dump data that could challenge their theory of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.
In a surprise public appearance, with Powerpoint presentation, on the streets of Copenhagen, the duo said the absence of raw temperature data to back their previous global warming claims pales in comparison with the “sheer terror” that their new data should inspire.
“If you go back some 107 billion years, as the molten surface of the Earth began to cool, insects were much bigger than they are now,” said Jones. “They went through several cycles of shrinking and expanding until the start of the Industrial Revolution.”
Professor Mann added that since factories and vehicles began to spew carbon into the atmosphere the average size of an ant has increased at an alarming rate — roughly .0002 percent per century.
“If you look at a chart tracking the average leg length of tarantulas,” Mann said, “it just shoots up in the mid-1970s. The graph looks like a hockey stick. And they’re on every continent. No one will escape their wrath.”
Jones and Mann said they arrived at their new theory of global giant bug warming “as an alternative explanation for the data that we no longer have to support our first theory.” This particular interpretation of the data was chosen, they said, “mostly because it’s really scary to little children.”
Examiner columnist Scott Ott is editor in chief of ScrappleFace.com, the world’s leading family-friendly news satire source.
MYSTERIOUS BLUE SPIRAL LIGHT IN NORWAY SKY DECEMBER 9 2009
WUWT
Nice.
Thank you, Peter and his dad.
Outstanding ! Absolutely outstanding !
OT
Mapou (13:43:45) :
I think that the quote below is indicative of the careful social manipulation that has been taking place. AGW is no more than a McGuffin for the Greens and the one world statists. It replaced Nuclear Winter, which was also a McGuffin for the same players. After all, what is a community organizer to do without a cause? And remember, the community organizer knows best and must tell us what to do!
“Norgaard: I think so. And the reason is that we don’t have a clear sense of what we can do. Any community organizer knows that if you want people to respond to something, you need to tell them what to do, and make it seem do-able. Stanford University psychologist Jon Krosnick has studied this, and showed that people stop paying attention to climate change when they realize there’s no easy solution. People judge as serious only those problems for which actions can be taken.
Another factor is that we no longer have a sense of permanence. Another psychologist, Robert Lifton, wrote about what the existence of atomic bombs did to our psyche. There was a sense that the world could end at any moment.
Global warming is the same in that it threatens the survival of our species. Psychologists tell us that it’s very important to have a sense of the continuity of life. That’s why we invest in big monuments and want our work to stand after we die and have our family name go on.
That sense of continuity is being ruptured. But climate change has an added aspect that is very important. The scientists who built nuclear bombs felt guilt about what they did. Now the guilt is real for the broader public.”
Congradulations of the awesome analysis Peter and Peter’s Dad.
I wonder what stations are used in the analysis? It would be great to see a peer reviewed paper published from the video.
New eyes on the problem reveal new solutions others missed or willfully hid within the rising heat island effect of urban areas. Hide the stability? Hide the boring sameness? Hide the heat island effect?
Anthony you can possibly reach them here if you haven’t already.
http://www.youtube.com/inbox?to_users=TheseData&action_compose=1
The annoying thing is that at this point, AGW believers and promoters asre in such denial of simple reality that they dismiss any and all counter evidence presented to them.
They *need* their apocalypse.
Do you expect a 6th grader to find evidence of AGW? Of course not. You need a PhD to do that.
O:T,
Saudi delegate brings up ‘Climategate’ at COP15
[snip -way off topic]
Al Gore would say that this young budding scientist in in the employee of Big Oil, but then again he also believe the earth is 2 million degrees below the crust and the climategate emails are from 10 years ago….
Great job Peter!
So what happens if one just plots the combined rural data? Is there warming or not? If there isn’t, then I don’t see how we’re causing the warming.
The Public Informer (13:35:43) :
“I bring AGW demotivational posters to share with AGW fanatics during these difficult times. Feel free to copy!”
http://agwdemotivated.blogspot.com/
I like the one that says, “Putting the ‘Con’ Back in Consensus.”
Here is a link to an interesting article
on the money it will cost us to pay for developing nations. In theory sounds good, but in reality the 100 billion comes from you and me. If that is split among Europe and us, what is our cost per taxpayer? Judging by what percentage pay taxes, I forget the number, what will it cost a family?
http://cleantechnica.com/2009/12/09/developing-world-assistance-likely-to-bring-100-billion-boom-to-renewable-sector/
Great !
Please ask some alarmist (even scientist) to react on this and let us know this here !
“Check out this preposterous article that appeared over at Wired today.
The Psychology of Climate Change Denial
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/climate-psychology/
It’s sickening. The folks at Wired have been a consistent and eager player in the GW fraud. We will remember.”
The interviewee cites Bangladesh flood patterns, the sinking Maldives, and distorted Alaskan highways. No comments there yet.
Republicans plan to form a counter delegation to prevent Obama signing an agreement.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/09/republicans-plan-form-counter-delegation-climate-conference/