Every now and then we come across a new journal article that reminds us of the challenges that exist in finding an anthropogenic signal within the near-surface temperature record.
Urban Heat Island Impact on Temperature In Manchester, UK
The latest study to cross our desks that gives us pause in this regard is from Levermore et al. (2018).*
The essence of their work included an examination of the urban heat island in Manchester, UK.
Using hourly temperature data from an urban and rural (~12 km away) UK Met Office site over the period 1996-2011, the five scientists calculated a statistically significant urban heat island influence of 0.021°C per year in the Manchester data, which trend is “approximately equal to the lower predictions of climate change.”
Levermore et al. also calculated the change in urban morphology between 2000 and 2009 based on changing aerial green space, determining that “the green area has reduced by up to 11% over the whole area shown, although it is only a 1.5% reduction within 200 m of the [urban] station.”
And it was this reduction in green space that was ascribed by the authors to be the main factor of urban heat island contamination in the Manchester temperature record.
Think about the above results. A 1.5 to 11% reduction in green space over a ten-year period was significant enough to raise temperatures in the Manchester record by an average of 0.42°C.
That spurious warming is about half the magnitude of warming that the world has seen globally since the end of the Little Ice Age over a century ago.
Clearly, correcting for urbanization effects is a knotty issue of climate science and, if not done correctly, will add spurious warming unrelated to natural or anthropogenic trends.
And that is one of the reasons that satellite-derived temperature data are considered to be superior to data collected at near-surface land-based locations.
*Levermore, G., Parkinson, J., Lee, K., Laycock, P. and Lindley, S. 2018. The increasing trend of the urban heat island intensity. Urban Climate 24: 360-368.
Read more at CO2 Science
Trackback from your site.
Physics Author
| #
Readers can confirm that PSI authors like Postma are wrong in assuming radiation is the primary determinant of global mean surface temperatures. It is not and data from planets including Venus, Uranus and Neptune all confirm that it is gravity which leads to the base of the troposphere being warmer, not solar radiaton, or backradiation, let alone both, such as climatologists assume because they don’t understand that the Stefan Boltzmann Law does not work for a combination of atmospheric and solar radiation.
It’s time that you and I John had a proper scientific discussion, and you are welcome to invite any other physics author to participate. In 2013 I presented you with the correct physics that does indeed explain the surface temperatures and the necessary downward heat transfers required to explain those temperatures and balance on the sunlit side the energy lost on the dark side.
Your pet authors Postma and Latour merely read the Conclusion in my paper and assumed, or at least asserted to you, that I must be wrong. After all, the paper refuted their own writings about radiation. Their writings were already refuted by Prof Claes Johnson anyway, and yet you still publish articles by people like Stephen Wells and Herb Rose that are way out in their physics and sometimes implicitly agree that the false physics of climatology is right, at least in its claims that radiation causes heat transfer from the cold atmosphere to the warmer surface. Of course, Prof Johnson proved that wrong years ago.
Many times I have suggested you get someone to write an article attempting to refute my 2013 “Planetary Core and Surface Temperatures” paper*, giving me right of reply. But instead, you, in your childish way, have kept on deleting my comments all these last five years or more.
DJC
Reply