Professor Ross McKitrick has just released a new paper on UHI, after reading it, it reminds me of this video from the space station. Weather stations exist in the points of light that define humanity at night, even in rural out of the way places, like the Arctic, where there’s a point of light, indicating humanity and energy use, you’ll likely find a weather station used to monitor climate. Like the dark, humans don’t like the cold either, so where there’s light, there’s heat.
Ross McKitrick writes:
I have released a new discussion paper addressing some ongoing issues in the analysis of surface temperature data and its potential contamination by non-climatic local changes. It is not meant to be the last word, so much as a glimpse of what the last word might sound like when it is eventually spoken.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/economics/sites/uoguelph.ca.economics/files/2012-02.pdf
ENCOMPASSING TESTS OF SOCIOECONOMIC SIGNALS IN SURFACE CLIMATE DATA
Abstract: The debate over whether urbanization and related socioeconomic developments affect large-scale surface climate trends is stalemated with incommensurable arguments. Each side can appeal to supporting statistical evidence based on data sets that do not overlap, yielding inferences that merely conflict with but do not refute one another. I argue that such debates can only be resolved in an encompassing framework, in which both types of results can be demonstrated on the same data set, in such a way that apparent support for one conclusion occurs as a restricted case of a more general specification that supports the other, and where the restrictions can be tested. The issues under debate make such data sets challenging to construct, but I give two illustrative examples. First, insignificant differences in warming trends in urban temperature data between windy and calm conditions are shown in a restricted model whose general form shows temperature data to be strongly affected by local population growth. Second, an apparent equivalence between trends in a data set stratified by a static measure of urbanization is shown to be a restricted finding in a model whose general form indicates significant influence of local socioeconomic development on temperatures.
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Love the video, sharing that on facebook now. I’ll be digesting Ross’ paper and have more to say on it tomorrow.
Beautiful globe, and well said!
No doubt there has been some effect of urban crawl on land temperature measurements.
But sometimes I think we fail to see the woods for the trees, I say this, because the whole concept of weighting land and ocean measurements based on surface area is flawed.
We have about 30% of the globe covered by land, but the oceans contain about 15 times the amount of thermal energy that is in the land surfaces I understand. Whatever the exact ratio is, I would suggest that should be the way we weight land v. ocean temperatures.
This would better reflect what I call the “thermal inertia” of the oceans compared with the land. You can see the reason for this if you visualise a more extreme example. Suppose that the whole system were represented by a sheet of paper and a sheet of somewhat thicker iron having the same area as the paper. Would that “climate” be governed equally by the paper and the iron? Hardly.
So, by all means fine tune the land measurements with some adjustment for urban crawl if there are reasons for such crawl being at a lower rate in the future. But weight your end result such that all land only counts about 6% to 7% rather than 30%. So your urban crawl adjustments may not be worth all the trouble after all.
I suppose that when the day comes when the whole world has been urbanised, this topic will become irrelevant.
Amazing as Carl Sagan said “Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.”
Extraordinary video. A good reminder that, even if we are not (as yet?) catastrophically screwing up the climate our presence and effect on the Earth is considerable.
Notwithstanding the extent to which environmentalism been hi-jacked, fundamentally the principles are sound. One of the great tragedies of the CAGW scare is that it’s demise may have far-reaching and damaging effects on the way we treat our planet.
What a lot of lightning there is around the place – and Israel looks to be so bright at night that one wonders if the Three Kings would be able to see any stars, new or otherwise, nowadays!
“insignificant” = “non-significant,” especially from a statistician.
There is a book called ‘Dirt – The Erosion of Civilisations’ (Dirt being the Americanisation of what Europeans might call ‘soil’ or especially ‘topsoil’)
For anyone with any sort of interest in agriculture, it has got to be required reading. It is admittedly alarmist but, the scary thing is, by keeping your eyes open and your brain in gear plus a bit of elementary history, anyone can see and verify what the book says.
My current fave theory is that – the farmers did it – and they had no choice. This is always the case since the hunter/gatherers started staying at home and bureaucracy came into existence.
As a slight aside…… cultivation and ploughing especially are ‘the problem’ described in the book. The topsoil is disturbed and basically, has nothing else to do but get washed away. Classic example= look at any pictures of reported floods and what do you see?
Brown water.
Floodwater should not be brown and is so because of all the topsoil its carrying away. Historic floods were crystal clear. Humanity’s problem is that its soils are being washed away faster than they’re being replaced. To really break your heart, check out what happened on Easter Island.
Back to my new theory on warming and CO2.
Q. What do farmers do?
A. Plough their field(s) in spring.
Why? Apart from the obvious burying of weeds and stuff, a lot of it is ‘to warm the soil up‘
In my part of the world, they’re actually covering fields with clear plastic in order to grow ‘forage maize’ for dairy cows. Bizarre.
Hence the farmers, (read= rural population) are doing all they can to warm their fields so that their crops grow faster/better.
Plus, modern crops, until well established leave lots of dark coloured earth between the rows. More solar absorption and especially in the spring/early summertime when the sun is getting to its hottest.
