A new study from the University of Alabama in Huntsville addresses the question of how much the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is responsible for the higher temperatures at weather stations across the world. Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy have spent several years developing a novel method that quantifies, for the first time, the average UHI warming effects related to population density. Their finding: no less than 65% of “runaway global warming” is not caused by our emissions of carbon dioxide, but by the urbanization of the world.
Dr. Spencer will join us to go over his findings. We’ll also cover the Crazy Climate News of the Week, including an absurd new bit of unscientific propaganda from the U.S. Climate Reference Network at NOAA, wonder if the sun is setting on wide-scale solar energy, and discuss how alarmists refuse to see that we live in a climactic “golden age”—and more.
Join Heartland’s Anthony Watts, Linnea Lueken, H. Sterling Burnett, Jim Lakely, and Dr. Roy Spencer LIVE at 1 p.m. ET for Episode #157 of The Climate Realism Show. We’ll be answering questions in the chat for us, and for Dr. Spencer, on the show.
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The headline:
“Urban Heat Islands Responsible for 65% of Global Warming”
The natural response:
“What about the other 35%?”
Cleaner air?
The reply should be ‘Nothing to worry about’.
That bitch – Nature.
We all love her, but in reality she’s more of a femme fatale
Considering that the models say the warming should be double what the actual figures are then should that not be 17.5% which is a rounding error.
The usual suspects.
The other 75% more likely. Many rural stations show a factual reduction in temperatures over time.
Cleaner air
The sun
Natural cycles
and the least important of all, CO2
Just more proof that CO2 is nothing to worry about.
According to NASA CERES mission data it is all due to ASR (absorbed solar radiation) from a decreasing albedo.
Natural recovery from the Little Ice Age?
The other 35% is due to fewer clouds allowing more warming radiation to reach the Earth. That is why the oceans are warming. Backradiation from CO2 won’t warm the oceans, but more visible radiation will.
My bet would be largely deforestation (particularly in tropical and sub-tropical zones which are naturally hotter and where growth is most vigorous) which is really just a parallel thing to UHI. i.e. humans have urbanized the land and while doing so cut down an awful lot of trees thereby removing their evaporo-transpiration cooling effect as well as their ability to absorb CO2.
If so it is even clearer that CO2 is a minor contributor to the ‘greenhouse’ effect of the atmosphere. Its all in the number folks, not in the demonization of ‘carbon’.
I haven’t listened to Drs. Spencer and Christy’s podcast yet, but the number sounds about right.
I have developed an equilibrium radiation model to calculate the warming effect of an increase in CO2 concentrations for given initial conditions of ground temperature and absolute humidity. This model showed that the warming effect due to the increase in CO2 concentration from ~300 ppm in 1900 to 420 ppm in 2022, due to increased absorption of IR radiation alone, would result in a temperature rise of about 0.1 C in the tropics, or up to about 0.4 C in winter at high latitudes, or roughly 0.17 C as a global average (between 60 degrees south and 60 degrees north latitudes).
However, the global average temperatures in the GISS database show an increase of about 1.1 C over the same period, although there were two periods of declining temperatures (1900 to 1909 and 1945 to 1974), followed by a steady increase since 1974.
This would mean that only about 15% of the observed temperature rise is due to the increased absorption of IR radiation by CO2.
Some of the observed temperature increase could be due to weather stations which were in rural locations circa 1900 which have since been urbanized, which have been locally heated due to heat loss from buildings and industrial operations to the surrounding air, as well as the increased absorption of solar radiation by pavement as compared to grasslands or forests.
If Drs. Spencer and Christy can demonstrate that 65% of the observed warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect, and about 15% is due to increased absorption of IR radiation by CO2, that leaves about 20% due to natural forces beyond human control.
This means that CO2 emissions are a very weak “control knob” over the climate, and spending trillions of dollars to reduce CO2 emissions are a tremendous waste of money.
Harold The Organic Chemist Says:
“CO2 Does Not Cause Warming of Air!
Please go to the late John Daly’s website: “Still Waiting For Greenhouse” at:
http://www.John-Daly.com. From the home page, scroll down to the end and click on:
“Station Temperature Data”. On the “World Map”, click on “NA” and then on “Pacific”. Finally, scroll down and click on “Death Valley”.
