Tag Archives: urban heat island

Where are the true environmentalists?

From CFACT

By Joe Bastardi

We have had a week that has exposed the no-limits extremes of the climate campaign.

John Kerry, with his parting shot as Climate Czar, said that the world might feel better about Russia’s actions in the Ukrainian war if they lowered their climate footprint.

The depths of lunacy this reaches know no bounds. It is because of the actions of Kerry and his ilk in the administration Putin has the funds to fight the war in the first place.

In Germany, destroying an ancient forest to put up wind turbines is beyond any rational thought. First of all, you can wreck plenty of open spaces with the turbines. But the removal of 120k ancient trees, each taking away 50 lbs of CO2 for 6 million pounds a year, and the environmental cost of building these monstrosities should have every environmentalist up in arms.

Do they realize the effect on the local climate?

Forests are a great way to remove CO2 as I mentioned above, and are naturally cooler areas. So if you are afraid of CO2 (I am not, but understand you might be) this shows in no uncertain terms the depths of delusion these people are forcing on others.

How this is even considered, is beyond me. And if you are an environmentalist how are you not up in arms at this?

You have a forest that has survived wars and turmoil. Germany’s forests are supposedly dying because of climate change so they destroy more forests to prevent more climate change. How is this even considered or tolerated? This is just another matter that Dostoevsky was right about.

Then, there is this illustration from this Twitter handle.

True Science PEng, DFP, ADFS, MA, MBA.

The covering of fields with solar panels could actually ADD TO WARMING.  The illustration means microclimates will indeed change. We see this all the time with cities.

Not only is there an urban heat island with downstream implications. (For example, the Philadelphia UHI is a great place to start thunderstorms that then follow the 3 major highways, US 30, US 322, and the Atlantic City expressway ESE toward the shore.

There are major differences in thunderstorm frequency at the NJ shore for instance north of Atlantic City vs south, more to the north enhanced by the effect noted above). But now imagine fields that were covered with cooling vegetation replaced with solar panels that can elevate temperatures to 70C. 

Imagine the change to the environment in those areas. The vegetation and animal life be dammed.

But this is because the people pushing this  HAVE NO LOVE OF WEATHER OR CLIMATE. I have written about this several times. They simply use weather and climate to advance their mission. There is no rational thinking about this.

It is getting so bad that the Dostoevsky quote above, not only is evident in the irrational policies we are seeing enacted in non-climate issues but is leading to some kind of disorder that is causing societal disruptions we are seeing with climate protesters that are blocking roads or trying to destroy priceless art. Circle back to the destruction of the ancient forest. How is that so different from throwing orange paint on a priceless piece of art as far as an irrational action based on a phony mission?

In the face of all this lunacy, these facts seem to be completely ignored, nicely compiled by man-made climate change skeptic, Graham Keagan:

Since 1900… – Life expectancy +130% – Literacy percentage up 4 fold – Population up 5 fold – GDP per capita up 7 fold – Poverty down 7 fold – Death from natural disasters down 50 fold (with 5x the number of people on the planet)  Civilization is flourishing!

There is no rational reason for what is being forced down the throat of the planet. The destruction of an ancient forest should raise alarm bells.

Kerry’s parting comments that would imply a carbon footprint reduction would somehow offset aggression that we are indirectly funding by phony climate war policies Kerry advocates should raise alarm bells. The effect of these actions on the environment, the destruction of large areas of nature by the establishment of these fields, and the cost of the materials should be obvious. This has nothing to do with climate or weather. It is being pushed by people who have no love of climate, weather, nature, or mankind in general.

Dostoevsky was (is) right. It’s time for rational people to stop this irrationality. I have never thought climate should be a big issue, but what is driving all this is. The motivation for all this is the reduction, if not destruction, of man’s upward mobility — and climate is the tool.  This must be stopped peacefully at the ballot box. Because, in the end, this irrationality is the nail in the coffin of our freedom and is designed for top-down elitist control.

Media Ignore Delhi’s Coldest May Since 1901

From Watts Up With That?

By Vijay Jayaraj

On May 4, India’s capital of New Delhi recorded the third coldest May morning since 1901. At 16 degree Celsius (60 Fahrenheit), the region’s 32 million residents woke up to a relatively cold morning in what is usually the hottest month of the year.

So why is there a record low temperature when the dominant mainstream narrative tells us that climate change has made our environs warmer than before? Is this just an aberration?

While Western media obsessed with the warm weather in Spain, India’s capital recorded a very cold summer morning. In fact, most of the cold-weather records in Delhi have gone unreported in Western media, which are mainly interested in showcasing the city’s extreme summer temperatures.

