Wood Romances

I've written a lot on the effect of urbanization and urban heat islands  (UHI) on GMST and CONUS  trends, and I don't want to duplicate those efforts here, but I think this section of the DOE report deserves its own post. The DOE report (authored by the Climate Working Group) has a section on "Urbanization influence on temperature trends" on pp. 20-21 (section 3.3) that engages in a bit of rhetorical slight of hand that I find dishonest. In particular, their treatment of UHI involves two studies authored or co-authored by members of the Climate Working Group (CWG), but the report misrepresented one and casually dismissed the other. The report misrepresented a study by Roy Spencer and casually dismissed a paper co-authored by Judith Curry, despite the fact that this study provided conclusive evidence against the position taken in the DOE report. I consider this particularly dishonest. Their treatment of UHI begins with: Historical temperature data over land has been ...

A new paper[1] by Spencer and Christy was published on urban heat islands (UHI), and I'd like to clarify what it says and what can actually be claimed as a result of it. The reason why has to do with a recent blog post from WUWT that claims the paper shows that 65% of global warming is due to UHI warming effects, rather than increasing greenhouse gas concentrations. Chris Rotter at WUWT says, A new study from the University of Alabama in Huntsville addresses the question of how much the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect is responsible for the higher temperatures at weather stations across the world. Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy have spent several years developing a novel method that quantifies, for the first time, the average UHI warming effects related to population density. Their finding: no less than 65% of “runaway global warming” is not caused by our emissions of carbon dioxide, but by the urbanization of the world. There's very little in this that resembles what the...