Spencer shows compelling evidence of UHI in CRUTem3 data

Lets accept, Had CRUT3 is boosted upward by UHI to some degree, and
HadCRUT4 is boosted further by warm spot chasing in the Arctic…..
Plain sneakiness in statistics, we know this type of people…..
But…..this cover-up of the temp decline is futile, because we have reached
the top temp plateau already from which it cannot get any warmer…. they
achieve only to buy time for a couple more years until the full truth of temp
decline will globally be evident…..
JS

Victor Barney says:
March 30, 2012 at 1:39 pm
And I heard that women were the thinkers!
————————–
We are…just ask us 🙂

Hi Roy,
Suggestions: I know you are doing apples to apples, but 5×5 degree gridding is absurd as it builds in a horrendous projective correction near the poles, and one that is reasonably accurate only near the equator. I’d strongly suggest building an icosahedral tiling of the sphere at a scale-adustable granularity. That way you can scale down to tile sizes that permit fine-grained assignment of stations and populations, and can apply simple affinity/range rules for building the local estimates of UHI warming, without having to worry about whether the grids are in CA, Maine, Alaska, or Ecuador (all of which have very different areas in a 5×5 grid cell no matter how you try to correct for that areal difference. The problem is that the gridding over the sphere is not uniform in the first place, and just accounting for the spherical jacobean cannot “fix” this in the statistics (at least not without a lot of expertise that I strongly suspect is not being correctly applied). A uniform tiling lets you do straight-up statistics with no fanciness.
Aside from the increased ease in doing the stats and integrals right with a good tiling (which can be made entirely automatic in computer code, right, so it is only “difficult” once and then is easy forever after) I really suspect that looking at the actual structure of the data on moderately fine grained icosahedral grid would provide a rather big hit of pure insight, especially if you are seeking to uncover either deliberate if occult bias (of the sort that makes all “adjustments” make the past cooler) or Anthony’s hypothesized poor-siting kind of bias.
As for publishing it, an icosahedral gridding might well help. This is something that might interest a reviewer enough to publish your paper for the method, even if they (want to) disagree with your conclusion. For one thing, it permits lots of folks to save face (if nothing else) if a scalable icosahedral tiling reveals problems or general structures that weren’t seen with lat/lon tiles. It “explains” why they were wrong without making them deliberately wrong, as it were. Indeed, you might well consider calling the paper “Comparing of icosahedral versus lat/lon tiling strategies in Climate Science” and only incidentally point out the resulting 57% underestimation of the UHI effect in at least some of CRUTem4.
It actually paves the way for taking the same data and doing a much better straight up estimate of global temperature, in a defensible way, and one that ALSO badly needs to be applied to the incoming ARGO data.
rgb

Hugh Pepper was peppered by logic. He won’t be back.

“At least 20 days of complete data were required for a monthly average temperature to be computed, and the 1973-2011 period of record had to be at least 80% complete for a station to be included in the analysis.”
Why? I’d like to hear more justification for this, because these type of decisions are often the bit which decides the results. Did you try with other figures to see what results you got?

@Doug Proctor
” If isolation of serious urban data does not show the reduction, then there has been no net UHIE adjustments. Then the effect is both real and, for normalization purposes, pushed into the general dataset.”
++++++
Well argued. An additional effect is not just the population (which is a proxy for urban development) but the wealth that population comamnds. If one were to use municipal taxation as the proxy, one might find a similar correlation and that the increase in population (noted above to be at a lower rate) is not as good. One might use the reported income of the gridcell population rather than the number of people. UHI is really a development impact, not entirely a population impact.

Hugh Pepper says, March 30, 2012 at 12:46 pm :
“This question was dealt with by the BEST study. They concluded that, since only 0.5% of the world is urbanized, even a 2 degree rise in urban temperature would contribute negligibly to the global average. Were they too part of the great conspiracy?”
But if thermometers used are placed in the “0,5%” of the world with urbanization, then UHI is suddenly dominating.
Ex: From 87 hadcrut stations used by Appinsys.com, the avg population is 1,3 mio people.
A typical Hadcrut (crutem3) station has over 100.000 inhabitants in the US:
http://hidethedecline.eu/media/ARUTI/USA/fig9.jpg
Ex, Turkey.
Systematically the 250 stations has been limited in data use so that the rural stations + stations from towns under 50-100.000 inhabitants are limited to years 1960-90. Somewhat larger cities are available from 1950-90 or 1960-2000, and then only the few very largest citites allows us to see the long trends.
http://hidethedecline.eu/pages/ruti/asia/turkey.php
Thus, UHI stations are forced to play a much more dominating role.
This and an endless row of other issues appears not to be considered in BEST.
Sceptics should in no way accept BEST. They did not do the needed.
K.R. Frank

Face it ladies and gentlemen–surface temperatures are simply data points. They are NOT the actual temperature of the earth (or any significant part of it, for that matter). To arrive at the actual temperature in any given time or place, the data points must be projected to the remaining volume, which is almost infinitely larger than the samples. A highly questionable method called “polynominals” is currently being used to make this jump, but far superior methods exist.
For example, geostatistics is used in mining to project small sample values to much larger volumes and the reason is obvious–the profit motive. When climate science gets to the point where they’re using best available technology for this exercise, then we’ll have a much better estimate. Until then, much of what is discussed regarding this data is just conjecture. Interesting, but still conjecture.
(You might say we’re still at the stage where sample quality is a concern, as this paper indicates–there are serious “contamination” issues with our set of data points.)

