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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I noticed that the paper included Edmonton’s international airport as obviously “urban”. But, it is located well outside the built-up area of the city and temperatures there are lower than within the city (as measured by a vehicle thermometer when driving into or out of the city).
R. Gates:
Both number’s one and two of your point arrive at this destination: They’re small enough to be swamped by the measurement errors. Roofed areas, roads, and cities combined are reported to be less than 1% of the land area. Even arbitrarily assigning albedos of either 1 or 0 thus leads to not much change in the overall albedo.
Point three is something you can look up actually. All energy consumption on earth ends up as waste heat eventually – so you just need to study reports of energy production or consumption. (aka oil + gas + nuclear + wind + hydro…)
Last stat I saw: Human energy consumption 474 exajoules per year. (4.74 x 10^20 J).
Incoming solar radiation: 1.74 yottajoules per year. (5.48 x 10^24 J)
That’s around one ten-thousandth of the incoming radiation.
But the converse of points #1 and #2 is: “Why in the name of all that’s holy are 99+% of all surface stations inside that 1% that’s touched by humans?” The list of stations is public, and plugging the actual stations into Bing Maps finds an amazing percentage that are inside city limits. Both the true ‘warming effect’ of cities in general, and also the micro-site issues of placing stations primarily for weather measurement and ease have resulted in a decidedly poor surface measurement system. Which then proceeds to use the wrong error, and apply UHI corrections in the wrong direction.
Don’t know about the paper, but that video is one of the most amazing I’ve seen from space.
Doug Cotton is dead on. I don’t understand why any alleged scientist can’t see that the thermal mass of water is so much greater than land. It seems pretty obvious that the majority of the earth’s heat is trapped in the oceans, and thus that climate is largely driven by chaotic upwellings and downwellings of these 1/3 Pacific Ocean sized thermal masses. Why anyone would think that man, who inhabits such a tiny percentage of the earth’s only 1/3 land area in an earth-wide minuscule density, is a main culprit for anything regarding climate borders on insanity. The large system inputs dwarf us by many orders of magnitude. The whole alarmism thing is such an obvious ploy for wealth distribution. Only those duped by slick, charismatic talkers, politicians, activists, etc. can’t see the obvious.
Vimeo has a hq version of the video
Pete in the UK,
Volcanoes are the best soil fertilizers, and they’re really on the job the last couple of decades. But the do perturb weather, there I said it, even if everyone is tired of hearing it.
“does anyone REALLY know what colour the Missouri/Mississippi/Ohio rivers ran 500 years ago when they were in flood?”
Having been raised in unfarmed hill country observing cutbanks on rivers and streams as they widen or even change course, I can assure you those rivers were quite muddy. Witnessed muddy cut banks collapse with trees and even cows on them. I’m not 500 years old but I’ve spent virtually all free time possible away from a television or PC and whereabout the water flows. Have seen a few vegetated and rocky mountain pouroffs stay clear in flood, but that’d be about it.
Hey Pete, you’re bound find this interesting.
http://volcanology.geol.ucsb.edu/soil.htm
http://m.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/02/the-top-10-reasons-i-love-volcanoes-and-you-should-too/#more-94761
As alluded to by Josh, your conclusions would have merit if and only if the extent of the urban heat islands had been fixed over the “long term”, whatever that is. Critics derided the location of St Patrick’s cathedral at the time of it’s construction as being too far from the city center! It is constructive to contemplate what the temperature record might have shown had a few generations of curates been of a meterological inclination. And thus, across the land. Someone with more time and resources might consider a time survey of various urban areas and their weather stations to see if something interesting might be found.
Floodwaters were clear before plowing began? How then did the great river deltas form: the Nile, the Mississippi, the Amazon?
Remarkable work by Ross M.
I really hope Muller, Mosher, Zeke and a few others examine this paper in detail. I sense a few punctured egos and a bit of face palming will be going down soon.
Roger Sowell,
Stephen Oppenheimer discusses this in Eden in the East. His idea is that Delta formation in the great rivers is a result of sea level rise over the last 10k years. Sedimentation would help this process but is not the primary cause. Interesting idea.
As for river colour, I am not sure about times of flood, but when John Oxley surveyed what would become the Brisbane river he found….
Muddy to varying degrees now, all the time.
Bill McKibben knows exactly why you can all enjoy those lovely NASA videos-
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/NB09Dj01.html
Apparently there’s not much snow about in the atmospere these days….???
Keith Minto says:
February 7, 2012 at 8:13 pm
Coral reef at the mouth of the Brisbane River? BS.
Try off the crystal clear beach of 1770. 400 klms north.
—
Who are these libelous men, whose phobias I must fear?
R gates says;
“ancient sunlight”
Haaaaa…
The massive Mississippi and Nile river deltas extending far out into their respective oceans say that the “clear water flood” has not, can not, and will not ever happen. Roaring water which has the capacity to round off rocks into smooth stones will have little problem carrying away any and all soil it encounters.
While farmers may be speeding up the process, geologically rivers and streams have worn down whole continents and deposited thousands of feet of sedimentary rocks of all shapes and sizes , not just shales and mudstones. Our contribution is rather puny Farmers are aware and moving to minimal tillage farming and others measures to conserve soils and not have to watch their farm blowing out to sea as in the great US dustbowls. Geoff Broadbent
PaulsNZ says:
February 7, 2012 at 2:59 am
Amazing as Carl Sagan said “Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.”
>>>>>>>>>
Dr. Sagan was indeed a well-spoken scientist.
As far as Dr. McKitrick’s seeming confidence that UHI is primary bias in the temperature record, that would have to overturn a substantial amount of work done thus far that indicates a slight or possibly cooling bias.
Menne, et al, 2010 and the BEST station quality paper seem quite convincing that the temperature record is indeed showing an actual warming trend. Also, individual folks have coded up programs to grid-average the stations, and some have shown that after throwing out the poor siting quality stations the trend is still upward.