Cities expand by area equal to France, Germany and Spain combined in less than 20 years
Urbanization choices to be fundamental to environmental sustainability, say experts; Equivalent of a city of 1 million needed weekly given population growth trend; Four-day Planet Under Pressure Conference in London attracts 2,800 participants Unless development patterns change, by 2030 humanity’s urban footprint will occupy an additional 1.5 million square kilometres – comparable to the combined territories of France, Germany and Spain, say experts at a major international science meeting underway in London.
UN estimates show human population growing from 7 billion today to 9 billion by 2050, translating into some 1 million more people expected on average each week for the next 38 years, with most of that increase anticipated in urban centres. And ongoing migration from rural to urban living could see world cities receive yet another 1 billion additional people. Total forecast urban population in 2050: 6.3 billion (up from 3.5 billion today).
The question isn’t whether to urbanize but how, says Dr. Michail Fragkias of Arizona State University, one of nearly 3000 participants at the conference, entitled “Planet Under Pressure”. Unfortunately, he adds, today’s ongoing pattern of urban sprawl puts humanity at severe risk due to environmental problems. Dense cities designed for efficiency offer one of the most promising paths to sustainability, and urbanization specialists will share a wealth of knowledge available to drive solutions.
How best to urbanize is one among many “options and opportunities” under discussion by global environmental change specialists today, Day 2 of the four-day conference March 26-29, convened to help address a wide range of global sustainability challenges and offer recommendations to June’s UN “Rio+20” Earth Summit.
Other leading options and opportunities being addressed include green economic development (Yvo de Boer, former Executive Secretary, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change), securing food and water for the world’s poorest (Bina Agarwal, Director, Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi University, India), and planetary stewardship: risks, obstacles and opportunities (Georgina Mace, Professor, Imperial College, London). For a full list of “options and opportunities” conference sessions and topics, see conference website.
Cities responsible for 70% of CO2 emissions
Shobhakar Dhakal, Executive Director of the Tokyo-based Global Carbon Project, says reforms in existing cities and better planning of new ones offer disproportionately large environmental benefits compared with other options.
“Re-engineering cities is urgently needed for global sustainability,” says Dr. Dhakal, adding that emerging urban areas “have a latecomer’s advantage in terms of knowledge, sustainability thinking, and technology to better manage such fundamentals as trash and transportation.”
Over 70% of CO2 emissions today relate to city needs. In billions of metric tonnes, urban-area CO2 emissions were estimated at about 15 in 1990 and 25 in 2010, with forecasts of growth to 36.5 by 2030, assuming business as usual.
Addressing climate change therefore demands focusing on urban efficiencies, like using weather conditions and time of day-adjusted toll systems to reduce traffic congestion, for example. Congestion worldwide costs economies an estimated 1 to 3% of GDP – a problem that not only wastes fuel and causes pollution, but time – an estimated 4.2 billion hours in the USA alone in 2005. Estimated cost of New York City’s congestion: US$4 billion a year in lost productivity.
An “Internet of things” is forming, he notes – a fast-growing number of high-tech, artificially intelligent, Internet-connected cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines and more — in total about one trillion in use worldwide today.
High-tech ways to improve the efficiency of urban operations and human health and well-being include:
- Rapid patient screening and diagnostics with digitalised health records;
- Utility meters and sensors that monitor the capacity of the power generation net-work and continually gather data on supply and demand of electricity;
- Integrated traveller information services and toll road pricing based on traffic, weather and other data;
- Data gathering and feedback from citizens using mobile phones;
“Our focus should be on enhancing the quality of urbanization – from urban space, infrastructure, form and function, to lifestyle, energy choices and efficiency,” says Dr. Dhakal.
Care is needed, he adds, to avoid unwelcome potential problems of dense urbanization, including congestion, pollution, crime, the rapid spread of infectious disease and other societal problems – the focus of social and health scientists who will feature prominently at the conference.