The question becomes “how do we take the UHI out and how do we remove the bias of station selection”.
Just use the rural stations that are not in or have been dropped from the GHCN and Crutemp3 station inventory lists.

I should say that almost 30% of the planet is land and water covers the remaining 70+%.

Hugh Pepper says:
March 30, 2012 at 12:46 pm
“Were they too part of the great conspiracy?”
That makes YOU officially a conspiracy theorist, Hugh.

Steven Mosher said @ March 30, 2012 at 1:40 pm

Roy
“I tried including SH sites, Steve, but there were none that met the inclusion criteria. Also, see the update to my post…even without extrapolation, the results over the U.S. show a 57% (!) warmer CRUTem3 trend versus the low population station data.
-Roy”

Yes, the SH stations in ISH and GHCN daily are rather sparse. So, you need to add in other data sources IF you want to understand the UHI bias in the complete record. If I wanted to show the highest bias possible I would just pick a NH dataset. That’s well known.

What is wrong with treating the Southern and Northern Hemispheres as separate entities? Not only is UHI different in the Southern hemisphere, the temperature trend over the last 100 years is also quite different. The only reason I can see for averaging the temperatures of the Southern and Northern hemispheres is to disguise the fact that there is no global trend. Southern hemisphere temperatures have been almost static for a century!

Can someone explain to me the difference between gridding data and inventing data? I’m not being flippant either. I’m genuinely interested in the answer.

Roy Spencer says:
March 30, 2012 at 4:08 pm
“UHI does in fact affect the calculated trends.”
Just use an algorithm to counteract the UHI.
It’s all the rage in climatology.

Just to be clear – AGW is real – people do cause it to get warmer. The big reveal is it only happens where there are lots of people and their stuff piled up in one place.
So this means we can stop talking about CO2 and instead talk about getting off the asphalt during the summer… right?
Well that’s going to save a lot of money. We should have a conference at a luxury hotel in a tropical paradise – or something.

Tom_R says:
March 30, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Dr. Spencer,
Because UHI warming depends on an increase over time, what your study here has shown is that the UHI warming increases faster in higher population density areas. Doesn’t this disagree with your previous results?
Yeah – I thought the same thing. If I understand your post you seem to be saying that there is no reason that an urban area should be any more affected by an UHI Trend than a rural area. I remember Roy did do a post on WUWT some time ago which graphed the UHI trends v population. The basic message was that an increase in population of say, 1000, in a rural area had a similar effect on trend as an increase in population of say, 100000, in an urban area. This makes sense to me.
I can’t see any reason why urban TRENDS (not temperatures) should be any different to rural TRENDS (not temperatures) unless ALL urban populations were growing while ALL rural populations remained static.

Oooh I love this stuff, questions, questions. So if NOAA show a “cooling” trend across all their geographical zones but differeing rates for each, do Dr Spencers’ “urban” areas correspond to the NOAA zones that cooled the least and can population numbers of those zones roughly correlate to the implied UHI. Or to put it another way would the whole of the US have cooled the same if there was no urbanisation? Anyone good with numbers?

@ rgbatduke who said “Suggestions: I know you are doing apples to apples, but 5×5 degree gridding is absurd as it builds in a horrendous projective correction near the poles, and one that is reasonably accurate only near the equator. I’d strongly suggest building an icosahedral tiling of the sphere at a scale-adustable granularity.”
Here is a link to an example of such a projection:
http://www.rwgrayprojects.com/rbfnotes/maps/graymap1.html

Hugh Pepper says:
March 30, 2012 at 12:46 pm
This question was dealt with by the BEST study. They concluded that, since only 0.5% of the world is urbanized, even a 2 degree rise in urban temperature would contribute negligibly to the global average. Were they too part of the great conspiracy?

That would be all well and good if the stations were spread evenly over the globe, but they are not. Many are near urban centers because that’s where they can be serviced more conveniently.

I would love to write this work up and submit it for publication, but I am growing weary of the IPCC gatekeepers killing my papers; the more damaging any conclusions are to the IPCC narrative, the less likely they are to be published. That’s the world we live in.
==================================================
Dr. Spencer, I think it’s time you and some of the more responsible adults simply start ignoring the current lunatic infested journals. And, simply publish in the alternative places. Your work on this issue (UHI) and others is so well known, very few alarmists actually dispute it, they simply hand wave and ignore this glaring fact.
Perhaps some of you guys can set up a publishing network of your own….
Anymore, I only use published studies on the climate issue to be held up for scorn and ridicule….. as do most here. My recent favorite was the one about if the stuff making us cooler wasn’t happening, we’d still be getting warmer!! I’m thinking up publishing a study about if frogs had glass asses they wouldn’t jump so high. But, then there’s always the lack of arctic ice causing all the snow, when before it didn’t, but it does now…. that we’re at a 7-8 year high in the ice extent.
You really shouldn’t risk tarnishing your name and reputation by publishing in some crap magazine anyway. I understand there are different venues available today.

