Washington Post Discovers The Urban Heat Island Effect

Meh, this is still probably all your fault

Where the most U.S. residents bake because of concrete and lack of trees

All U.S. cities experience some level of “heat island effect,” in which heat reflects off hard surfaces, intensifying the impact of the hottest days. But as climate change intensifies, nine U.S. cities are special islands unto themselves, according to an analysis released Wednesday that coincides with a heat wave enveloping much of the nation.

The nine — New York, Houston, Los Angeles, Dallas, Chicago, San Antonio, San Diego, Phoenix and Detroit — each have more than 1 million residents enduring temperature increases of 8 degrees or more, because of the heat island effect. That’s according to Climate Central, a nonprofit science and news organization, which has sought to create a broad snapshot of the largest urban populations at risk.

“Anyone who steps out on a sunny sidewalk can feel the difference from when they are in their yard,” Jen Brady, Climate Central senior data analyst, said in an interview. “Obviously, in the city there’s fewer trees, fewer yards and more sunny sidewalks. Those places are going to be warmer. What we’ve tried to do with this analysis is quantify it.”

Forty-one million residents among all nine cities experience the temperature boost, some up to 10 degrees or more, exposing them to higher risks of heat-related illness and more expensive cooling costs, the study found. Climate Central’s analysis did not include demographic data, Brady said, but other organizations such as the D.C. Policy Center have conducted research showing that lower-income communities face disproportionate impact from the heat island effect, partly because their neighborhoods often lack trees.

It’s certainly factual that the Earth has warmed since around 1850, when the Little Ice Age ended. And, surely, some of it is caused globally by the release of greenhouse gases by Mankind. Yet, a goodly chunk of the warming, and perceived warming, goes to land use (you can’t cover up tons of land with pavement, concrete, and buildings without an effect) and the Urban Heat Island effect. And when that extra heat is measured along with the true warming it elevates what the real warming actually is.

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13 Responses to “Washington Post Discovers The Urban Heat Island Effect”

  1. Elwood P. Dowd says:

    When you are in the concrete jungle it seems all encompassing, but in reality urban areas cover only about 2% of the globe’s land area, so urban contribution to the mean global surface temperature is trivial.

    Teach alludes to the temperature measurements in and around cities increasing the apparent mean, but that is why temperature changes are compared to the previous readings. Louisville may be 1C warmer than rural Ohio but the temperature increase year over year in both regions might be 0.01C. Recall the mean global surface temperature is reported as the change.

    • Dana says:

      We’ve long used weather stations at airports as our points of ‘official’ measurement, but airports are paved in concrete themselves. That jacks up the measured temperatures, but what happens when airports which were once at least somewhat out in the country become increasingly surrounded by businesses and residential areas, all paved with concrete, or worse, asphalt? As the airport heat island gets surrounded by other heat islands, thermodynamic heat loss at the weather station is delayed, as the ‘edge’ of the heat island moves further and further away from the measurement station.

      At what point do the changes in the surroundings of the weather stations start to affect the consistency base of the measurements themselves?

      • Elwood P. Dowd says:

        Anthony Watts raised this and other points related to the siting of weather stations significantly biasing the global temperature record. Former skeptic Dr Richard Muller (UC Berkeley), founder and board member of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (“BEST”) project and his team conducted a 2 year study of the temperature record, concluding in 2011:

        After completing the analysis of the full land temperature data set, consisting of more than 1.6 billion temperature measurements dating back to the 1800s from 15 sources around the world, and originated from more than 39,000 temperature stations worldwide, the group submitted four papers for peer-review and publication in scientific journals

        1. The urban heat island effect and poor station quality did not bias the results obtained from earlier studies carried out by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the Hadley Centre and NASA’s GISS Surface Temperature Analysis. The team found that the urban heat island effect is locally large and real, but does not contribute significantly to the average land temperature rise, as the planet’s urban regions amount to less than 1% of the land area. The study also found that while stations considered “poor” might be less accurate, they recorded the same average warming trend.

        2. Global temperatures closely matched previous studies from NASA GISS, NOAA and the Hadley Centre, that have found global warming trends. The Berkeley Earth group estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911 °C, just 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. The team scientific director stated that “…this confirms that these studies were done carefully and that potential biases identified by climate change sceptics did not seriously affect their conclusions.

        Muller has concluded:

        When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn’t know what we’d find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization and other corrections.

        Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.

        • Hoss says:

          When NOAA started “adjusting” quantitative data, years after the fact, they made themselves irrelevant on data collection.

          • Zachriel says:

            Hoss: When NOAA started “adjusting” quantitative data, years after the fact, they made themselves irrelevant on data collection.

            Adjustments are used due to discontinuities in the temperature records, such as when stations are moved or instrumentation changed, a process known as homogenization. However, you can derive the same trend from the raw data using statistical means. See Rohde, et al., Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process, Geoinformatics & Geostatistic 2013.

          • drowningpuppies says:

            Give it up, kiddieZzzz.
            They “cooled” the past
            temperature measurements statistically by using so-called “anomalies”.
            Using Rohde, et al., Berkeley Earth Temperature Averaging Process, Geoinformatics & Geostatistic 2013 is really not a very convincing argument.
            Maybe y’all should just…

            Bwaha! Lolgf https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_cool.gif

          • Elwood P. Dowd says:

            How did the climate scientists persuade the Arctic sea ice, Greenland ice sheet and Russian permafrost to start melting? How did they convince flora and fauna to redistribute?

            lGlobal Warming Deniers now claim they’ve long recognized the Earth is warming but only question the cause (i.e., human generated CO2?).

            Yet… every chance the GWDs get, they deny that the Earth is warming, claiming artifacts in the measurements and “adjusting” the data to make it appear warmer now.

            You can’t have it both ways. Is the Earth warming or not?

            There is no doubt that the Earth is warming, and high confidence that most of the warming can be attributed to human generated CO2. Just as predicted*.

            ______________________
            *Propagandists have little interest in truth, especially “truths” spawned by emerging scientific consensus, so they seize every single study with even a hint of a “prediction” to claim all the predictions have failed! But… as CO2 has increased, so tot has the mean global surface temperature and the retained heat of the oceans.

          • drowningpuppies says:

            Really good 6th grader rhetorical questions ya got there, Rimjob.

            Keep at it, porkchop, with your repeatedly overused infantile “arguments”.
            They’re so very persuasive. https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yahoo.gif

            #TheStenchFromAfftonMoIsOverwhelming
            Bwaha! Lolgf https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_cool.gif

  2. Zachriel says:

    William Teach: And when that extra heat is measured along with the true warming it elevates what the real warming actually is.

    One way to check the validity of the temperature anomaly based on surface measurements is to remove urban stations from the calculation. See Rohde et al., Influence of Urban Heating on the Global Temperature Land Average using Rural Sites Identified from MODIS Classifications, Geoinformatics & Geostatistic 2013: “no urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010”.

    Another way to check the validity of the temperature anomaly based on surface measurements is to compare it to the temperature anomaly from an independent source, such as satellite observations of atmospheric radiation. Satellite observations show much the same trend.

    • drowningpuppies says:

      The Earth’s Temperature


      Currently: 57.44°F/14.13°C
      Deviation: 0.24°F/0.13°C
      Stations processed last hour: 70431
      Last station processed: Villahermosa, Mexico
      Update time: 2023-07-27 13:56:07 UTC

      https://temperature.global/

  3. L.G.Brandon!, L.G.Brandon! says:

    The Ballad of The Kenosha Kid by Dennis Keith

    https://youtu.be/EYIHOJOV4rE

  4. Zachriel says:

    Washington Post Discovers The Urban Heat Island Effect

    Washington Post {among many}
    8/21/2014, D.C. has one of the most intense urban heat islands in the U.S.
    8/28/2018, This week’s NOAA ‘heat island’ campaign is mapping what neighborhoods in D.C. are hottest
    10/15/2018, On sizzling summer days, Northeast D.C. heats up the most, NOAA analysis shows
    7/15/2021, These cities have the most stifling heat islands in the United States
    11/9/2021, Exposure to extreme urban heat has tripled worldwide

    • drowningpuppies says:

      11/9/2021, Exposure to extreme urban heat has tripled worldwide
      So scary, y’all!

      The Earth’s Temperature

      Currently: 57.44°F/14.13°C
      Deviation: 0.24°F/0.13°C
      Stations processed last hour: 52881
      Last station processed: El Borma, Tunisia
      Update time: 2023-07-27 16:08:29 UTC

      https://temperature.global/

      Bwaha! Lolgf https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_cool.gif

Pirate's Cove