Neatly concealed from the public’s eye are the record low winter temperatures that Delhi has been witnessing since 2017. In December 2018, Delhi recorded an average minimum temperature of 7°C (44°F), the third lowest in the last 50 years. On December 30, 2019, the maximum temperature settled at 9°C (49°F), making it the coldest December day in 122 years.

As is the case globally, winter cold in Delhi is a bigger killer than summer heat. According to studies, short-term exposure to extreme temperature accounts for 6.5 percent of all deaths in India, with 88 percent of that amount caused by cold weather and only 12 percent by hot weather.

This is an example of media bias towards advancing a narrative of apocalyptic warming when reporting weather events. Also, part of this slanted reporting is the media’s failure to acknowledge the real reason behind the recording of all-time high summer temperatures: the urban heat island (UHI).

Urban Heat Island, Not Climate, Sets Records

During my stint as a climate consultant in New Delhi, I lived close to the Safdarjung temperature-measurement station. As per the Indian Meteorological Department, the highest maximum temperature ever recorded at Safdarjung was 47°C (117°F) on May 29, 1944.

This high temperature recorded nearly 80 years ago for this station has yet to be toppled by the 21st century warming that supposedly threatens us with doom, and the reason is probably the station’s location.

Unlike the other temperature monitoring stations in Delhi, the Safdarjung station is in a relatively greener section of the city. Thus, it is less susceptible to the Urban Heat Island effect, and, therefore, has not been registering the insanely high temperatures of 49°C (120°F) witnessed in and around Delhi.

Mahesh Palawat, vice-president of Skymet Weather Services, says, “Safdarjung weather station is located in a fairly green area, as compared to the rest of Delhi, which has a lot of heavily concretised spaces without much green cover. Temperatures in these parts of the city will therefore, understandably, be higher.”

So, the reason thermometers record new all-time highs in Delhi is because of urbanization’s concrete structures and pavements and other landscape changes. Weather officials also note that some of the newer automatic weather instruments used in highly urbanized areas may be prone to error.

“Most observatories in Delhi have automatic systems, which have a scope for error because they use bimetals, which can contract and expand during different weather conditions,” says an official of the India Meteorological Department in the Hindustan Times. He added that abnormal temperature spikes of the error-prone stations should be compared to the readings of older stations like Safdarjung to obtain “a more precise idea of the temperature.”

It takes just a bit of common sense to understand the artificial urban heat island impact on thermometers in cities and airports. However, preconceived notions of catastrophic warming pose serious hurdles to grasping this reality.

Delhi’s case illustrates that warming is not a continuous and unprecedented phenomenon as some claim it to be. Instead, we see at play a chaotic climate system at work with unpredictable weather patterns. Additionally, we must be mindful of the urban heat island impact when reading news bulletins about record-high summer temperatures.

Vijay Jayaraj is a Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds a master’s degree in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia, UK and resides in India.

Classifying Land Temperature Stations as Either “Urban” or “Rural” in UHI Studies Proves Nothing about Spurious Temperature Trends

From Dr. Roy Spencer’s Global Warming Blog

April 8th, 2023 by Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

As I spend more time working on a research project, the more time I have to reflect on things that others have simply assumed to be true. And in the process I sometimes have an epiphany than clarifies my thinking on a subject.

As I continue to investigate how to quantify urban heat island (UHI) effects for the purpose of determining the extent to which land surface temperature trends have been spuriously inflated by urbanization effects, there is one recurring theme I find has not been handled well in previously published papers on the subject. I’ve mentioned it before, but it’s so important, it deserves its own (brief) blog post.

It has to do with the common assumption that “urban” thermometer sites experience spurious warming over time, while “rural” sites do not.

Obviously, at any given point in time urban environments are warmer than rural environments, especially at night. And urbanization has increased around temperature monitoring sites over the last 50 to 100 years (and longer). Yet, a number of studies over the years have curiously found that urban and rural sites have very similar temperature trends. This has led investigators to conclude that temperature datasets such as the Global Historical Climate Network (GHCN), especially after “homogenization”, is largely free of spurious warming effects from urbanization.

But the conclusion is wrong…all it shows is that temperature trends between rural and urban sites are similar… not that those trends are unaffected by urbanization effects.

Instead, studies have demonstrated that the greatest rate of warming as population increases is for nearly-rural sites, not urban. The one-fourth power relationship found by Oke (1973) and others (and which I am also finding in GHCN data in the summer) means that a population density increase from 1 to 10 persons per sq. km (both “rural”) produces more warming than an urban site going from 1,000 to 1,700 persons per sq. km.

Thus, “rural” sites cannot be assumed to be immune to spurious warming from urbanization. This means that studies that have compared “rural” to “urban” temperature trends haven’t really proved anything.

The mistake people have made is to assume that just because urban locations are warmer than rural locations at any given time that they then have a much larger spurious warming impact on trends over time. That is simply not true.