Roy Spencer says:
March 30, 2012 at 4:15 pm
Following up on a few comments about the strength of the warming bias increasing (not decreasing) with average population density, I agree this is opposite of what I expected. I don’t have an explanation for it, but I haven’t taken the time to think about it, either.
I think the problem here is that UHI itself is widely misunderstood. It’s assumed to be greater heat release and retention in urban areas.
I think decreased urban aerosols and aerosol seeded clouds since the 1970s is the primary cause of urban warming since that time in the developed world (quite different trends exist in the developing world). This explains why larger urban areas show a greater trend, because aerosol concentrations are largely a function of the size of an urban area. It also explains why the effect is smaller in the southern hemisphere, because aerosol levels in the SH (ex tropics) have always been lower than in the NH (Brazil possibly excepted).
there are hundreds of thousands of data files in the NCDC ISH archive, each file representing one station of data from one year. The data volume is many gigabytes.
I did try and download this data but gave up under the sheer immensity of the task. If you could make it available in a more accessible form, I and I expect others would appreciate it.
One final point, I believe that an analysis of this data by time of day would produce some interesting results. I believe you will find the warming is predominantly a daytime phenomena. This would be directly contrary to analyses based on min/max temps, which IMO wrongly attribute increasing min temps to increasing nighttime temperatures, when the cause is increased solar insolation due to decreased aerosols.

The great dying of the thermometers can not be explained in terms of too much data to analyze, as computing power during this time grew by leaps and bounds.
If I was tasked to find a human signal in global temperature, the killing of thermometers that showed no warming would be an obvious step to take. The then fudging of the UHI is an easy cover as no effort was taken to show its full extent and an ever upward temperature signal can be foisted on the world.
The poor dears at the moment are having trouble finding enough fudge factors to keep the temperate level, as even the UHI is not enough to cover the decline. The coming years will be such a disappointment to the poor souls.
Thank you Dr Spencer.

the maps at these links show how US population shifts continue to increase the size of urban areas…
http://www.forbes.com/2010/06/04/migration-moving-wealthy-interactive-counties-map.html
http://www.usgcrp.gov/usgcrp//Library/nationalassessment/images/PopMap-o.jpg

Roy Spencer said @ March 30, 2012 at 4:58 pm

so, dp, now we should prefer urban to rural thermometer data? Those backwards rural types must be under-reporting temperatures just to spite the elitist city folks. 🙂

Ag scientists are like that 😉

Roy Spencer says:
March 30, 2012 at 4:58 pm
so, dp, now we should prefer urban to rural thermometer data? Those backwards rural types must be under-reporting temperatures just to spite the elitist city folks. 🙂

I was confident you had it under control but as a fellow aviator who earned his wings at John Wayne Field (long before it was JWF), I’ve seen first hand why a lot of areas of California are sparsely populated and know how quickly one can transit climate zones in the Golden State. From the air the highest and lowest points in the state can be seen at the same time as they’re not too far apart, and not far from either are high and low deserts, the central valley, glaciated mountains, sparse coastal regions, etc. I’m looking forward to learning how it is all quantified in your paper. Thanks for responding.

Dr. Spencer,
If you’re still reading this thread, please expound on this quote Steve Goddard says is from you. I have asked Steve Mosher to comment on this a few times, but apparently he didn’t read it.
http://www.real-science.com/important-point-from-roy-spencer

if the satellite warming trends since 1979 are correct, then surface warming during the same time should be significantly less, because moist convection amplifies the warming with height.

Steve Mosher, care to comment now?

“I am attempting to correlate County population changes changes from 1900 to 2010 with cooling or warming from 1900 to 2011.
Warming Counties had a mean temperature change of .0692C/decade.
Warming counties had a mean population increase of 174,361.
Warming counties on average grew by 648% from 1900 to 2011.
Cooling counties had a mean temperature change of -.0573C/decade.
Cooling counties had a mean population increase of 39,060.
Cooling counties on average grew by 194% for 1900 to 2011.”
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/03/17/county-population-statistics-and-coolingwarming-stations-since-1900/
Higher population growth = warming.

Philip Bradley says:
March 30, 2012 at 5:47 pm
……….
I think the problem here is that UHI itself is widely misunderstood. It’s assumed to be greater heat release and retention in urban areas.
I think decreased urban aerosols and aerosol seeded clouds since the 1970s is the primary cause of urban warming since that time in the developed world (quite different trends exist in the developing world). This explains why larger urban areas show a greater trend, because aerosol concentrations are largely a function of the size of an urban area. It also explains why the effect is smaller in the southern hemisphere, because aerosol levels in the SH (ex tropics) have always been lower than in the NH (Brazil possibly excepted)……..
Well first there is the effect of all the buildings and concrete and tarmac that reflect a lot of heat and also get hot and act as heat stores for overnight. Then the buildings have air-conditioning heat pumps dumping waste heated dry air to the atmosphere or heating leaking heated air to the atmosphere. All the power being consumed normally turns to heat and leaks from the buildings and lights. Then most cities have a lot less plant life trees, grasses than the rural areas. Plants in rural areas transpire water into the atmosphere raising its humidity and therefore its enthalpy and increasing the amount of heat required to raise the temperature. So the dryer air over towns and cities will be warmer for the same amount of energy and the amounts of energy available in cities at night is higher for the reasons given.
And of course – atmospheric temperature is in any case the incorrect metric to measure atmospheric heat content.

Dr Spencer,
Now that you have done this, and shown your main message, you might do two things and then submit to a statistics journal like Annals of Applied Statistics: then instead of an outright rejection, you might get a debate such as the debate stimulated by McShane and Wyner.
the two things:
1) address Steven Mosher’s points in detail — it seems from your responses that you can, and that they do not affect the main message;
2) if it isn’t too much trouble, follow this up with analyses of the 4 time points separately, to see if you can discover at what time of day the effect is greatest. I think that it will be a really good idea for climate scientists to step away from the “daily mean”, and look at particular times of day. Usually (I don’t know if it is true in this case), doing the disaggregated analysis after doing the aggregated analysis is not that much extra programming time, but is a lot of additional reading and writing time.
I think this would be worthwhile, but that is only an opinion from a non-expert.

