Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
“I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw”
William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii
Following on from my look at the USHCN temperature dataset, I have gone north (if not north-north-west) and looked at the NORDKLIM dataset. This dataset covers Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and Iceland. Of the seventy-five stations in the dataset, fifty of them have records covering the period from 1900 to 1999. Figure 1 shows the average of those selected temperatures for that period.
Figure 1. Average of the 50 long-term stations in the NORDKLIM dataset. The warmest year in the data is 1934. Photo is of Tromso, Norway, 70° North Latitude.
As before, I wanted to look at the changes in different months, to see when during the year the warming occurred. Figure 2 shows the decadal changes in the temperature for each month.
Figure 2. Decade-by-decade changes in the temperature of the Nordic countries. Photo is of Tromsoe, Norway, 70° North Latitude
As you can see, the changes are similar to those in the US. The summer temperatures have not changed. Winter temperatures (January to March) have warmed. One difference is that the winter warming is larger in the NORDKLIM temperatures.
The more I look at these datasets, the more I think that we are looking at the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. This is the change in the recorded temperature due to increasing development around the recording station. Increasing houses, buildings, industry, parking lots, and roads all increase the recorded temperature at nearby stations. The NORDKLIM notes say:
Especially one should notice that stations represent local conditions, which may have been effected e.g. by urbanisation
This effect is known to be greater in winter than in summer. In a study done in Barrow, Alaska, for example, there is a 4.5°C difference in the UHI effect between January and July. The winter to summer difference in the UHI in Fairbanks, Alaska is estimated to be 1.2°C.
In addition to the physical development (buildings, roads, etc.), another reason for this UHI can be seen in the photos used to illustrate the graphs. This is the direct usage of energy in the cities. For example, estimates of the energy usage for the New York City area are on the order of 5 * 10^18 joules annually. This gives a local forcing of ~ 20 W/m2.
How large an effect is this? Well, to get this amount of forcing from increasing CO2, instead of merely doubling, it would have to increase by more than forty times …
The colder the city is on average, the more effect that this will have. A building kept at 70°F (20°C) will have little effect on temperature if the local temperature is only slightly below that. If the temperature is below freezing, on the other hand, this will be a much larger effect.
In addition, the colder the weather, the more energy is put into heating the buildings. This also increases the winter UHI. As a result, we would expect the effect we have seen, that the recorded change in winter temperatures is greater in the NORDKLIM dataset than in the USHCN dataset.
My conclusion? At least part of the warming in the US and the NORDKLIM datasets is the result of UHI distortion of the records. An unknown but likely significant amount of this UHI heating is due to direct energy consumption in the cities.
And knowing how much of the temperature change is from UHI is harder than telling a hawk from a handsaw.
All this talk about hawks seems to have frightened off our local small bird population – not a Wren in sight.
Re: Hawks and Hand Saws:
So many lines of the Bard are like this. Endless delights in the music of the words, the complexities of nuance, meaning, and emotional shading. He was the greatest punster of all times. Puns, being cousins to riddles, when well done delight the both ear and imagination.
Surely, he meant many things in this line. Was Fortinbras not a hawk in spirit and deed, while Claudius vascillated as a hand saw? Hamlet claims to know the difference, yet the whole play is about his struggle to be a hawk, when his intellectual inclinations trapped him into playing the hand saw. In the end tragedy befell Hamlet and all around him, for he could not escape his own nature, while trying to be true to a nature unnatural to him.
KW
As a person who lives in Norway i can indeed verify that most of the warming has occured during the winter. I personally also believe that UHI is a large part of this, since the temp is usually several degrees warmer in populated areas during the winter compared to surrounding areas.
Willis, my heating handbooks show that a gallon of #2 fuel oil produces about 1.2 gallons of water when burned in a modern boiler. I assume that kerosene (jet fuel) and propane produce similar amounts, perhaps more because of the higher hydrogen content. Natural gas (CH4) would produce the most water per unit of heating (if I have stated that correctly). Even at N43 latitude in New England, we often see clear-day snow from heating plants when the temperature is very cold. However, accumulation of the fine crystals seems to be largely offset by sublimation in the dry air.
From Kwinterkorn (08:40:20):
(…)
So many lines of the Bard are like this. (…)
Surely, he meant many things in this line. (…)
In the intro to my Revised Standard Version (RSV) Bible, it mentions a main reason for the new version was that the English language had changed since the King James version. Words had differing meanings, some even meant the opposite of the original. As it explicitly mentioned, this is why Shakespeare’s lines can sound so strange.