Says Prof. Karen Seto of Yale University, who with colleagues is organizing four of the 160 conference sessions at Planet Under Pressure: ”The way cities have grown since World War II is neither socially or environmentally sustainable and the environmental cost of ongoing urban sprawl is too great to continue.”
For these reasons, “the planet can’t afford not to urbanize,” says Seto. “People everywhere, however, have increasingly embraced Western styles of architecture and urbanization, which are resource-intense and often not adapted to local climates. The North American suburb has gone global, and car-dependent urban develop-ments are more and more the norm.”
How humanity urbanizes to define the decades ahead
Fragkias notes that while there were fewer than 20 cities of 1 million or more a century ago, there are 450 today. While urban areas cover less than five per cent of Earth’s land surface, “the enlarged urban footprint forecast is far more significant proportionally when vast uninhabitable polar, desert and mountain regions, the world breadbasket plains and other prime agricultural land and protected areas are subtracted from the calculation.”
…
Read the full press release here
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Dr. Pielke writes:
This land use change not only affects local and regional climate, but also results in a time varying effect on surface temperatures that have been used by the IPCC and others as the iconic metric of global warming. As we reported on in
Montandon, L.M., S. Fall, R.A. Pielke Sr., and D. Niyogi, 2011: Distribution of landscape types in the Global Historical Climatology Network. Earth Interactions, 15:6, doi: 10.1175/2010EI371
GHCNv.2 station locations are biased toward urban and cropland (>50% stations versus 18.4% of the world’s land) and past century reclaimed cropland areas (35% stations versus 3.4% land).
This bias is only going to increase in coming years as urban areas continue to expand.
Recently, I did an essay about the disparity of warming in Texas, and this IGBP press release along with Dr. Pielke’s commentary lends credence to what I found.
The differences between temperature trends between Texas as a whole (which is largely rural by area) and some of its fastest growing cities, such as San Antonio, is quite striking:
The data from San Antonio:
At 0.41 Fahrenheit per decade, it is four times larger than the statewide trend from 1948 to 2011. The population of San Antonio looks like a hockey stick, especially after 1940:
According to the Wikipedia entry on San Antonio: “It was the fastest growing of the top 10 largest cities in the United States from 2000-2010, and the second from 1990-2000.”. So I suppose it is no surprise to find it having such a large temperature trend compared to other Texas cities and the state itself.
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Harold Pierce Jr says:
July 2, 2012 at 4:54 pm
Canada has a surface area of 2.5 billion acres, chocked full of all kinds of goodies except tropical fruit and is essentially unpopulated. We here don’t have to worry about susustainability. Ditto for Siberia.
Metro Vancouver is best since winters are mild and electricity is generated by hydro which is dirt cheap.
Harold notice how the price is rising to pay the contracts to the independent power producers which includes wind farms and site C has to be built as backup for the IPP’s. 60 billion in contracts and site C on top of that. The fiberals are mad.
Then we also have a carbon tax brought to us by David Suzuki, Andrew Weaver and Mark Jaccard.
” by 2030 humanity’s urban footprint will occupy an additional 1.5 million square kilometres – comparable to the combined territories of France, Germany and Spain, say experts at a major international science meeting underway in London.”
1.5 million square kilometres is a square of about 1225 km by 1225 km. I suspect that the combined three countries cited are in real life, vastly larger than the 1500000 square kilometers. I guess a noble cause gives license to gross nonsense.
@ur momisugly MarkW says:
July 2, 2012 at 3:21 pm
In today’s world, most couples are starting their families much later in life. For these couples, babies delayed often turn out to be babies that will never be born at all.
No way in heck to we get 9 billion by 2050.
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Curiousgeorge says:
July 2, 2012 at 4:35 pm
You really shouldn’t generalize like this (most couples). There are parts of the world where population increase is double that of the USA or other 1st world countries.