Left out of discussions above is heat released from burning fossil fuels which have totally released energy to warm the atmosphere by .2 C. Touched on was irrigation in CA that increased the atmosphere temperature by 3 C. However, worldwide there is about 900 cubic kilometers per year of fossil ground water from slow or no recharge aquifers being produced, which has resulted in increasing the temperature of the atmosphere by about 1.6 C per year since 1950. Also left out is the release of energy from condensation at night on grass blades used for lawns and production of food and fodder. Area extent of both urban and rural grasses has increased steadily since roughly 1950.
It appears to me that there is a temperature control process at work in the upper Troposphere.

Correction:
A highly questionable method called “polynominals” “polygons” is currently being used to make this jump, but far superior methods exist.
(Sorry, sometimes math overwhelms my vocabulary).

What does “rural” actually mean in 2012. My rural locale, the Fraser Valley is arguably the best farm land in Canada. It produces mouth-watering corn, delicious blueberries and all manner of veggies and livestock but it also has the Trans Canada Highway running through it, land fills, two international airports, acres of natural gas heated greenhouses, bio gas plants, composters, chicken, turkey, pig and mushroom “farms” – steel sheds – and enough diesel powered combines, tractor-trailers, locos and tractors to give Gore a heart attack. With mechanised farming i would think that the number of people working farms has dropped as production has increased over the last 50 years. The measure of the “UHI” of rural areas by population density is, i’ll wager, underestimating warming effects of intensive,energy -dependant, modern farming and “rural” life.

Thanks again Dr. Spencer,
I have published quotes from this excellent article in the section on Global Temperatures of my page “Climate Change (“Global Warming”?)
– The cyclic nature of Earth’s climate”, at http://www.oarval.org/ClimateChangeBW.htm
(Spanish version at http://www.oarval.org/CambioClimaBW.htm)

This is precisely why I am only interested in satellite data.
I generally consider the surface data to be worthless in any use for measuring climate effects, as I think many of us do…
Great work Dr. Spencer!
I caught your stint on Fox the other day and thought you were excellent.

Dr. Spencer,
I think your analysis understates UHI because the period you analyzed was one of the steeper sections of the record since it occurred from the bottom of the trough (mid-’70’s) to present. By analyzing this section, your baseline slope is much steeper than the overall long term trend, so any absolute UHI °C/yr identified will be a smaller % of the long term slope in that section.
You identified a method by which UHI goes from 15% to 30%. I identified a difference in slope of 2.5x after cyclical elements were removed. I went ahead and posted my own analysis of CRUTem3 tonight so you could see the details. Please see my analysis here:
http://naturalclimate.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/northern-hemisphere-uhi-crutem3-18/
Based on our two studies taken together, and then taking the idea of using all 5 population density categories, I pose the question on whether between the two of us we have identified UHI as MORE THAN 100% of the total observed temperature increase. I don’t thing it is out of the question. I would be most interested to hear your perspective on this. As always, thanks again for your interesting articles. Good show on Stossel.
As far as giving up on the gatekeepers, I’m thinking the gates they are guarding aren’t worth walking through anymore. Somebody might see you. Mike S.

Ian W says:
March 30, 2012 at 8:12 pm
Well first there is the effect of all the buildings and concrete and tarmac that reflect a lot of heat and also get hot and act as heat stores for overnight. Then the buildings have air-conditioning heat pumps dumping waste heated dry air to the atmosphere or heating leaking heated air to the atmosphere. All the power being consumed normally turns to heat and leaks from the buildings and lights. Then most cities have a lot less plant life trees, grasses than the rural areas. Plants in rural areas transpire water into the atmosphere raising its humidity and therefore its enthalpy and increasing the amount of heat required to raise the temperature. So the dryer air over towns and cities will be warmer for the same amount of energy and the amounts of energy available in cities at night is higher for the reasons given.
I should have my point clearer. I was referring to any UHI trend.
If you look at power consumption, per capita USA energy consumption peaked in 1973. So there is no contribution to the trend from this source during the period of Dr Spencer’s study. Although there may be a contribution from increasing population densities, where this has occured.
http://epb.lbl.gov/homepages/rick_diamond/LBNL55011-trends.pdf
Otherwise I agree completely about enthalpy, but unfortunately the debate is around temperatures.

I collected a number of approaches to UHI discernment and they actually start with Goodridge’s graph at the top here, and include earlier work of Roy Spencer’s.
I found it good to see many different approaches producing basically the same result. My page also shows evidence of the UHI effect increasing more rapidly in very rural areas urbanizing slightly over time, than in urban areas.

Following BEST press release has any actual peer reviewed work be seen in journal form this organization or its that still fence they have not jumped over despite the dramatic claims?

An Inquirer says:……..
and what is the error in that 0.1c trend?
what is the error in the measuremensts.
how much has it been “adjusted “……do we even know if it has or hasn’t been adjusted ?

