UHI – worse than we thought

I experienced this effect vividly in the early 1990s, when I lived in a brick building in Portland, Oregon. It became an oven at night in summer. The surrounding countryside by contrast could be downright cold after the sun went down.
When I flew into Vegas last month, it was 113 F at 9 PM. The surrounding desert was cooler enough for the plane to be buffeted by the thermal differential.

It is bad enough this contributes to the warming fantasy, but the adjustments for it are in the same direction, warmer.

Shouldn’t it be mentioned somewhere that this UHI needs to be backed out of the thermometer data when trying to show the primary and secondary effects of CO2 on climate change? It should also be pointed out that during bitter cold winters a little UHI (like incandescent lights) can be a good thing. My expensive LED lamps do nothing to blunt the chill of Old Man Winter.

Everyone agrees that the little warming the Earth has experienced over the past 150 years or so is very much concentrated in the northern hemisphere, where almost everyone lives and the vast majority of cities and towns lie. However, the devout warm-mongers continue to deny the connection. Anthony, I trust your are going to challenge the absurd assertion by Climate Central that the analysis of UHI is their original work.

Any motorcyclist knows all about UHI from practical experience. Perfectly comfortable in the city, freezing to death ten miles outside of town.

Nothing new here. In the 1920’s, when it was hot in the summer, it was common for the “City folk” to take the streetcars to a large park (Swope Park, Kansas City, Mo.) south of the inner city to sleep… with mattresses and kids in tow.

this is why meteorologists (at a higher percentage anyway) don’t believe in this GW crap.

This is the real Man Made Global Warming and shows that the (s)warmies were right all along.

Stay after it, Anthony. I know you don’t do it for glory, but at least you will be able to enjoy the last laugh.

you are all missing the point,as the best homogenization process takes that uhi and smears it over thousands of square miles ensuring it has no effect on the inhabitants of the cities or the global average temperature data series 😉

Well, the present California, unprecedented mega drought, is having a disruptive technology emergence in Silicon Valley.
Now I have often asserted, that the best kind of grass to grow for a front lawn, would be a nice slab of green concrete; hopefully colored through and through, so it would last forever; rather than just a paint job.
So now all over the Valley , well Sunnyvale anyway, the water starved brown micro hay, is being dug out, and replaced, with mosaics of paving stones. They now run from the sidewalk / footpath, up to the very garage door.
One house just across the street from me, had a lively crew of “immigrant” stone masons, who took a jack hammer to the footpath / sidewalk, and broke the whole thing up , into pieces of concrete, that a typical immigrant mason, could pick up by gloved hands, and put in the back of a truck for hauling to a landfill. Then the dust blower crew came in, and blew all the concrete pieces, too small to pick up, over onto my driveway, and all over my cars’ shiny paint.
Next, a large cement mixer truck, came and poured a new concrete sidewalk, which the mason artisans smoothed by hand trowel, into their idea, of a new footpath, to merge with the mosaic tiled brickyard, that once was the front lawn (and pre garage addition). The new side walk set up over night, so, the next morning; crack of dawn, the jack hammer crew could return, and demolish the new footpath again, down to immigrant stone mason size. Meanwhile, the Mosaic artists, would restack the red and brown brick tiles, after the house resident, had ruled nyet, on the artistic design.
So in about ten days overall, this sidewalk was dismantled, and re-poured, four times in all, that I counted, each time with an intervening dust blower encorpse, to re-decorate my cars.
I’m guessing that the rock quwarriers, did the first job, sans any sort of city approval, or building permit; who needs a building permit ??
Well the instant replays, were probably for some sort of road code violations. And four times, the moasicticians, did actually reshuffle, and re-stack, and re-lay the tiled art work.
So the last re-incarnation of this project, actually took place with the new residents, actually having moved in; in the interval, between the rock truck, leaving for the land fill, and the next arrival of the cement mixer truck.
I really would like to know the full history of this project, and what the final grade was, that the immigrant Stone Mason students received for their project.
Bottom line is; the home’s new water usage, is about the same, since the new residents , number more than the previous occupants, of the small lawned residence that use to be there. No doubt, the house flipper, on this deal, made a killing. The start up stone masonry, likely will seek, whatever substitutes, for Chapter Eleven, in failed DIY enterprises.
So this coming winter, should be warmer, due to the lawnless neighbor, and no need for evaporative cooling of his driveway artistry.
It would be nice to get a couple of showers, to remove the speckled concrete new paint job on my cars.

