Urban night lighting observations challenge interpretation of land surface temperature observations

[rangerrebew]

Urban night lighting observations challenge interpretation of land surface temperature observations
Posted on December 17, 2022 by curryja | 32 Comments
by Alan Longhurst

The pattern of warming of surface air temperature recorded by the instrumental data is accepted almost without question by the science community as being the consequence of the progressive and global contamination of the atmosphere by CO2.   But if they were properly inquisitive, it would not take them long see what was wrong with that over-simplification: the evidence is perfectly clear, and simple enough for any person of good will to understand.


In 2006 NASA Goddard published two plots showing that the USA data[1] did not follow the same warming trend as the rest of the world. Rural data numerically dominate the USA archive, while urban data massively dominate almost everywhere else.   Observations began very early in the USA – being introduced by Jefferson in 1776 – and that emphasis had already then been placed on providing assistance to farmers.

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They are consistent with the ‘global warming‘ that so worries us today being an urban affair, caused not by global CO2 pollution of the global atmosphere but by the heat of combustion of petroleum we burn in our vehicles, our homes and where we work – all of which is additive to the radiative consequences of our buildings and impermeable cement and asphalt surfaces. However, towns and cities in fact occupy only a very small fraction of the land surface of our planet, about 0.53% (or 1.25%, if their densely populated suburbs are included) according to a recent computation done with rule-based mapping. But it is in this very small fraction of land surfaces that most of the data in the CRUTEM or GISTEMP archives have been recorded.

 https://judithcurry.com/2022/12/17/urban-night-lighting-observations-challenge-interpretation-of-land-surface-temperature-observations/

[The_Reader_David]

Ah, the other of the ignored contributors to anthropogenic warming that I always like to point out:  aggregate heat-island effect.

I'm perfectly happy to acknowledge that human activity influences the earth's climate. (How could I not be? I live in the Great Plains where the lakes built by the Corps of Engineers for flood control moderated the previously more extreme mid-continental climate.)  I am not willing to believe conclusions drawn from models which assume a single cause for observed changed to a massive non-linear dynamical system with multiple known (and one might suspect many unknown) inputs.

Besides greenhouse gas emissions, we produce the heat island effect in which waste heat from human activities warms the climate in and near cities, and deposit soot on both polar and alpine ice-packs from coal burning (as well as other light-absorbing impurities from agricultural activity stirring up soil).  Of course the policy prescriptions that would flow from even an attempt to accurately include these effects would be primarily for Russia, China, India and the EU to adopt and enforce analogues of the American Clean Air act to get rid of the soot from coal burning, and urban planning to include more parks and roof-top gardens or at least heat-reflective roofs, not governments and the UN seizing control of the world's energy economy to enforce "decarbonization", so there aren't any takers on looking seriously at a better (but still lousy) model.