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And many of their babies (and the mother die) soon after. deaths of infants under one year old in a given year per 1,000 live births in the same year 6/1000 for the USA and 121/1000 for Afghanistan. This does not include the under five who often starve to death in poor countries.
In 2009, 57% or 129 of the 224 countries were below the 2.1, benchmark in 2010, 112 countries are below the 2.1 benchmark. The world population growth rate is 1.096% and the fertility rate is 2.47. The infant mortality (under one year) is 39.48 deaths/1,000 live births, (link) 10.9 million children under five die in developing countries each year, 60% from hunger related disease. (Replacement rate is 2.1)
The USA had a birth rate of 1.3 in 2009. In 2010 and in 2011 it was 2.06 (I guess those illegals are having babies/sarc)
France 1.3 -2009, 1.97 – 2010. now 2.08 (2011 est)
UK – 1.1 -2009, 1.92 -2010, now 1.91 (2011 est)
Canada – 1.0 now 1.58 – 2010, 1.59 (2011 est)
Germany – 0.8 now 1.42 – 2010, 1.41 (2011 est)
Switzerland – 0.9 now 1.46 1.47 (2011 est)
Greece – 0.9 now 1.37 -2010, 1.39 (2011 est)
Georgia – 1.0 now 1.44 – -2010, 1.46 (2011 est)
China – 1.4 now 1.54 – 2010, 1.55 (2011 est)
Paraguay – 2.8 now 2.16 – 2010, 2.06 (2011 est)
Cambodia – 2.5 now 2.9 – 2010, 2.78 (2011 est)
Hong Kong – 0.7 now 1.04 – 2010, 1.09 (2011 est)
Niger – 5.2 now 7.68 – 2010, 7.52 (2011 est)
Russia 1.43
Australia 1.77
South Africa 2.28
India 2.58
Afghanistan 5.64
Egypt 2.94
Iran 1.87
Iraq 3.58
Israel 2.67
Argentina 2.29
Brazil 2.16
Chile 1.87
Columbia 2.12
Mexico 2.27
The Congos – 5.09/5.59
Guinea – 5.04
Africa is the only continent with a really high birth rate but there is also a high infant/child mortality rate World Population is guestimated to peak at about 9-10 billion and then decline.
Statistics take from : link over last couple of years.
If you are breaking the law by pointing out the carbon tax cost of your products, you need a constitution work-over. I think in North America there would be a several million strong disobedient ignoring of this law organized. In Canada, gasoline pumps list all the government taxes next to the price.
Oops wrong thread!
Hello KR,
Maybe you and Muller missed these:
http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu/~shaopeng/stoten08.pdf
http://www.utsa.edu/lrsg/Teaching/EES5093/UHI-houston.pdf
http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/files/LAHeatWaves-JournalArticle.pdf
.
There are countless other examples out there, and I’m sure Anthony is aware of them. It really isn’t difficult to understand, but is to measure. Some conflate the issue to minimize the significance of UHI. Rather, we are supposed to believe lights=0 can discriminate the effects of UHI within .01 degC, or that by replicating the reported “adjusted” temperatures is somehow a legitimate method of validation. What makes you think these documented phenomenon in the references given are not common throughout the surface temperature records for every location on the planet?
OTOH, you would likely latch on to this one. It is a model, therefore must be true, because as we’ve learned over the years in climate “science”, models trump observations.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/october/urban-heat-islands-101911.html
And you guys wonder why so many are skeptical.
I love how they call it “a major international science meeting”. No doubt! Which kind of science?
Dark city infrastructure, such as black roofs, also makes urban areas more apt to absorb and retain heat.
———-
This claim ignores some pretty basic physics. Dark surfaces not only absorb heat more readily than light surfaces they also emit heat more readily than light surfaces.
Therefore I expect cities to warm rapidly during the day, but also to cool rapidly during the night.