Add that to the existing Urban Heat Island effect plus, note that ‘industrial scale ploughing only really took off after WWII, when a lot of graphs showing rising CO2/temps have their (xy) origin.
Next, ploughing (topsoil) releases vast amounts of CO2.
http://ecosystemghg.ceh.ac.uk/docs/2006andOlder/DEFRA_Report_2004_Section3.pdf
This document refers to a place quite near me and measures 10 tons per hectare per year. Run that over 1.5 billion Ha of worldwide land under cultivation and you get a lot of CO2. I’ve seen estimates of CO2 release at over 10 times that for very peaty soils, drained swamps etc.
Hopefully you see what I’m getting at.. the farmers are doing their level best to heat their land, it releases huge amounts of CO2 in the process plus, the timescale is about right. The SUVs and coal stations may have impact but I’m guessing that ‘Worldwide Farming Inc’ is the real reason for the supposed CAGW. The guilt trip rules and is allied to a general lack of self-confidence in (western) societies generally. Another theory of mine says that alcohol consumption is a contributory cause to that.
Thanks for reading.
What a great Video. Man is awesome, imagine a kangaroo doing that!
What it does show is how much cloud there is out there.
Do those IPCC knuckle heads include clouds in their models???
Neat video.
Slower would be better.
Thunder storms were really cool !!
General to specific.
You can’t keep a good econometrician down!!
The Black Adder, you are not supposed to ask that question. You are banned from viewing http://www.ipcc.ch .
*****
Pete in Cumbria UK says:
February 7, 2012 at 4:11 am
The topsoil is disturbed and basically, has nothing else to do but get washed away. Classic example= look at any pictures of reported floods and what do you see?
Brown water.
Floodwater should not be brown and is so because of all the topsoil its carrying away. Historic floods were crystal clear.
****
Quite true. When I lived in a forested area, there not only wasn’t any “mud” in floodwaters, there wasn’t any floodwaters at all unless the water table came above the stream banks.
Now, I must say, here in communist MD they have regulated stream-bank intrusion & require buffer-zones of vegetation. This has helped a great deal in my nearby forest-farm mix of land areas & helped reduce the “mud”, tho it’s still obvious in the more serious floods. The water in my border stream is usually quite clear & supports a large population of brown trout, blue-gills, suckers & crayfish (even a couple muskrats, snapping turtles & green & great-blue herons).
Anthony:
Can you give Ross’s paper its own thread? It looks to be a very clever, rigorous and robust approach to a fundamental issue and hopefully will set a standard that future research will need to follow.
Wow! What a job to have a view like that out of your office window. Three cheers for the good ol’ US of A for the ISS, and more generally their positive attitude instead of the stifling bureaucracy and political correctness that burdens so much of business in Europe.
Anyway, leaving aside the obvious population centres and energy usage on Planet Earth, the worst aspect revealed by the video is the obvious light pollution. Just when are we going to deal with this shocking waste of energy and the impact the light leakage has on everyone’s view of the night sky.
A wonderful earth view…”those were the days my friend”… a view now only possible for russians and chinese. A kind of “electric earth” where global warmers, climate changers, “greens” and all those opposed to progress will make it blackout, to achieve their most cherished goal of a complete deprived of live planet.
Pete in Cumbria UK says:
February 7, 2012 at 4:11 am
“Another theory of mine says that alcohol consumption is a contributory cause to that.”
________________________________
Alcohol contributes to the warming, or the theory?
/
It is amazing to be able to realize that the envelope of atmosphere is so tiny.
I’ve read the discussion paper and can recommend it. (Aside of the use of “insignificant” instead of “non-significant”, which I’ve already nit-picked.)
An important observation in the paper is that if you use the wrong measure of urbanisation, you can demonstrate that, if anything, rural sites have a higher temperature trend than urban sites. But as McKitrick points out, such an observation is actually expected if there is a UHI effect, because the rural sites are further down the classic “log population-temp bias” relationship.
Pete in Cumbria UK says:
February 7, 2012 at 4:11 am
[It’s the farming, stupid.]
Absolutely a big factor. In addition, in many cases lots of trees and other plants were cut down to make way for farming. Not only do we have a big source, but we reduce the possible sinks.
Peter in Cumbria/beng…
I challenge the assertion that flood waters were clear, and are now brown due to all the topsoil being washed away. The Mississippi River has flowed brown as far back as I can remember, 365 days a year. Many rivers in the southern U.S. are normally brown. If that was from topsoil, it would have been depleted centuries ago.
What a refreshing dip in a clear concise statistical tour de force. When real scientists do statistical analysis, it looks like this paper. What a marvelous exposition!
Thank you very much for your efforts!
I grew up in Missouri, and I know the smell I’m getting here ain’t from topsoil. In other words, this is a complete load of crap. Not bull crap, but horse crap, to boot.
The International Space Station caught a cloud-free eastern seaboard of the US. The spacecraft tracked up from New Orleans to Atlanta, Washington DC, New York, Boston, Montreal, Halifax and finally past St John’s Newfoundland.