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:
I sure hope someone is archiving the publicly available data. You know that the revelations over the last few weeks are going to tempt someone to “adjust” raw data.
Monckton also accusing American Scientists of criminal fraud:
http://www.cfact.tv/2009/12/07/lord-monckton-on-climategate-at-the-2nd-international-climate-conference/
I would have titled this “Are you smarter than a 6th grader?”
I found a little more of this story here, but the original link was shut down within 2 hours of posting.
Secret Draft Leak Proves More Damaging Than ‘Climategate’ As Talks Are Suspended
http://www.nrgefficiencyblogy.com/secret-draft-leak-proves-more-damaging-than-%E2%80%98climategate%E2%80%99-as-talks-are-suspended/
Here are the google news results search
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=Secret+Draft+Leak+Proves+More+Damaging+Than+%E2%80%98Climategate%E2%80%99+As+Climate+Talks+Are+Suspended&btnG=Google+Search&aq=f&oq=&aqi=
Okay, no one else has said it so I will.
Huh. Global warming is an Urban Myth!
Peter’s dad here. Just want to thank all of you for your comments, they are most supportive. We are starting analyze more sites and may have a new video soon. Thank you again.
GJG
Hi, i got one made for the Netherlands.
http://img16.imageshack.us/i/grafiek.jpg
A nice thing to notice is that the top line is from the KNMI (Dutch Weathercenter) data. The other two are from GISS. Red is raw. blue is “homogenised”(?). And it also had a adjustment down in the early years.
Link should be http://img193.imageshack.us/i/grafiekr.jpg/
The end credits say (C) attic animations
Google turns this up:
http://www.atticanimations.com/
which has links to their videos including the above one.
There is a contact link.
Thanks
JK
and Cavemen??
Icarus (13:15:52) :
Sure, the UHI effect is real. That’s why they adjust for it, isn’t it?
————————————————————–
Oh sure they do…. But they don’t adjust it the 1.5 degrees that they should be, which this simple video elequently points out…..
After all there are adjustments….. and then there is “hiding the decline” 😉
E.M.Smith will correct me if I’m wrong but if I understand it correctly, GISS take the GHCN data then remove corrections applied by NOAA.
Then they apply their own corrections & homogenisation.
In the station data at GISS, there are 3 datasets.
Set 0: Station data, (unadjusted, may be more than one dataset for one area)
Set 1: Station data, (datasets stitched together to form one record)
Set 2: Station data, (homogenised, almost invariably shows warming)
DaveE.
If it is raw data it confirms the UHI effect quite nicely.
If it is adjusted data it confirms how dubious the adjustment has been.
Child’s play.
(So let’s all play the AGW game and double insulate our homes to remove the UHI – that’ll teach ’em. It’ll save you a few bob as well)
Seems like someone on a low budget could take a weather ballon and an IR camera, and let it go over a city and capture temp empirically. I’m amazed there isn’t a satellite capable of doing this now.
I have suggestion : let’s launch a dedicated, fully open source website a bit in the spirit of http://www.woodfortrees.org/ where we would provide that kind of analysis, and let people interact with the graphs.
One would be able to pick a subset of rural cities, display the trend, etc.
Anthony, if you’re interested, contact me, I’d love to help. (For a living, I’m a senior software designer and I’m used to building very elaborate projects for big brands).
Dont get me started on Parkers paper..
What do you make of the UK situation then?
Looks as if some work is needed there.
http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/urban-heat-island-effect.html
Another self-evident point about UHI: In 1900 the number of airports in the world was zero. Today, I believe it’s the case that the primary weather station for most large cities is at the airport. This is logical, because pilots need to know the on-site, real-time weather conditions. The larger the city, the larger the airport, with its acres of asphalt, air-conditioned and heated buildings, and thousands of jet engines pumping heat into the atmosphere. This is a heat island if ever there was one, and it didn’t exist in 1900.
Just FWIW, I made spatial temperature plots for the Mid Atlantic region compiled from the Cooperative observing network microfilm the Army Corps of Engineers keeps for data from the 1980s as a part of my senior research mentoring program back in 1999/2000 and found that UHI correlated very strongly with population density. One could easily take US Census data for the entire climate history record…broken down by county, and adjust every station using a linear regression model of population density and UHI.
I’m still wondering about the “adjustments” made on the Darwin temp. The Team (?) applied stepwise upward adjustments from around 1940 onwards, amounting as much as 3 degC. However, an upward adjustment is meningful only when some anthropogenic COOLING has taken place as time went by. What on earth were such COOLING factors at Darwin airport and its vicinity ??
This teacher gives you a benchmark score of “Exceeds”. It compares well to an exceedingly well done 8th grade research project.
I don’t really know where to begin. NO WARMING AT ALL in the rural sites. And the jazz fusion track, a bit Steely Dan. Very Nice.
But 2 words of warning to Peter’s Dad (and Peter):
1) Peter and Dad, the Magic Climate Circle will not appreciate you doing a Penn and Teller
2) Peter, NEVER TRY TO IMPRESS A GIRL with this. It will only leave you lonely. Just say you know a few tricks and be vague. Works a treat
Very good interview with Rep. John Linder (R-Ga.) on CBS news.
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/12/09/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5954989.shtml
Watch CBS News Videos Online
Even a caveman could figure that out.
I see one of the pairings was Sacramento-Colfax, and I’m not sure if it was the best pairing, as Sacramento is in the valley and Colfax up in the foothills. A better pairing might have been another valley town…but it still works, I expect.
Someone should give this kid a lesson in statistical manipulation and selective sampling. These numbers are meaningless until they have been “adjusted” by highly skilled climatologists. The kid probably doesn’t even know that old temperature readings do not age well. They tend to float upward with the passage of time and must be adjusted downward in order to bring them up to date. Conversely, newer temperature readings fresh off the old thermometer tend to rapidly sink and must be adjusted upward.
The general public, and certainly some grammar-school kid, cannot not hope to comprehend the complexities involved in teasing the underlying greenhouse warming signal out of seemingly simple and straightforward land temperature records. This chore is best left to the professionals. /sarc
CH
REPLY: I added /sarc in case it wasn’t clear to some people that this was sarcasm -A