Exactly how these two contrary effects affect average temperatures is not clear to me. Until I see some math or experiments on this I am keeping an open mind on the issue.
old construction worker on July 2, 2012 at 3:11 pm said:
UHI is a myth, just ask the “Team”. (LOL)
——–
Some members of the team have done research on the urban heat island effect. They know and everyone else knows it’s not a myth.
You seem to be confused.
Smokey – various accusations of scientific malfeasance…
Then show your data – the authors of these various studies certainly have. If you don’t have the data to support your opinion, then as Hitchens said: “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence”.
DR – UHI certainly has strong local effects, making urban areas hotter than rural. When assembling global anomaly data, however, only changes from long term mean are important. Looking at the full data set – well, UHI has no discernible effect on long term anomaly trends.
KR,
I provided Muller’s cherry-picked BEST chart, and the corrected chart. Also, DR tried to educate you. Face it, things just aren’t like you wish them to be.
Smokey – “Muller’s cherry-picked BEST chart”??? Muller provided all of the data. What you presented in your “corrected chart” is a 10-year snippet of the BEST temperature chart, a period which appears chosen to minimize temperature trends, and which is too small a sample to have statistical significance.
Here’s the trend for 17 and for 20 years through the present (17 years being the minimum for statistical significance in RSS, as per Santer et al) of BEST data – http://tinyurl.com/d8w89wo – you will note trends of 0.36 and 0.23 C/decade, respectively.
As to what the statistical significance is, taking into consideration autocorrelation of the data (see the calculator at http://tinyurl.com/7uumvqo and look for yourself), the BEST data indicates a 2-sigma significant trend emerging from the noise in 1994, of 0.247 +/- 0.243 C/decade – only a 5% chance of the null hypothesis (no warming) being true given the noise/variation present in the land temperature signal.
Given the 10 year snippet of data you highlighted, the BEST statistics indicate a 2-sigma range of 0.131 +/- 0.542 C/decade – meaning that the 95% probability trend range might be as low as -0.411, or as high as 0.673 C/decade given that information. That’s just not enough information – your 10 year graph doesn’t tell us anything.
So – I’m still waiting for some evidence to support your claims of scientific malfeasance.
KR says:
“…your 10 year graph doesn’t tell us anything.”
Not “anything“?? Anyone with such a blinkered, extremist view is irrelevant to the discussion. Clearly KR is not up to speed on the subject. I suggest that instead of winging it, he should back up, and start by reading this article and comments:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/29/uh-oh-it-was-the-best-of-times-it-was-the-worst-of-times
BEST data is cherry-picked crap. It is certainly not science according to the scientific method. But that is to be expected with an agenda-driven narrator like Richard Muller inventing conclusions.
KR needs to take a couple hours to read that article and the comments. It is important for KR to understand what he’s talking about. As of right now, it’s clear he doesn’t.
“High-tech ways to more egregiiously violate privacy and reduce human liberty and well-being include…”
Just another little “truth in assertions” correction.
I think it is clearly obvious that UHI creates a bias in the temperature record, however; I also think UHI is not in-significant in climate. We have essentially 5% of the land covered in mega-heaters. Not just the change to emissivity, but in huge volumes of energy use which always has some waste (heat). This has to have a measurable effect on real global temperature. Not to mention the millions of miles of asphalt highway. I’ve run quick calculations on how much additional energy is captured by the roads alone in albito changes compared to surrounding natural terrain. The difference is more than enough to meet all US energy needs. That is significant.
“An ‘Internet of things’ is forming, he notes – a fast-growing number of high-tech, artificially intelligent, Internet-connected cars, appliances, cameras, roadways, pipelines and more — in total about one trillion in use worldwide today.”
One trillion? More than a hundred for each of the planet’s 7 billion inhabitants? Am I so relatively impoverished or are these worry pros just more of a vocal minority that doesn’t know the difference between a million and a billion?