An Inquirer says:
March 31, 2012 at 2:29 am
///////////////////////////
I have long held the view that the land based temperature data should simply be consigned to the bin. The reasons are fourfold.
First, given the heat capacity of the oceans which dwarfs that of land air temperature, it is ocean temperature not land air temperature that is important.
Second, it is ocean temperatures not land temperatures that drive climate (this is something that follows from the first point).
Third, the land air temperature data does not even measure the correct metric. It tells us nothing about energy.
Fourth, the land air temperature record is almost certainly corrupted by UHI.
The problem with sea temperature is that we do not have good quality data on it and are only just beginning to compile this. We therefore cannot reliably answer the enquiry made by An Inquirer.
The oceans are the key to global warming. Without the oceans warming there can be no global warming. Understanding the reasons why the oceans may be warming (if they are) is also the key.
As I have often observed, not sufficient thought has been given to how DWLWIR works over the oceans. For example:
1. Do the oceans reflect some part of the DWLWIR, if not why not?
The K & T energy diagram shows that not all the solar is absorbed by the surface and some part of this is reflected. The reflected part is predominantly from the oceans which reflect solar when striking at low angles of incidence. Some part of the DWLWIR must strike the oceans at a similar low angle of incidence, so why is that part not simply reflected?
2. The optical physics is such that 20% of all DWLWIR is absorbed within 1 micron of water and 60% of all DWLWIR absorbed within 4 microns of water. Theoretically, there would be so much energy being absorbed within the first few microns of the ocean that this would drive a huge amount of evaporation which is not being observed. Why not? For example, is it because much of the DWLWIR is simply being reflected?, or perhaps it lacks sensible energy? Some explanation is required.
Following on from point 2, given the absorption characteristics of water, water is essentially a LWIR block (much like sun cream may block harmfull UV rays), how does any energy from DWLWIR effectively heat the ocean? How does it find its way down from the top micron level? Indeed, does not wind swept spray/spume in itself act as an effective block. IF wind swept spray/spume is more than 4 microns thick it in itself would capture 60% of all DWLWIR and would carry it away in the air before it even gets to the bulk ocean.
I am merely pointing out that there are substantial issues with DWLWIR and the oceans and much consideration needs to be given to this. To date, I do not see that proper consideration has been given to the optical physics involved and the consequences of this..

@ An Inquirer on March 31, 2012 at 2:29 am:
When I want an “easy to play with” dataset, I head to NCDC. I’ve yet to find an easier access point than at the bottom of this FAQ, “The Global Anomalies and Index Data” section. I looked at “The Annual Global Ocean Temperature Anomalies (degrees C)“. The set goes back to 1880. The anomaly baseline is the 20th century average (1901-2000). To easily feed into a spreadsheet, open in a word processor, find and replace all double spaces with single spaces, repeat until no double spaces left, then cut and paste into a spreadsheet (paste special) with a space as delimiter. Since you said “last three decades” and the last full year is 2011, I’ll do calculations for ranges with the last year ending in 1.
Sure enough, 1982 to 2011 was 0.12°C/decade. 1972 to 2001 was the same.
But the winner is 1912 to 1941, 0.13°C/decade, the highest three decade group in the record. So nothing unusual is going on.
If you shift to decades, 1982-91 0.17°C/decade, 1992-2001 0.23°C/decade, 2002-11 –0.08°C/decade (the oceans cooled).
That highest rate was nearly matched in 1922-31 with 0.22°C/decade, and blown away with 1932-41 at 0.33°C/decade. Note also there are sharp drops, as 1942-51 was –0.30°C/decade. Again, nothing unusual going on. Nothing has happened in the last three decades that is outside the range of natural variability.
For comparison, using Dr. Spencer’s range above of 1973-2011, the rise was 0.12°C/decade. This appears to match the rate in the chart in the Update for US Temperature Trends, lowest population density group, derived from NCDC land data. Which is noted for entertainment purposes only.

“Can someone explain to me the difference between gridding data and inventing data? I’m not being flippant either. I’m genuinely interested in the answer.”
“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.” – Ernest Rutherford

*****
Hugh Pepper says:
March 30, 2012 at 12:46 pm
This question was dealt with by the BEST study. They concluded that, since only 0.5% of the world is urbanized, even a 2 degree rise in urban temperature would contribute negligibly to the global average. Were they too part of the great conspiracy?
*****
That’s an irrelevant point. The real question is what is the percentage of sites located in these “negligible” urban areas. My guess is that it’s shockingly high.

The BEST data is also biased by a drop in Elevation.
From 1950 to 2000, the average elevation of BEST data dropped 46m.
Thats .45C of warming according lapse rate calculators.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2012/03/21/climate-data-and-elevation/
AGW = UHI + lower thermometers.

Dr. Spencer,
Thanks for your dialog with independent views of the UHI topic. The UHI biasing of the IPCC supporting temp data sets gets exposed again.
John

Mosher: “50% of the stations are Spencers low population”
If those low population stations are overrepresented in the US and underrepresented in the rest of the world it would explain why the trend is lower in the US and higher in the rest of the world (or at least northern hemisphere)
Isn’t that the case? As I recall Steve McIntyre once mentioned that most stations in the world outside the US are Urban or located at airports..

Gail Combs says:
March 30, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Here is a set of data points that illustrate the problem. These are the only city & close by airport listed for North Carolina. The NC state population, 2011 estimate, is 9,656,401. For a comparison the New York–Newark, NY –NJ–CT Urbanized Area has an estimated population of 18,319,939 double that of the entire state of NC. The city is on the North Carolina/Virgina border and right on the ocean.
Take a look at the city vs the airport! Norfolk City and
Norfolk International Airport
………..
The two trends are very different for two locations close together, not sure of reason. Both are airports. The Norfolk airport is closer to the Atlantic Ocean but the Norfolk Naval Air Station (Norfolk City/NAS) is directly next to the Hampton Roads (mouth of the James River). I expect the NAS is about as urbanized as it ever was, WWII being the time it was really built up and the beggining of the record and the Norfolk Airport having slower growth and surrounding urbanization over the same time period. The Oceana NAS located closer to the Atlantic than the Norfolk airport seems to have a similar trend to Norfolk NAS. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=425723080030&data_set=14&num_neighbors=1, I beleive it also had most of its growth during WWII.

