| Writing in American Thinker, Mark Adams notes that although 2023’s summer was hotter than normal, as the mainstream media voluminously report, three recent papers published in respected peer-reviewed journals have concluded that much of the hyped heat was a result of the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, with compromised ground-based temperature stations in expanding urban and suburban areas biasing the local and thus global averaged temperatures upward. As Adams writes: |
| Although urban areas occupy only about 4% of the land surface, most weather monitoring stations are located in urban regions. Those same regions … have an abundance of concrete and asphalt, both of which have remarkable heat-absorbing properties. The result is that these urban islands are warmer than their rural counterparts. That raises an important question: If the majority of temperature readings are taken in areas of inherently higher temperature how much does this skew the claimed rise in temperatures? |
| If the three peer-reviewed papers published recently are right, it turns out a lot of the “record-setting” extended heat this summer was likely due to UHIs. Those three papers, published in the journals Climate, the Journal of Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, and the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology, after examining copious amounts of data, conclude that as much as 40 percent of the reported temperature increase this summer was attributable to the UHI effect. These papers, of course, are not the only studies implicating UHIs in the recent reported rise in temperatures that so alarms the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the mainstream media. Most recently, Climate Change Weekly 485 discussed research from scientists at the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, which indicates summer warming since 1885 has been exaggerated by as much as 100 percent. And my colleague, meteorologist Anthony Watts, recently updated earlier research confirming the vast majority of surface temperatures stations (96 percent of those surveyed, in fact) used by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to record and report temperatures in the United States, are corrupted by the UHI effect, failing to meet NOAA’s own standards for trustworthy temperature data. In short, mounting amounts of research confirm what climate realists like myself and the rest of us at The Heartland Institute have long said: Reported surface station temperatures are badly compromised and shouldn’t be used to raise the alarm about a supposed unnatural increase in temperatures, the rate of rising temperatures, or anthropogenic climate change more generally. Alarm is unwarranted based on real-world data. This piece originally appeared at HeartlandDailyNews.com and has been republished here with permission. |
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