While it’s been interesting reading so many comments about his hidden wit and so many other interesting facets of his writing, I think what would be most productive is if people well-versed in the history of the English language actually went through his plays and converted as needed to Modern English, so we can really see what an actual listener back then would have perceived him as actually saying. Might not sound as witty, but at least it’d be more accurate.
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mindbuilder (14:11:01) :
Do we have reliable measurement and calculation of global temp rise from satellites? If so do they show the same warming as thermometers? If they do then doesn’t that discredit the UHI effect as insignificant? Or was most of the UHI effect created before the satellites started measuring?
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You can see from the slope of the UAH vs GISS/HADCRUT3 data that the increase as measured by satellite is less than the other two.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1980/to:2010/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:2010/trend/plot/uah/from:1980/to:2010/trend
davidmhoffer (06:46:39) :
James Sexton;
Willis, there is something wrong with your graphs or the numbers used. Sure, I buy the UHI effect. What I don’t buy is how much greater the UHI is in Januarys as opposed to Decembers>>
If you take a look at my explanation above re how much energy a building absorbs from the sun in winter versus summer, it might be part of the answer. I am guessing that someone less lazy than I, and with accurate math skills rather than guestimates for illustrative purposes, could show that the maximum absorption of energy from the sun would be a combination of sun’s inclination and length of day with maximum arriving somewehere after the winter solstice…. like January or February…
Yes, I buy that part of it, sadly, I’m probably not less lazy, however, curiosity is getting the better of me…….I’m running the numbers and graphing myself. I’m using Excel only w/o any special coding. So far, the graph looks remarkably similar to Willis’. Next, I’m going to check the numbers as far as divergence from month to month, and compare, but the more I look at it, I’m suspect of the numbers themselves.
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Digsby (08:33:24) :
All this talk about hawks seems to have frightened off our local small bird population – not a Wren in sight.
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They may have been eaten by wind turbines – the “green” alternative.
Hi Willis
I live in Florida and I don’t have much experience with real cold weather. I’ve been in Kansas a few times during cold and western North Carolina. From my very limited experience, it seems to me, that when it gets cold, there is less wind. When there is less wind, there is more of a heat bubble. The UHI affect may not be dissipated as it might be in the summer time.
Now, again, that might be Florida thinking. When I campout in freezing temps in the Ocala Forest, if there is no wind my tent stays nice and cozy (sometimes as much as 10degrees warmer than outside (33 outside, 45 inside). When there is a breeze (very rare) the inside quickly gets as cold as the outside. In the summer time here there is almost always wind. The air is always moving somewhere. Maybe that dilutes the UHI affect in the summer time.
YMMV.
Kwinterkorn (08:40:20) :Re: Hawks and Hand Saws:
So many lines of the Bard are like this. Endless delights in the music of the words,
Of course you could see the two sides of the debate on the climate as being like that between Hawks and Handsaws. The hawk is a single-hit hunter, it goes in for the kill in one. The handsaw is a slow but steady progression. As such I would suggest that Hawks represent the view of science/technology that you can “do everything at once” or conversely that you can “understand the complete system” as a sum of its parts.
In contrast the handsaw represents incrementalism: that systems are holistic entities that have to be understood as a working system to which modifications are made. (typical of engineering)
Now this will be a bit of a leap of faith (and if anyone is interested I could fill in the details), but the “all in one” hawk view is one adopted by those who look at a problem and try to deconstruct it into it component parts. Or more accurately, they represent those who believe you can simply assemble together a system from the separate parts and the total system is merely the sum of the functions of its parts.
In contrast the handsaw represents the incrementalist who is typical of engineering who sees a system and tries to understand the impact of a small change which does not upset the system as a whole.
The “Hawk” approach is typical of relatively simple systems or problems that can be highly compartmentalised and with huge budgets and very little need to optimise the system as a whole or rationalise function of the system as a whole rather than each individual component part. The moon launch is typical of the idea of “going for the target in one (or very few) steps”.
The incrementalist approach is typical of very complex systems relative to the resources available. Typically such systems have tight budgetary constraints and/or rely on huge expertise/experience. Problems are tackled without trying to understand the full function of the system — a small part is worked on in isolation whilst trying to maintain the integrity of the whole. A typical system is a windmill (low-cost early developers were criticised for “throwing metal” at problems) or the human body (too complex to understand – no one tries to build a body from the “bits”)
So how does this relate to climategate/sceptic
The climategate gang have tried to deconstruct the problem of world temperature based on their belief that they can identify all the components that affect the climate. This belief leads them to try to deconstruct the world’s climate into its simplest components (the effect of gases etc.), they then try to construct a pseudo-climate proxy via their models of the climate believing the complete system is simply a combination the (known) component parts. In practice this means they look at the known changes in the atmosphere … ignoring anything they don’t know about or can’t measure or haven’t got the historic data for … and then they make the mega-huge jump to say that because they (think) they have all the variables affecting the climate the climate must therefore only respond to these variables and whilst the relationship doesn’t fit at all well, it is assumed that A->B so the variables must be the (only) drivers of global temperature and then because climate must be caused by the known variables there will be a simple and direct relationship (even if they have to fudge it) between the known variables and the temperature. – So like a hawk … a belief that success comes from a single simple movement (logically movement) or strike.