Terry Oldberg: Smokey says: “If the runaway global warming predictions were right, we would see a recent rise in the long term trend” Smokey: those “predictions” are “projections” and projections are logically neither right nor wrong.
Hi again.
Projections can be accurate or inaccurate, with respect to publicly available standards of accuracy. If the runaway global warming projections were accurate, we would see a recent rise in the long term trend.
Your assertion that projections are logically neither right nor wrong hasn’t the least practical importance.

People like Hugh Pepper “are the conspirators” who put many people seeking the truth on the defensive. Mr. Pepper, there is nothing wrong with seeking the truth. As a project engineer and designer in a multitude of process automation areas, I naturally question things to find out what the data and results are telling us. It’s amazing when you don’t assume you have all the answers at the onset of a project. This is far different than your scenario just accepting that using data in ways that can show a preconceived result must be the best way.
In my experience, there is much that can be learned by managing projects if one is open to the science learned along the way. In your majority world of sheep, there is a very strong bias to seek data which proves the hypothesis and strongly disregard data which shows there is something else going on.

All modern data is also biased by the fact that digital temperature sensors respond faster to temperature changes. A momentary breeze of hot air, say from tarmac heated air at an airport, will register as a higher peak temperature on a fast response digital sensor as compared to an old fashioned mercury in glass min/max thermometer.

This paper is consistent with the results of my 2010 analysis of temperature data for Australia, comparing our Bureau of Meteorology’s (BoM) official temperature record with
(1) data for all 43 long record temperature stations (LRTS) in rural locations and
(2) data for known urban heat islands (UHI), Sydney and Melbourne.
Relevant results, in summary, are
1. Warming according to BoM is more than twice that of rural LRTS (0.5/0.22 deg C)
2. Warming according to BoM conforms with that of a known UHI, Melbourne (0.5/0.51 deg C)
http://www.climategate.com/urban-heat-island-effect-proven-to-corrupt-aussie-climate-data

I have just looked at CRUT4 vs CRUT3 differences for some Australian 5 degree grid cells. Found this stunning adjustment for the Murray Darling Basin grid immediately west of Sydney.
Instantaneous moving of the Sydney UHI several hundred km west.
CRUT4 revison of the Murray-Darling Basin grid box temperature data – is this the worst warming tweak ever by the UKMO / Jones et al team ?
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=1460

I still haven’t heard where the additional energy in the ocean heat index is coming from. The sun has not shone sufficiently brighter, there has not been sufficient change in cloud cover or change in ozone levels.
That the ocean dwarfs the atmosphere for energy content is a known. That makes it all the more fruitless to attempt to draw global lessons from a narrow examination of air temperatures.

I was under the impression that 20th century heating in the Arctic was on the order of several degrees (3C above 1979-2000?). I do not think one needs to be concerned with figures well to the right of the decimal to find significance in Arctic heating. I was also under the impression that Arctic temperatures were currently higher than they had been in approximately 2,000 years.
As I said, I’m no climate scientist. As such, I do not understand what you intende to convey with your comment concerning Arctic surface temp’s correlation with nearby oceanic conditions.

That’s still considerably higher than the global rate and I’m pretty sure its unaffected by urban heat islands.
And… still waiting for the source of energy raising ocean heat content.

And, I may regret asking this, but how would an interaction between the magnetic fields of the Earth and Sun affect cloud movements?

Henry P says:
1) I honestly don’t know [Why Peterson 03 and Jones 08 did not find a UHI effect] and I would not trust any work unless I had made sure about it myself. There is some indication that (some) results reproted by UK and USA could have been compromised.
http://letterdash.com/HenryP/what-hanky-panky-is-going-on-in-the-uk
I checked your “hanky panky” link and I find that your evidence that “results reported by UK and USA may have been compromised” consists of lower temperature readings from Gibraltar than from Tangiers, Granada and Malacca. I invite you to consult a map that shows both land and sea.
2)see: http://www.letterdash.com/HenryP/henrys-pool-table-on-global-warming
My latest tables clearly imply that the observed warming over past 4 decades was largely due to natural causes. Either the sun shone a bit brighter or there were less clouds. Or there was less ozone , which could have had a human influence but not anymore (?) , shielding us. There are various theories.
Looking at the differences between the results from the northern hemisphere(NH) and the southern hemisphere (SH), what we see is happening from my dataset is that more (solar) heat went into the SH oceans and is taken away by water currents and/or weather systems to the NH. That is why the NH is warming and that is why the SH does not warm.
There certainly are various theories. Might I point out that precisely as much water moves north across the equator as moves south across the equator. The temperature differences in the air is due to the differing amounts of landmass in the two hemispheres.
3) A lot of the extra heat coming into the SH oceans condenses in the arctic, because of the cold there, releasing energy. (when water condenses it releases heat)
The Arctic is not in the Southern Hemisphere. Antarctica has not experienced anything like the warming that has taken place in the Arctic. The simple reason for the difference is that one pole is land surrounded by sea while the other pole is sea surrounded by land.

