Dominant factors that determine temperature
By Henry Pool.
Recently, someone asked me what dominant factors influence the temperature around us. It is an interesting question to consider.
The influence of the sun
First of all, there is the variation of irradiation that we get from the sun. In general, most scientists, myself included, find that the variation in the total energy we receive from the sun is not very variable within the time frame of a person's age, on average 87 years. Ten years ago I did an extensive statistical analysis of the daily data of 54 weather stations (ws), i.e. 27 ws in each hemisphere, more or less balanced to the 0 latitude. I reasoned that maxima would be a good measure to look at the heat coming through the atmosphere. Of all those results from the period 1974 to 2014, I drew up the following graph for Tmax (roughly), for the acceleration or deceleration of Tmax (you just plot the measured rate of change at certain points against time):
Figure 1My finding at the time was that the maximum temperature per decade has gone to negative, measured about 17 or 18 years ago from 2014, i.e. 2014 – 18 = 1996. So in 2015 I was reasonably convinced that all the hype about global warming would soon pass if the global average temperature (median) would go down again. Strangely enough, this did not happen, as the following graph shows. My conclusion is that all extra heat measured from 1996 – which is approximately from -0.2 to +0.4 = 0.6C – must have come from somewhere else than the sun; Watch chart below:
Figure 2
The Urban Heat Island effect (UHI)
In my opinion, the biggest factor that causes an increase in the temperature around us is the so-called UHI effect. It is caused by the fact that we are putting more and more buildings, pavement and asphalt around us that retain heat. This also includes solar panels and wind turbines. The rivers and waters around us are also getting warmer due to all kinds of human activities that need cooling water. Willie Soon and others have done an evaluation of the contiguous states of the US and measured a difference of +0.05K per decade between 20% of the most densely populated residentialareas and 20% of the most remote areas. Densely populated residential areas give results that are on average 1.8 times higher. That is significantly more than the <10% that the IPCC wants to attribute to the UHI effect. See Figure 3 below. Says Willie Soon: 'Since 2011, more than half of all humanity has urbanized. So it is quite understandable that for most people there is a perceptible 'warming' in their environment. But we must remember that the total area of all cities is still only about 3-4% of all the land. And there is75% of all weather stations...... So you can clearly see here that the UHI effect is much greater than 10%'.
https://www.climategate.nl/2025/09/dominante-factoren-die-de-temperatuur-bepalen/