In contrast, the sceptics seem to come from an engineering type background where they are familiar with systems which cannot be understood by understanding their component parts (often for very practical reasons like it’s too expensive), where systems have to be maintained and gradually and incrementally improved and where the systems are far too complex to understand precisely how any change will affect the system as a whole. Those from this background tend not to try to deconstruct climate into the constituent parts and then assume we can model climate based on the available knowledge of constituent parts. Instead we use a range of tools/experience to assess whether the small (apparent) change in temperature needs to be explained by some change like e.g. CO2.
The type of approach this leads to is summed up by the question: “Does the system’s characteristic AS A WHOLE (with variation) explain the temperature record and is there evidence of change in the SYSTEM AS A WHOLE.
“Engineers/incrementalists are very happy to work with such concepts as “system noise” and it doesn’t worry us that we don’t understand the last detail of the systems we work on because our practical training gives us a range of highly sophisticated tools by which we can understand incremental changes without having to deconstruct back to constituent parts. And so we view the climate as a complete system and view CO2/temperature as two incremental changes and we have the tools to determine whether they are related without resorting to the fruitless exercise of deconstructing a system which is impossible to deconstruct into all its parts like the world’s climate.
To summarise
Hamlet is contrasting two types of leadership: the swift one-off action of the “hawk” can be contrasted with the slow “to-and-for” diplomacy of the “handsaw”. Similarly in climate “science”, the attempt to characterise the earth’s climate in a single movement from known variable to modelled climatic change (where variation is ignored) can be contrasted with the view that the complexity of climate is best viewed as a complete holistic system where small incremental changes like CO2 are of no concern unless they cause the system to move beyond the normal variation of the climate.
From Fred Harwood (09:19:46):
Willis, my heating handbooks show that a gallon of #2 fuel oil produces about 1.2 gallons of water when burned in a modern boiler. I assume that kerosene (jet fuel) and propane produce similar amounts, perhaps more because of the higher hydrogen content. Natural gas (CH4) would produce the most water per unit of heating (if I have stated that correctly). (…)
Well, that could account for part of the sea level rise. We have been burning lots of fossil fuels, and recreating lots of “fossil water.” 😉
@davidmhoffer
“Let’s take an extreme example for illustrative purposes. Let’s suppose in summer at high noon the sun is at an 80 degree angle to the earth and shining away at 500 watts per square meter. In winter, let’s say the sun is at a 10 degree angle to the earth, exposing it to only 50 watts per square meter.”
You seem to forget that Norway is pretty damn far north. The sun here in middle of norway does not even reach more than 3 degrees above horizon during december. When the sun is so low in the sky it wont really heat anything. It is so weak that you wont even feel the sun on your skin even on a mild winter day. There is also hardly any difference between day/night in winter months due to sun being so low in the sky.
Even during summer soliscite the sun does not reach more than 45-55~ degrees above horizon during noon.
The UHI can be estimated by simply keeping an eye on your car’s temp indicator as you drive into town. Doesn’t need to have absolute accuracy since you are only looking at the relative difference.
It would be a simple matter to then tabulate the readings from many contributors as they travel between two places at different times of the year to get an idea of the UHI.
James Sexton (09:44:03) :
“…..Yes, I buy that part of it, sadly, I’m probably not less lazy, however, curiosity is getting the better of me…….I’m running the numbers and graphing myself. I’m using Excel only w/o any special coding. So far, the graph looks remarkably similar to Willis’. Next, I’m going to check the numbers as far as divergence from month to month, and compare, but the more I look at it, I’m suspect of the numbers themselves.”
Do not forget dial M for missing minus signs. The likelihood of having a minus sign is greatest in the winter at night. That combined with the UHI probably explains a lot of the divergence.