People are asking “Why….Jones 2008 found no signal at all from increasing urbanization in China?
Have you read this paper co-authored by Jones;
History made as Jones et al 2008 paper admits huge urban warming in IPCC flagship CRUT3 gridded data over China
http://www.warwickhughes.com/blog/?p=204
March 16th, 2009 by Warwick Hughes
Now Jones et al 2008 are saying in their Abstract, “Urban-related warming over China is shown to be about 0.1 degree per decade, hey that equates to a degree per century. Huge.
I think it is likely that Jones has had to be “dragged kicking and screaming” by his co-authors to go along with this conclusion.

From Abraham3 on April 1, 2012 at 12:13 pm:

Climate change in the Arctic and Effects of global warming
(Wikipedia)
…

Wow, a mass copy and paste of a Wikipedia entry, about climate, including references.
1. Wikipedia’s bias about climate issues is well known around here, so it will be ignored.
2. You didn’t indicate what were the relevant bits that should be noted, nor indicated why you thought it was important to copy it here, so it will be ignored.
3. There is no “Climate change in the Arctic and Effects of global warming” entry currently in Wikipedia. The cited references are getting old. There is a current “Climate change in the Arctic” entry that looks completely different:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_change_in_the_Arctic
Thus what you posted can be ignored.
4. As regular WUWT readers will know, the Arctic climate system is an area of active research where new discoveries are being made, new hypotheses formed and tested with new theories established. We know we don’t know everything yet, there are still things to learn. There have been interesting revelations since January 2010, the latest reference date, with some things disproven. Thus what you posted can be ignored as dated.
5. 4 of the 6 references are ordinary publications, there is only one peer-reviewed paper, Kaufman et al 2009.
Ref 3: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8236797.stm
refers to paper
Ref 4: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1210986/Arctic-ice-reveals-decade-hottest-2-000-years.html
refers to paper
Ref 5: http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1920435,00.html
refers to paper
Ref 6: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d30695ec-98e9-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html
refers to paper
So basically the entire copied entry has just two sources. Moreover that paper was being debunked practically the moment it was released:
http://www.greenworldtrust.org.uk/Science/Scientific/Arctic.htm (posted here on WUWT)
http://noconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/rewriting-arctic-history/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/09/03/kaufmann-and-upside-down-mann/
http://climateaudit.org/2009/09/07/kaufmans-stick-iceberg-lake-varves/
With original (later shown to be incorrect) press release for the paper:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/09/04/dmi-arctic-temperature-data-animation-doesnt-support-claims-of-recent-arctic-warming/
To provide the links, Ref 1: http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=42392
And the paper, Ref 2: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/325/5945/1236.abstract
The full paper is paywalled, but a copy was found: http://denverclimatestudygroup.com/OTHER-MISC/ArcticCoolingScience200909041236.pdf
However at the abstract link, there is a note on the left toolbar about a correction to the paper, clicking reveals it’s from February 2010… And the correction is paywalled. The paper copy that can be downloaded predates the correction.
So all the references for all that you copied and pasted are:
1. NASA saying 2000-2009 was warmest decade of a record only going back to 1880, which is hardly controversial.
2. Debunked paper with unknown correction which can be inferred as an admission it had at least one flaw so egregious it had to be formally noted.
Thus what you posted can be freely ignored.

Another, obvious thing, something I haven’t seen mentioned here, though someone must have brought it up: That cities contains tens of thousands of windblocks called “buildings”. Wouldn’t blocking this lower wind slow down the thermostatic cooling effect that Willis E. describes so well, besides obviously giving the air more time to heat up?
This occurs in the country as well, only the blocks there are called “trees”. Of course trees respire and cool (but raise local humidity) where buildings don’t and warm (but are dry). The problem is once again not simple, linear, or (probably) linearizable. Not only are trees going to be different from farmland, farm land different from desert, hills different from plains, cities different from towns, lakes and rivers different from dry (but not desert) land in all types of use, oceans and coastlines different from everything, but different kinds of trees, or crops, or deserts, are likely to be different in different places.
In another post I mentioned the variability I can observe in recorded temperatures just moving the recording thermometer to different places on my 1/2 acre plot of property in a semirural setting. Front of the house different from the rear different from under the trees different from over the driveway different from anywhere near the roof different under the deciduous trees in front with relatively high vaulted canopy and the tightly packed cypresses in the rear.
I’m curious about whether or not this has been properly studied. I’m very tempted to buy one of the really good weather stations for the sole purpose of moving it around to different locations on my property every night (randomly selecting a new location by rolling a die, as it were) and recording the thermal trace at six different places as six different randomly scattered threads, to see how distinct the max-min-mean-variance sort of behavior is, averaged out seasonally by the random daily site selection.
If I were rich and bored, I’d probably do the same thing with sites in Duke forest, on nearby farmland, in the city, and so on, moving the same unit to all of these places so the traces were randomly selected from the same thermometers, not systematic but from different thermometers, all within a (say) three mile radius of my house. Within three miles I can’t quite reach the main part of downtown but I can hit malls with major high-rise offices, stream beds, Duke itself, farmland, and major rural forest with huge populations of deer and differing kinds of trees, at heights above sea level that vary by at least 50-100 meters (I live on the slope of a ridgeline that stretches from Chapel Hill to Hillsborough, with Durham proper the slightly flatter land off to the side). I’d bet that mean temperatures at the sites vary by at least 2K, maybe even 3K, from the hottest to the coldest (all measurements with the same thermometer).
Heck, one could even arrange to do it double blind, I think.
rgb