The chart (See below) shows plots of temperature from 1922 to 2001. In 1922, the concentration of CO2 in dry air was ca 303 ppmv (0.59 g of CO2/cu. m.), and by 2001, it had increased to ca 371 ppmv (0.73 g of CO2/cu. m.), but there was no corresponding increase in air temperature at this remote desert site. The reason there was no increase in the air temperature at this arid desert is quite simple: There is too little CO2 in the air.
At the MLO in Hawaii, the concentration of CO2 in dry air is currently 428 ppmv (0.84) g of CO2/cu. m.), an increase of 15% from 2001. The above empirical temperature data and simple calculations, and the many temperature charts at John Daly’s website show that the claims by the IPCC and the collaborating scientists that CO2 causes global warming and is the control knob for climate are fabrications and lies.
The purpose of these lies is to provide the justification for the maintenance and generous funding for not only the IPCC but also the UNFCCC and the UN COP. Hopefully, President Trump will put an end to the greatest scientific fraud since the Piltdown Man.
I have a request. Could you go to the GISS temperature data base and get the temperature data from 2002 to 2024, and complete the plot of just average annual temperature from 1922 to 2024? You could show the plot in the next “Open Thread”.
It would be quite a chore top average seasonal temperature. If the plot shows no increase in temperature, it could be used to shut down the climate programs in California, the UK. Germany, and Australia.
Here is the chart for Death Valley. IF you click on the chart, it will enlarge and become clear. Click on the “X” in the lower right corner to return to text.
From the abstract
That is for the US. Not global.
Valid point, but it does not disqualify the results.
They should do this study for the winter season. Every winter the Canadian Polar Express blasts the lower US with enormous amounts of super cold air.
And the US surface sites are likely to be in better condition that most other places.
We have seen just how bad they are in the UK , for instance.
Denial of urban warming is a “climate alarmist” trait.
Maybe I should have been clearer. This article is claiming that the “SHOCK CLIMATE REPORT” is claiming that 65% of global warming is caused by UHI, when the paper seems to only be claiming that 22% of US temperatures are caused by UHI. The article is basically looking at the 65% claim for urban and suburban areas and treating it as if that applies to everywhere, including the 2/3rds of the globe covered by ocean.
A couple of other points – this is only based on Summer months. I’m not really sure why, as I would assume there was more of a UHI effect in Winter.
Dr Spencer says that “Most of that UHI effect warming occurred before 1970.”.
Since 71% of the earth’s surface is covered with water, I doubt that the UHI effect has any effect on global temperature.
The polar region have enormous amounts of ice which functions like a block of ice in an old-fashioned fridge.
Considering the Specific Heat Capacity of water, I’m surprised that the oceans have warmed as much as they have. This may be evidence that something other than solar insolation is warming the oceans, especially the deep bottoms.
According to the ARGO floaters, the oceans have only warmed by a few hundredths of a degree C.
Considering that the vast majority of the temperature readings are land based, UHI is going to have a very considerable impact on global temperatures.
They really don’t have any actual measurements for much of that ocean before 2005 with ARGO
Much of it is just “made-up” using models.
Dr. Pilkey in his most recent substack post says that reduced cloud cover in recent decades could be responsible for a big chunk of the warming.
Unfortunately, I suspect the Ivy League barely notices anything from the state of Alabama.
That is at their peril. The von Braun folks have always been the leaders. This is a part of the original space team pre NASA.
But there is no uhi in the oceans yet the ocean heat increase. WHY
Measurement error and instrument error.
Not from atmospheric CO2.
What’s your explanation? Are the oceans really getting hotter?
There aren’t many measurements for most of the ocean either. !
They temperature increases mostly because that is what the “made-up” fake data does.
A few hundredths of a degree. Not a big deal. Easily explained by the decrease in cloud cover.
Increased solar energy as measured by CERES satellites.
Only if you think an increase of 0.16 degrees Celsius in ocean temperatures since 1960 is measurable.
Ocean heat
Show us where oceans were measured before 2005.
Before ARGO, much of it was agenda-drivel model fakery.
And if you convert to actual temperature instead of heat content, it is basically nothing !
If you want to look at that ocean heat content in a proxy based comparison….
… see that little red squiggle at the end. Basically meaningless.
Ah Mr bnice – this is one of your fave graphs I believe?
I have not investigated it before, but thought I’d have gander this time ….