I notice the greatest divergence is in the winter but there is also a divergence in the summer during peak A/C use too. (not to mention all those buildings absorbing the summer heat and radiating it at night)
vigilantfish (08:21:57) :
davidmhoffer (06:34:48) and (06:46:39) :
Thanks for the clarification. I’m a suburbanite, and was thinking in terms of ordinary houses. Obviously when considering tall buildings, there would be more sun exposure to the south- to some extent east- and west-facing walls in the winter. I suppose this factor would be more important than the shadows cast by other nearby tall buildings as the overall effect would be cumulative.>>
I grew up on a farm but have since undergone suburbanite conversion. Houses show the effect too, it is why winter cities try and design for maximum southern exposure in residential areas. Saves on heating fuel. You can even measure a pronounced UHI just driving through a warehouse district where the warehouses are cold storage (ie not heated). The taller the building, the more pronounced it is. I live due west of downtown. Just anecdotal observation of my dashboard temperature gauge I notice a much larger UHI driving home in the evening than I do going downtown in the morning and more so in winter. Never thought to compare Dec to Feb. If I forget to turn off at my street (and yes I do that sometimes) and keep going to the edge of town, the UHI is still visible from residential to rural, just not as pronounced as from downtown to residential.
James Sexton (05:17:42)
Apologies, James. It is possible that either the graphs or the numbers used are incorrect … but I just checked both and they seem to be correct. The numbers are straight off of the NORDKLIM spreadsheet.
However, that doesn’t mean I didn’t make a stupid (or even a wise) mistake. It has happened more than once. Which is why I cite all my sources.
I suspect the problem is more apparent than real. Here’s a 15-month look at the same data, which cycles back to January, February, March where it started:
I don’t see much that looks wrong there, but YMMV …
DavidmHoffer
Following the great fire that largely destroyed Ancient Rome, the Emperor Nero was exalted to rebuiild the city with ‘streets narrows and buildings tall’ in order to overcome the UHI effect. This had caused Beech trees to migrate out of the city and caused the great and the good to flee the place in summer on any pretext. They also noted that their oranges grew well even in winter and that frosts had disappeared within the city.
In my opinion UHI is of much more concern than Carbon dioxide and has a measurably greater effect.
Tonyb
In reply to Digsby (08:33:24) :
“All this talk about hawks seems to have frightened off our local small bird population – not a Wren in sight.”
Jim (09:44:15) wrote:
“”They may have been eaten by wind turbines – the “green” alternative.””
Sorry, Jim, only regular readers of this blog would likely understand my playful reference to a “Wren”. Stick around and you may discover why my capitalizing the first letter wasn’t a typo.
Quite a few times I have seen AGW tracts expounding that the occurrence of the greatest heating at high latitudes, in winter, and at night is a “fingerprint” of AGW. (The logic is that in the colder conditions, there is less water vapor in the air and hence less natural greenhouse effect, so each increment of CO2 has a greater effect here than in warmer conditions.)
I have often thought reading these things, “Wait, that’s the fingerprint of UHI as well!”
But it works both ways. How can we be sure that this is not the expected result of AGW?
WIllis: Since your calculation of 20 W/m^2 of energy consumption in NYC didn’t include any references, as a good skeptic, I “audited” it. 5*10^18 J/yr divided by 3.15*10^7 s/yr gives 1.58*10^11 W (J/s). NYC has an area of 789.4 km^2 (Wikipedia) or 7.89*10^8 m^2, yielding 201 W/m^2, roughly as much energy as delivered by sunlight.
Interestingly, Wikipedia (citing the World Resources Institute) also says per capital energy use in the U.S. is 327 GJ/yr. NYC’s population is 8.36 million (Wikipedia), giving a total energy use of 2.72*10^18 J/yr. So your figure of 5*10^18 doesn’t seem absurd at first glance. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
In the US, about half of fossil fuels are used to generate electricity, which is done outside the city. presumably with less than 50% overall efficiency. Most of the goods and food used in NYC are produced outside the city along with the per capita energy needed to produce them. If one postulates that 80% of the energy consumed by the people of NYC is actually released as heat outside of the city, then NYC might release about 5*10^17 J of heat per year, and that would give a number close to your figure of 20 W/m^2. So 20 W/m^2 of energy released in NYC appears sensible.
Curt (12:51:18) : edit
See my post above for one way to distinguish between the two …
w.
Willis, I live in Norway and I own detailed population records for the last centuries for all of Norway and I can certainly also comment on landscape details (coastal, inland, altitude etc. If you wish to look into this, e-mail me the list of weather stations you have in Norway and I can provide the population growth and any anomalies. It would be interesting to find whether there is correlation between population growth and rises in temperature in winter. The webmaster have my email address.
Willis Eschenbach (11:35:27) :
Apologies, James. …..
No don’t, none needed. I was just hoping you see the same thing I see in the graphs.