richardscourtney says:
April 2, 2012 at 2:24 am
Abraham3:
Your post at April 1, 2012 at 7:35 pm suggests you are attempting to disrupt this thread.
I say:
You are incorrect. I am attempting to discuss Spencer’s hypothesis. Reading through the comments on this web site, one is struct by the tremendous amount of support Spencer receives here and the extraordinarily small amount of criticism. I was hoping, in my own small way, to move things toward a more balanced and equitable configuration.
richardscourtney says:
It follows my post at April 1, 2012 at 3:18 pm that explained;
“You make some good points but, with respect, they are not relevant to the subject of this thread.
I say:
I have to disagree.
richardscourtney says:
But you have responded with a long screed which purports to support your irrelevance.
I guess I failed to realize that your comment was an order to stop or that you possessed the authority to give out such commands in the first place.
I advised in my first post here that I was not a climate scientist. Given that, I had no idea that an entry from Wikipedia would be greeted with such disdain. I’m sure it lacks some of the numerical details you folks love to bandy about, but I’m also quite sure that it is a great deal more objective than most of the references I’ve seen used on this site.
richardscourtney says:
The post by wshofact at April 1, 2012 at 4:31 pm proves the Jones paper you cited is wrong.
I say:
It most certainly does not. She references a blog singing gleefully that Jones found 0.1C/decade urban warming in developing China – signficantly more warming then he found in 1990. But since I cited Jones 2008, the error here is yours.
richardscourtney says:
Your subsequent long screed drops that and concentrates on trying to justify the claim by Parker that wind speeds indicate temperature better than thermometers.
I say:
Since I made no error citing Jones 2008, there was nothing to drop. No one here or elsewhere has challenged it. Parker’s methodology for looking for diferentiating urban heat sources is valid and if you want to make comments about it, you might want to actually familiarize yourself with it first as it made no attempt whatsoever to measure temperature via wind speed.
richardscourtney says:
This debate of irrelevance is inhibiting discussion of the subject of this thread. I suspect I am not alone in wanting you to stop it.
I say:
Take a quick scan through the 178 comments on this article and tell me what proportion support Spencer’s results and what proportion questions them – then explain to all of us how you can call what you have going on here a discussion, much less a debate. It’s a mutual back-slapping sing-along.
********************************************************************************************************
As I pointed out to the inestimable HenryP, a high reading from a UHI is not going to influence the gridded reading from an urban station hundreds of miles away. The distance over which interpolation is conducted is limited. Therefore, by selecting only cells in which all three population densities exist – where all are in close proximity, Spencer has guaranteed that he has found the relatively rare areas in which they do.
Having a thousand thermometers does not give a cell more weight in the process of surface temperature determination. That there are more stations in populated area does not cause a bias – at least in any study by middle school grads and above. GISS, NASA, NCDC/NOAA and Hadley have all gone to great lengths to correct UHI effects where necessary. The presence of UHI’s has not corrupted, much less falsified the global warming seen in the last 150 years. UHIs have had no detectible effect on sea temperature and given the 272-fold edge the ocean has over the atmosphere in mass, I still have confidence that the data the rest of the world’s climate scientists are providing is trustworthy – at least more trustworthy than anything I’ve seen out of Dr Spencer.

From Abraham3 on April 2, 2012 at 6:31 pm:

I advised in my first post here that I was not a climate scientist. Given that, I had no idea that an entry from Wikipedia would be greeted with such disdain. I’m sure it lacks some of the numerical details you folks love to bandy about, but I’m also quite sure that it is a great deal more objective than most of the references I’ve seen used on this site.

Your apparent wholesale quoting of a Wikipedia entry on Arctic climate objectively boiled down to one NASA statement on global temperature and a single debunked questionable paper on the Arctic. It also is not currently in Wikipedia, doesn’t match current Wikipedia contents, and I have no evidence it ever was a real Wikipedia entry. Even by Wikipedia standards, it should have had more references than those two and four articles regurgitating and interpreting the paper’s press release.
If that’s enough for you to evaluate it as more objective than the usual plethora of sources found on WUWT, then you have far greater problems judging references and sources than any that could possibly arise from not being a climate scientist.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/urban-heat-island-effect.htm
Watch the video.

You are correct, I was wrong. My quote did indeed come from Wikipedia’s “Climate of the Arctic” and not “Climate Change in the Arctic”. My apologies. I allowed myself to be fooled by the presence of the same graphic at the beginning of the section I actually quoted and at the beginning of the article I erroneously identified as my source – and, of course, the similarity of the two titles..
I would ask, however, that you withdraw your use of the word “liar”. Such a charge was uncalled for and is unproductive. There is no rational reason why I would have lied about such a thing and the fact that you located the actual source of my quotation – in Wikipedia and with the references cited – leads me to wonder what it was that actually motivated your charge.
Re Tietsche et al: the study looks at recovery from loss of ice over a single summer. If the process they propose – increased radiation from open water vice ice – were dominant, Arctic sea ice would not be in decline. Their study demonstrates a mollifying mechanism assuring the unlikelihood of a “tipping point” leading to runaway melt. It does not refute the loss of albedo from melting ice nor the continued melting from increased temperatures.
It is good to hear from Dr Jacobsen that controlling soot might save Arctic sea ice but I see nothing in his work questioning the ongoing melting, the cause of that melting or the self-reinforcing nature of albedo loss.
The Arctic is melting and the cause has nothing to do with urban heat islands.

I’ve been wondering for some time if air conditioning has something to do with this (I
haven’t read all 191 replies).
Almost all buildings in the U.S. have air
conditioning and when the air inside is cooled the heat is transferred outside via the A/C system.