No, Climate Central, Summer Warming Isn’t Due to Climate Change
2 days ago Anthony Watts
Climate Central claims in “Summer Warming (1970–2025) Driven By Climate Change” that summers have warmed in 97 percent of 243 U.S. cities and that human-caused climate change is the leading driver in 91 percent of them. This is misleading at best. The analysis relies on biased average temperature trends and model-based attribution while downplaying one of the most important and well-documented drivers of urban warming: the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.
Climate Central claims:
Summers have warmed since 1970 in 97% of 243 U.S. cities analyzed. A new Climate Central analysis shows that human-caused climate change is the leading driver of summer warming trends in 221 (91%) of these cities.
Digging deeper, we find that Climate Central’s findings are based on changes in average summer temperature, calculated from daily highs and lows. That matters. Because when you look at how UHI typically manifests, the strongest signal is not in daytime highs, it is in nighttime minimum temperatures.
The Urban Heat Island is not a fringe concept. It is a well-documented physical process, and it has been observed and mapped worldwide. Even the often-biased website Wikipedia gets it, saying, “[t]he urban heat island (UHI) effect is a meteorological and climatological phenomenon in which urban areas experience significantly warmer temperatures than surrounding rural areas. The temperature difference is usually larger at night than during the day.”
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/05/28/no-climate-central-summer-warming-isnt-due-to-climate-change/