And where do the records fall by the dozens–in the woods or in the cities? –AGF
Curiousgeorge says:
July 2, 2012 at 4:35 pm
You really shouldn’t generalize like this (most couples). There are parts of the world where population increase is double that of the USA or other 1st world countries.
===========
Even in those countries, the rate of population growth has plummeted in recent decades.
Harold Pierce Jr says:
July 2, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Once in the lungs these particles are there forever since synthetic rubber and asphaltenes are not degradeable by the body.
=====
The lungs have mechanisms for expelling foreign particles from the lungs.
LazyTeenager says:
July 3, 2012 at 5:36 am
This claim ignores some pretty basic physics. Dark surfaces not only absorb heat more readily than light surfaces they also emit heat more readily than light surfaces.
Therefore I expect cities to warm rapidly during the day, but also to cool rapidly during the night.
——-
Please think before posting.
Exactly where is that expelled heat going to go?
Into the air.
The roof may cool down more rapidly, but the air into which that extra heat is dumped is going to cool down at the same rate it always did. Since there is more energy being dumped into the air, and since the air loses heat at pretty much the same old rate, the total amount of energy in the air at any given time is going to be higher. Hence hotter.
Smokey – I took another look at your linked graphs, and it clearly includes some less certain data. The last two data points on your graph are from a mere 47 Antarctic stations, as opposed to the >14,000 used in the remainder of the BEST data, and have a correspondingly higher uncertainty (see http://tinyurl.com/3qlstkw for an in-depth discussion of this). So your data is not only cherry-picked, but includes some data points that are uncertain enough (+/- 2.5C) to be rather worthless.
It would be a better choice to actually use all of the data. Cherry-picking your data sets, at best, weakens your argument. I strongly suggest you do some reading on statistical significance. As it is, you appear to be suffering from D-K (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect).
Regarding the WUWT thread you linked – I followed that when it first came up, and was rather astounded at the reversal. Anthony Watts had clearly stated that:
(http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/06/briggs-on-berkeleys-best-plus-my-thoughts-from-my-visit-there/)
But when the results came out, which (not surprisingly, as the trends are clearly in the data, raw, rural, and otherwise) agreed with previous temperature anomaly data, skeptics rushed to dismiss it. I considered commenting there at the time, but decided that the folks posting were making a big enough ****up on their own.
Can you believe these jokers? They hate the fact that you or I own a house in the suburbs rather than be packed like rats in little cages in their “master planned” cities…
Jerry Brown wants to build these Soviet-style cities along the hyper-expensive, slow-speed rail Browndoggle line he is pushing for California.
I think it might be a good time to bring up the following posts from Spencer:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/03/the-global-average-urban-heat-island-effect-in-2000-estimated-from-station-temperatures-and-population-density-data/
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2012/03/mckitrick-michaels-were-right-more-evidence-of-spurious-warming-in-the-ipcc-surface-temperature-dataset/
Given KR’s lack of reading comprehension, I’m pretty sure he didn’t read the article and comments I provided him with here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/29/uh-oh-it-was-the-best-of-times-it-was-the-worst-of-times
If he read it, he sure didn’t understand what most folks are saying. In 400+ comments, BEST’s Richard Muller comes across as what he is: a climate charlatan.
I’d call Muller a faux-sceptic. I saw a clip of him claiming to have been a climate warming sceptic prior to BEST. It felt like orchestrated theatre to me.
Besides, had he been a real sceptic, I think he would have been unlikely to get the BEST gig.
Re: Robert Austin –
1.5 million square kilometres is a square of about 1225 km by 1225 km. I suspect that the combined three countries cited are in real life, vastly larger than the 1500000 square kilometers. I guess a noble cause gives license to gross nonsense.
Actually, according to Wikipedia the combined size of Germany (357,021), France (547,030), and Spain (505,992) is less than 1.5 million square km., closer to 1.41 million. I’m not sure I agree with the prediction of new urban space needed, but the ‘visual’ they suggest of their number seems accurate.