From Rosenthal et al 2013 “Pacific Ocean Heat Content During the Past 10,000 Years”
“The modern rate of Pacific OHC change is, however, the highest in
the past 10,000 years (Fig. 4 and table S3).”
The explanation of the posted graph ……
“Compiled IWT anomalies based on Indonesian records spanning the ~500- to 900-m water depth … ”
You cannot extrapolate to the whole globes’ sea temps from just the IWT of Indonesian 500-900m waters.
The red squiggle added at the end is intended I think to show modern warming of the global deep ocean.
In fact it appears to be the rise of OHC in 10’s of zettajoules (10^22) – the graph says “IWT Anaomaly (sic) Deg C”.
Levitus showed that the 0-50M global waters warmed by ~0.5C between 1960 and 2010.
So bnice, would you like to redo that deceptive graph by taking the “red squiggle” up to the 0.5C mark and then say …
“see that little red squiggle at the end. Basically meaningless.”
Your comment is gibberish based on assumption drivel models. !
There is no possible way of measuring ocean heat content before 2005 and ARGO, (where you can see it levels off.)
And seriously.. “GISS” forcing”, “Feedback”
Junk data to create junk.. GIGO… Hilarious.
Your graph is a FAKE as they come.
When they started measuring OHC using ARGO, rather than nonsense models…
.. it levels off.
The models are JUNK non-science..
I love way you use scary numbers instead of converting it to a value that has meaning to people.
Conver joules to degrees C, and you find out that the alleged warming is just a few hundredths of a degree C.
Trying to scare people by using deceptive numbers. How typical for a climate alarmist.
Its is not that he is intentionally trying to scare anyone.
Its that the BIG numbers scare him, and he has zero clue what they mean in real life.
So tell us how they measured ocean heat to 2000m for the global oceans back to before 1960. How many observations etc. You know – actual data. Did they really use zettajoules back then?
Yep. No surprise there. I’ve made that contention for years. But now, Science!
haha I seem to remember Professor Jones, of Climategate fame, denying the existence of the UHI and ‘proving’ it in a paper he co-wrote using a lot of dodgy Chinese stats which when later queried, he was not able to find for some reason or another. Strangely, his position “warming not a function of UHI” became orthodoxy in Warmist circles. People who clung to the idea of UHI were dismissed as buffoons and rubes, certainly not climate ‘scientists’, quite possibly even – gasp – Deniers!
Well, precisely 0% of warming is caused by adding CO2 to air, so they’re probably right.
In Australia it (UHI) makes up nearly 100%.
The Bom, in their latest State of Climate Report of 2024, say Australia is warming 1.51 deg C from 1910 to 2023, based on the 112 meteorological stations that make up their homogenized, ACORN-SAT annual mean temperature series.
“Australia, on average, has warmed by 1.51 ±0.23 °C since national records began in 1910, with most warming occurring since 1950.”
Interestingly, this coincides with the average warming rate of the 6 major Capital Cities (Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, and Perth) the annual and summer, observed/raw mean max series, as I show below.
Make of it what you will.
Australian cities {where most people (67%) live} started warming after the 1950s and 1960s of the post WW2 migration boom.
Almost all used energy ends up as low grade heat,except for some potential energy and some converted to chemical energy. So most of the world’s used energy – a huge number – ends up as low grade heat i.e. a temperature rise that finds a new equilibrium with radiation to space by dE being proportional to dT to the fourth power
Might I respectfully suggest that all used energy ends up as heat? The reason I say this is that eventually even heat energy transformed to potential or some other form of energy, is eventually dispersed as heat.
It might take a while, admittedly. I’m just being picky for form’s sake.
No offense or disparagement intended.
Check out this article I wrote some time ago :
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/04/16/observation-of-the-earth-shows-that-deforestation-and-urbanization-cause-three-times-more-warming-than-co2/
Don’t get me wrong, I love Dr. Spencer and Dr. Christy, but why is this topic so complicated?
CO2 evenly blankets the globe, in other words it is a constant per location. The quantum mechanics of the CO2 does not vary by location or over time, so once again, CO2 is a constant in any model. What has changed over time is the concentration, but the concentration shows a log decay with the backradiation. It is much like painting a window black. The first coat does a lot, additional coats does very litte. In other words, beyond a certain concentration, CO2 does very little.