Although there can be no doubt that these urban heat islands exist and are significantly warmer than their surroundings, it seems intuitively obvious to me that it is the *growth* and development of these urban heat islands that leads to measurable *warming*.
Static long-established urban areas (e.g. Oxford, UK) may have a measurable UHI – but if it hasn’t grown or intensified significantly in time then there will not be much UHI-driven warming there.
On the other hand, temperatures at a location (e.g. Heathrow, UK) that was a rural pastoral district 60 years ago and is now one of the worlds busiest airports around just two runways (and surrounded by urban sprawl) are going to include lots of UHI-driven warming.
Static or slow-developing UHIs = negigible UHI warming;
Rapidly expanding and developing UHIs = rapid UHI warming.

Lovin Spoonful

You know, it occurs to me that only a myopic alarmist could claim that UHI does not contribute to global warming—when they claim that exact thing about CO2, when both achieve that effect by analogous mechanisms. The pavement/concrete absorbs solar radiation (both short- and long-wave, in the case of concrete and pavement), and then re-radiates it as long-wave radiation (ok, simplification, because depending upon albedo, parts of the ‘concrete jungle’ can reflect the short-wave). So does CO2. It is this exact effect of CO2 that is why the alarmists continue the hue and cry about it.
(Well, no, the real reason they continue the hue and cry about CO2 rather than the REAL culprit, H2O, is that, quite aside from the fact that H2O is also a heat sink (Latent Heat, of both Fusion and Vaporisation) and a convective conductor of heat (water vapor, in thermals inside thunderstorms, acts as an express elevator to carry heat from the surface to the top of the Troposphere where it deposits it when the vapor changes back into a liquid in order to precipitate out as rain), it can’t be as effectively regulated as processes which produce CO2, so there’s no money in it. Follow the money. It explains most of the entire sordid affair, But the “greenhouse gas effect” of CO2 is the ostensible reason for the hullabaloo)
If a trace gas like CO2 can bear such a huge burden of the warming for which man is supposedly responsible since the industrial revolution, then how much is mankind’s paving of the globe responsible for? To say none—as it appears the alarmists have been claiming—is disingenuous at best, obstinate stupidity more likely—denial, actually, in truth.
Now—unlike them with their claims about CO2, I have never heard anyone of the Skeptic camp claim that there is some very high percentage of confidence that some percentage of all the warming since 1950 can be blamed on UHIE, but I think it’s been proven beyond doubt—how odd to discussing this here of all places—that so much heat collected to re-radiate through the nights in locales where surface temperature monitoring is also located will, ipso facto, skew the surface temperatures thus recorded, distorting the measurement, and effectively disqualifying that data for use in determining the mean global surface temp, lest it make it look like the earth is warming a lot faster than it perhaps is…QED.
But again, if you look at it, for the alarmists to claim that CO2 plays a huge role in warming, and deny that UHI has any—not even the skewing of the data—is an incredible, fabulous double standard.

The UHI in Las Vegas is 7.3 F. Let’s assume no UHI only greenhouse effect. Assume 2 C per doubling of CO2. We have to quadruple CO2 to 1,200 ppm to get 7.3 F warming. Funny we worry more about GHE than UHI. 7.3 F warming is catastrophic! The gamblers are too busy to notice.

I measure temperature in my garden in two places, one next to the house and the other in a secluded shady part. I can get up to 10C difference at times. Guess which one is the higher?

I believe in global warming, but I think it is only in the cities. I live between two metro areas that are consistently 2-6 degrees F warmer than here at the house. Seems like a no-brainer to me….