New Study Casts Doubt On A Key Metric For Predicting Global Warming

[DB]

The effect is small but measurable. even skeptics agree that stuff like "urban heat islands" are real and measurable and that by definition affects climate.

I'd bet most of the urban heat island effect is due to pavement, roofing and buildings absorbing the suns radiation reradiating heat. Not from energy production or use by people. The bottom line is what the actual consequences are. There's very little evidence of any significant consequences and that those changes due to people are dwarfed by natural variations.

[the_doc]

I'd bet most of the urban heat island effect is due to pavement, roofing and buildings absorbing the suns radiation reradiating heat. Not from energy production or use by people. The bottom line is what the actual consequences are. There's very little evidence of any significant consequences and that those changes due to people are dwarfed by natural variations.

As I understand the larger controversy, the greatest significance of the urban heat islands has nothing to do with their effect on climate but on the perception of warming trends.

To wit:  Historical data starting from the first part of the 20th Century have been and still are mainly based on fixed monitoring stations;  many if not most of these stations were/are near urban areas.  Unfortunately, as the urban areas have grown, that growth has tended to produce warmer local conditions at the monitoring stations--which obviously skews the "global temperature trend" data (calculated from the stations' corrupted data) in favor of the alarmists' claims.   

[LateForLunch]

Yes, but there is a difference between affecting local climate and affecting global climate.

Thank you. If the effect of urbanization were global, it would effect average global temperatures, but it doesn't. Any rises in temperature occur in the immediate vicinity of the urbanization and are disbursed throughout the system through all of the natural elements - water as vapor/humidity etc., Coriolis winds (which distribute heat to the upper atmosphere to be radiated to space), rain (which removes heat from the air and deposits it in the ground or in bodies of water).

Remember, we are talking about urbanization which effects less than 5% of the planet's surface (since human activity only take up 5% of 196.9 million square miles of land area). The effects of urbanization are minuscule in terms of the total energy of the climatic black-body radiation retention mechanism.

[Smokin Joe]

Yup.  And the temperatures were FAR higher.

Then the removal of that CO2 from the atmosphere, being trapped as coal or other fossil hydrocarbons, caused the temperatures to plummet down to where we are today.

If we want to go back to those conditions, all we have to do is burn the fossil fuels!

You oversimplify. From: http://joannenova.com.au/global-warming-2/ice-core-graph/
One of those graphs:

Please note that 12,000 years ago, where I sit was covered by an ice sheet over 1km thick (some estimates say 2km). This is roughly the time Clovis Man makes his appearance in North America.
Note, however, that the bulk of the warming occurred between 20,000 years ago and 12000 years ago, and did so without any coal-fired power plants, SUVs, or oil well flares. In fact, the whole industrial revolution thingy was well, between 19,850 and 11,850 years away.

But wait, there's more. According to the Vostok ice core data, the lag time between temperature going up and CO₂ increasing is roughly 800 years. That makes CO₂ a lagging indicator, not a forcing indicator.

So, why does the CO₂ content go up? Soluability. CO₂ dissolves more readily in colder water (70% of the earth's surface). As temperatures warm, the ability of the CO₂ to remain in solution declines, and it is precipitated to the atmosphere.

Just like the CO₂ leaving beer or pop as it warms, it left the oceans. Now, the concentration wasn't as high in the oceans as in the beverages, but there is a lot more marine habitat than pop or beer.

[LateForLunch]

Great post. And not only that. the CO2 levels were roughly 760 PPM (almost 100% higher than today's average level @400 PPM) when Antarctica became a permanent wasteland. If carbon forcing were real, that would never have happened. The "greenhouse" effects of CO2 in the millions of years prior were due to the fact that it was hundreds of times higher than today, not just a couple of percentage points.

[Hondo69]

As a young man growing up in rural Iowa I worked with several conservationists groups such as the Isaac Walton League.  The overriding principle was both basic and logical - leave it better than you found it.

While most of these groups have been around well over a hundred years they receive almost no attention from the media or our government overseers.  Admittedly, there is nothing flashy, radical or headline worthy in their work.  They simply work to preserve our natural resources using traditional conservation methods. 

When radical environmentalists began to make headlines in the 1970's it struck me as pretty funny.  My thinking at the time was these kooks are obviously missing the boat because despite their protests they clearly have no fundamental understanding of the land.  All hat and no cattle.

Fast forward to today - it's not funny anymore. 

We're still missing the boat and there's a very basic lesson we just can't seem to learn.  There's a big difference between conservationists and environmentalists.

[DB]

As I understand the larger controversy, the greatest significance of the urban heat islands has nothing to do with their effect on climate but on the perception of warming trends.

To wit:  Historical data starting from the first part of the 20th Century have been and still are mainly based on fixed monitoring stations;  many if not most of these stations were/are near urban areas.  Unfortunately, as the urban areas have grown, that growth has tended to produce warmer local conditions at the monitoring stations--which obviously skews the "global temperature trend" data (calculated from the stations' corrupted data) in favor of the alarmists' claims.   

You are correct.