In reality all the data you need is the data for temperatures over the oceans and Antarctica to remove the UHI effect. They are natural controls for the UHI Effect. Simply limit the data to the stations that aren’t exposed to any UHI Effect? Adding additional corrupted data sets only decreases the explanatory power of the model and increases the error.
I’ve done that and when you simply select the stations with a very low BI score, you basically get no warming. If you comnbine the temperatures over the oceans with the change in cloud cover, you see that what global warming we do see is due to fewer clouds over the oceans, not more CO2.
CO2 has absolutely nothing to do with the warming of the globe. CO2 is a trace gas of 415 ppm that thermalizes 15 micron LWIR, which is associated with -80 °C temperature in the IR spectrum.
Climate Science claims to be a science. I just outlined a very simply and common sense way to control for the UHI effect and there is no need to worry about the adjusted or unadjusted data. Simply use the raw data from a station that hasn’t been impacted by the UHI efect, it is that simple.
To test this, try the unadjusted data from Alice Springs Austraila using the older version of the GISS Data before they broke up the data file. What you will see is that there is no warming. Do the laws of physics cease to exist in Alice Springs? Nope, the backradiation of CO2 is the same as everywhere else. So, if Climate Science was a real science, the scientists would be asking the very simple question. Why, if CO2 is the true cause of warming, are there so many locations that show no warming when CO2 increased from 270 to 415 PPM. Why was I able to construct an experiment using natural controls for the UHI and pretty much prove CO2 doesn’t cause warming? The reason is, no one else except Dr Soon and Dr. Spencer asked the right questions. Climate Scientists don’t run common sense experiments simply because they know the results they will get, and that result is that CO2 doesn’t cause warming. If it sis, Alice Springs would be warming…but it isn’t.
This is Adelaide not Alice Springs, ‘CO2islife.’
But I agree with on a number of points.
If you have 100 bowls of soup and 5 bowls are cold or luke warm you remove those 5 bowls because they are obviously based on flawed data !!
Correction, if you have 100 bowls of soup made of identical ingredients and apply 1,000 BTUs of heat to each bowl and you find that 5 bowls did not warm. You then look into the anomaly and discover that the other 95 bowls used identical steel bowl and the 5 that didn’t warm were in ceramic heat resistant bowls. You conclude that heat does warm soup, and the 5 that didn’t warm was due to the insulated bowl.
The “climate extremes” paper looks like BS. They seem to be inferring that there is increased variability in the more recent record. So they need to examine each variable individually and see whether there is a statistically significant change in variability.
IMO with such a limited number of points , nothing there is statistically significant.
The corn argument is just an illustration of that fact that the main greenhouse gas on Earth is water vapour.
Mr Watts needs to check the definition of ice age.
We are indeed in an ice age at this time. When he says we are in an “inter-glacial”, that is an inter-glacial period of an ice age. In few thousand years there will be a new glaciation and we will be in glacial period of the same ice age.
The confusion of the terms glaciation and ice age is common in uneducated, non technical people. I’m surprised that Mr Watts is not aware of the correct use of these terms .
This is the only website you need to debunk CO2 causes warming.
http://www.john-daly.com/stations/stations.htm
CO2 evenly blankets the globe; in other words, CO2 concentration is a constant per location.
The quantum mechanics of the CO2 molecule doesn’t change per location, so the backradiation of CO2 evenly blankets the globe.
What has changed over time is the concentration of CO2 over time. The scientific challenge then becomes how to design a controlled experiment that isolates the impact of CO2 on temperatures. How do you tease out the effect of the Urban Heat Island, water vapor, and other exogenous factors?
In other words how do you design this experiment : Temperature = f(CO2) and not Temperature = f(CO2, Water Vapor, UHI, and other factors)
The solution is relatively simple. One simply needs to choose locations, mostly the dry hot and cold deserts, that are shielded from large swings in H2O and impacted by the UHI. When you do that, you see that the temperature doesn’t increase with an increase in CO2. The obvious reason for that is that CO2 shows a log decay in the backradiation with an increase in concentration, and the CO2 concentration and Backradiation function forms an asymptote, and at the current concentration, the slope is approaching 0.00 quickly.
In real science, one needs to find only one example where the results don’t agree with the model to reject the null. The above link provides plenty of examples that defy the CO2 causes warming hypothesis.
Albert Einstein famously stated, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.”