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Old 01-03-2020, 07:33 PM
 
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
4,876 posts, read 4,195,274 times
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Since it has known now for a considerable amount of time that urbanization boosts the average temperature of a given area, should humanity just omit the cities temperature data because of the increased urbanization distorting the global average temperature ? What are your personal opinions on such a matter of reference? I personally feel that the Proposition of AGW is really just a bunch of “Half Truths”. But I am open on seeing what other fellow CD members in the weather forum think about this alleged issue of Climate Change. Should only small towns be used as a “Metric” to determine whether the climate is indeed changing? Discuss.
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Old 01-04-2020, 01:26 PM
 
1,503 posts, read 903,528 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Isleofpalms85 View Post
Since it has known now for a considerable amount of time that urbanization boosts the average temperature of a given area, should humanity just omit the cities temperature data because of the increased urbanization distorting the global average temperature ? What are your personal opinions on such a matter of reference? I personally feel that the Proposition of AGW is really just a bunch of “Half Truths”. But I am open on seeing what other fellow CD members in the weather forum think about this alleged issue of Climate Change. Should only small towns be used as a “Metric” to determine whether the climate is indeed changing? Discuss.
In reality climate scientists are well aware of the urban heat island (UHI) effect and go to a lot of effort to quantify and remove the warming bias that it could introduce. There are several ways this can be done, for example by comparing the record of somewhere with a suspected UHI with a nearby rural record to remove any warm warm bias found. Crudely, if say a city record warmed by say 1C over 60 years, while a nearby rural location warmed by 0.75C over the same time, it would be evidence that 0.25 of the city warming was UHI and could be corrected for.

There are also ways of verifying whether UHI is having a significant effect on the global temperature record by doing things like comparing it calculated from only very rural stations and then comparing it with the record calculated from all stations. Or calculating it only from stations that recorded windy conditions at the time and comparing it with those that recorded calm conditions. As wind tends to dissipate any UHI, one would expect that if the UHI effect was introducing a warm bias, that the record calculated from calm days would show more warming than the one from windy days.

It's important to note that global average temperature calculations are not a simple mean of all climate station data as is implied on some blogs, tabloid news sites etc alongside photos of weather stations sited next to AC units etc to try to cast doubt on the science.

See https://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/10...urban-heating/
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Old 01-06-2020, 08:48 AM
 
Location: The Driftless Area, WI
7,181 posts, read 5,033,283 times
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Adjusting for the UHI effect would have only a small effect on the situation, whereas NOAA has made some pretty drastic changes to the raw data, kinda in the vein of "it's more effective to just lie on your tax form than to bother taking all the legal deductions." https://principia-scientific.org/how...rd-warm-years/


The land based temp record does show much more variation due to instrumental error, observational error and poorly spaced (and placed) recording sites (like only 2 or 3 sties in the vast polar regions compared to the satellite record. ...Two problems with the satellite records is (a) they only go back to 1979, and [2] they are an exercise in "curve fitting" ---weighting the raw data on irradiance and correlating it to temperature history. That's why they occasionally have to "adjust" their weighting because it's no longer giving an accurate reproduction of the history (everyday the history gets one day longer).


Another problem with paying attention to "average temps" is that we don't really care what the average temp is in practical matters. When we get up each day and get dressed, we want to know OUR temperature, not the average for the planet.....Energy naturally flows from hot to cold, so the tropics have not warmed at all, the temperate zones have only warmed slightly (all at nite, not in the day), and of the ~0.5degC "average" warming we've seen the last 30 yrs, ~2.7degC of it has occurred in the polar regions where nobody lives, bringing the total up in a meaningless way down here where we do live.
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