Oddly enough, I graphed the data several different ways, one of them just as you did with the 15 month. Yep, mine looked almost exactly like yours. I flipped through the numbers, and nothing stood out and according to the numbers, the greatest difference in average is indeed between Dec and Jan. You UHI explanation is probably the best for the divergence, but then, we’ve both dealt with numbers that lie.
In the .pdf that accompanies the data, in the 2.1 section I find…………”There are 68 stations with data on monthly mean temperature in the NORDKLIM data set. Mean temperatures have usually gone through quality control. They have often been tested for homogeneity breaks and possible inhomogeneities have been adjusted. However, the data may still contain some homogeneity disturbances. Especially one should notice that stations represent local conditions, which may have been effected e.g. by urbanisation.” Also, in 2.0 under the “Maps and Graphs” heading I find, “Also some subjective characterisations on reliability and homogeneity of data are presented. Heino (1994) discusses reliability and homogeneity questions of many climatic elements.”
I was under the impression that this was a different group people that had been collecting the data other than the “I’ve got to fix this data” group of people. Sadly for me, this stops me from looking any further. I’ll just assume they’ve screwed it up. Based on what I’ve read and seen, I’d say, the graphs are correct, the numbers used are the ones provided, and you’re right!!! Their UHI adjustments are woefully inadequate and they’re “homogenizing” one month more diligently than the other.
Thanks for your patience.
James
Sorry, Willis, I don’t see it. All I see is a reference to the density of energy use in NYC, comparing it to CO2 forcing, which is not really relevant to the main point of your post.
Eyeballing your graphs, I see about a 1C greater warming in winter compared to summer (it would be interesting to see the different seasonal trends plotted and slopes calculated). This could be within the bounds of a reasonably hypothesized AGW differential effect.
Note that I’m not saying I believe this is so. I am just saying I haven’t seen anything in your analysis yet that convinces me it is not likely to be so.
@ur momisugly Curt (14:40:41) :
I’ve read and listened to the “higher latitudes” rationalizations. It never made any sense to me. To me, originally, it went something like this……”We’re getting globally warmer because in a few local places we’re getting warming, but the other places we aren’t getting warmer, but that’s not global.” Further, the onus isn’t upon anybody to prove or disprove what someone else is asserting. What I’m getting from Willis is ‘here’s the temps, here is the temps on a graph for the visually stimulated people.’ UHI is a perfectly reasonable(if not charitable) explanation for why people may see warming.
I, typically hate graphs, I like numbers instead. I use graphs for finding discrepancies when there’s a large amount of data to process. What I see from the data and graphs………. I’m not really seeing warming during the winter months, rather a divergence from what is normally occurring during the rest of the decadal(?) years. If one looks at Willis’ graph in his submission, we see the greatest divergence occurs between Dec.’s and Jan’s. (The spaghetti straps separate.) It could be this is the time of year, EVERY DECADE FOR A CENTURY we are getting warmer. Feburary’s are also divergent, but not as much and as we move towards April, suddenly, things are back to normal pretty much until December moves into January again. (July and August have divergences, but not as pronounced.) Given the CAGW theory, applying it in this instance defies all logic. The CO2(or any and all other GHG) is only cooking us in certain months of the year???? What? The other months the CO2 is tired and is resting? If that is true, then CO2’s effect is only felt seasonally and the presence is seasonal.(Which I seriously doubt, but I haven’t seen any credible assertion about how long CO2 stays in the air either.)
My take, someone is mucking with the numbers. My other most recent post, shows they have “homogenized” the temps. They don’t give us an appendix which states what they did or how or why, just, they did. I haven’t bothered to read the referenced materials, only because I’m so weary of doing so. Every time in the past, I’ve found when this occurs, it is arbitrary and without rationale. Other than to present a point of view that wasn’t backed up by the original numbers. I’m quite certain, if one was to do the research, one would find the historical temps in NORDKLIM are predominantly “homogenized” downward and as one moves closer to the present, temps are predominantly “homogenized” upwards. It has been so in every case I’ve looked at. Darwin is a great example, but there are sooo many others.
If you know any of these homogenizing bastages, ask them why the UHI affect is so much greater at the turn of the previous century than the turn of the current one. I have yet to see a formula for UHI, but all seem to incorporate it in their “homogenizations” Dr. Spencer seems to be making great strides towards a standard, but he’s not there yet. It is absolutely ludicrous for the scientific community to include accommodations for UHI and yet not print a formula for doing so. Suffice it say, obviously they’re doing it wrong.
Sorry for the length, and the rant.
James Sexton