Media reports are laced with unsubstantiated claims that man is overheating his planet. Every time climate change is mentioned in a story, even features in a newspaper’s food or fashion pages, it is understood that humans are turning Earth into a muggy greenhouse by burning fossil fuels. [emphasis, links added]
No evidence is provided to corroborate the claim. Man-made global warming just is, and skeptics are deplorables.
But the facts tell a different story.
Roy Spencer, a University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientist, has determined that:
“65% of the U.S. linear warming trend between 1895 and 2023 was due to increasing population density at the suburban and urban stations; 8% of the warming was due to urbanization at rural stations. Most of that (urban heat island) effect warming occurred before 1970.”
In other words, man has built heat sinks, which skew the temperature data upward.
Researchers have known about the urban heat island effect for almost two centuries. It “is mostly due to the replacement of vegetation and aerated soils with buildings and impervious pavement.”
Spencer and co-authors John Christy and William Braswell explain that “global warming trends calculated for land areas have been spuriously inflated” because “most surface air temperature measurements are made in or near human settlements, and most of those settlements have grown over time.”
It’s inarguable that urban settings have amplified temperature readings. Three years ago, the Heartland Institute published a paper written by meteorologist Anthony Watts, which demonstrated that the ground-based system for measuring surface temperatures in the U.S. is unreliable.
A follow-up to a 2009 study, the report noted that:
“…approximately 96% of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be ‘acceptable,’ uncorrupted placement. These findings strongly undermine the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends.”
The stations that have been recording tainted data are “located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, located on blistering-hot rooftops, or placed near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat.”
Nine of 10 stations failed to meet the National Weather Service’s “own siting requirements, which stipulate that stations must be 30 meters (100 feet) or more away from an artificial or radiating/reflecting heat source.”
Read rest at Issues & Insights
