Mosher/Curry Say There Is No Urban Heat Island Effect

Influence of Urban Heating  on the Global Temperature  Land Average using Rural  Sites Identified from MODIS  Classifications

Wickham C1  , Rohde R2  , Muller RA3,4  *, Wurtele J3,4  , Curry J5  , Groom  D3  , Jacobsen R3,4  , Perlmutter S3,4  , Rosenfeld A3 and Mosher S6

The effect of urban heating on estimates of global average  land surface temperature is studied by applying an urban-rural  classification based on MODIS satellite data to the Berkeley  Earth temperature dataset compilation of 36,869 sites from 15  different publicly available sources

We observe the opposite of an urban heating effect over the  period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.10 ± 0.24°C/100yr (2? error) in  the Berkeley Earth global land temperature average. The confidence  interval is consistent with a zero urban heating effect, and at most  a small urban heating effect (less than 0.14°C/100yr, with 95%  confidence) on the scale of the observed warming (1.9 ± 0.1°C/100 yr  since 1950 in the land average from Figure 5A).

scitechnol.com/2327-4581/2327-4581-1-104.pdf

Everyone knows there is an urban heat island effect. This has been understood for a couple of centuries. The weather forecaster says every night “a few degrees cooler in outlying areas.” Many cities have had studies done showing five to ten degrees warming in town relative to truly rural areas. Even tiny towns like Barrow, AK have 2-3C UHI effects

ScreenHunter_7093 Feb. 12 23.35

Hinkel_etal_2003_winter_UHI.pdf

So how did Mosher and Curry come to a conclusion so utterly daft?

They made the standard climate science mistake of doing a bunch of math on a problem they don’t understand. Barrow would certainly appear as a rural site in their methodology, yet Barrow has 2-3C UHI.

I routinely observe 5 degrees F warming just going from open space on my bicycle into an adjacent neighborhood. The presence of any asphalt, brick, heated houses and snow removal in the area has a marked effect on temperature. How could they not have an effect?

Over the past hundred years suburban sprawl and pavement has spread everywhere. This has had a marked effect on the surface temperature record, and has nothing to do with urban lights. There is no reason to expect that downtown areas would have changed much over the past century, because they were already paved over. It is the semi-rural areas which have expanded and been paved over. Curry and Mosher see UHI warming in supposedly rural sites, but don’t recognize it as UHI warming – because their methodology is flawed.

Garbage in/garbage out. Standard fare for peer-reviewed climate science. Next I will show you what actual UHI science looks like.

I did a survey of the ten oldest stations in New South Wales And Victoria, circled below. Three rural stations were not included because of obvious problems with the data, but none showed any warming.

MELBOURNE REGIONAL OFFICE              ASN00086071
DENILIQUIN (WILKINSON ST)              ASN00074128
BATHURST GAOL                          ASN00063004
SYDNEY (OBSERVATORY HILL)              ASN00066062
CAPE OTWAY LIGHTHOUSE          GSN     ASN00090015
BOURKE POST OFFICE                     ASN00048013
WAGGA WAGGA (KOORINGAL)                ASN00072151
FORBES (CAMP STREET)                   ASN00065016
INVERELL COMPARISON                    ASN00056017
GUNNEDAH POOL                          ASN00055023

ScreenHunter_3589 Oct. 11 08.55

The two urban stations at Melbourne and Sydney both showed strong warming, and both have disastrously poor siting of their thermometers in the middle of large cities.

ScreenHunter_3552 Oct. 11 07.59ScreenHunter_3566 Oct. 11 08.22

By contrast, all of the rural stations show a long term cooling trend, with some recent warming. (Note that there is no data for the most recent years with some of the rural stations.)

ScreenHunter_3563 Oct. 11 08.17ScreenHunter_3558 Oct. 11 08.11

ScreenHunter_3570 Oct. 11 08.28 ScreenHunter_3574 Oct. 11 08.34

ScreenHunter_3582 Oct. 11 08.47

The only conclusion which can be derived from this is that Australia has not warmed long-term, and that BOM claims of record temperatures are due to UHI and/or data tampering.

For all GHCN stations in Australia, there is no net warming since 1880

ScreenHunter_7094 Feb. 13 06.50

Curry and Mosher tell us that there is no UHI and no warming due to data tampering. First rate comedy.

ScreenHunter_7083 Feb. 12 05.58

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105 Responses to Mosher/Curry Say There Is No Urban Heat Island Effect

  1. Google micro or local climate.
    Pages of info.
    No you Steven but the ‘climate scientists’

    Cities contains a lot of concrete structures like streets and buildings which soak up sunlight during the day. At night, they release this heat, which warms urban areas several degrees Celsius above nearby rural areas. This phenomenon is known as the urban heat island effect.

    http://www.enviropedia.org.uk/Climate/Local_Climates.php

  2. Anything is possible says:

    Please tell me they didn’t use Hansen’s night-lights fiasco to define urban and rural stations.

    (Checks pdf)……….

    ….THEY DID!

    • Edmonton Al says:

      So.. please explain this to we poor soles. Thanks.

      • SMS says:

        Hansen and the GISS/Nasa team did not do a proper UHI survey on each temperature site and determine an algorithm. Instead they looked at a night time satellite picture of the world and determined UHI based on intensity of light coming from any one designated USHCN site. But they did not attribute more than .1 degree C of UHI to any one site. You can look at Nasa’s recent study of UHI and soon realize that UHI is extensive and significant.

        From Richards comment below: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/heat-island-sprawl.html

        On the other hand, NOAA does not make any corrections for UHI.

    • DD More says:

      In addition to the ‘night-lights’, look what Hansen did with the data afterward.

      From the Climategate emails # – 2328
      date: Wed, 3 Jun 2009 15:07:25 +010 ???
      from: “Parker, David”
      subject: RE: Tom’s thoughts on urban errors …
      Everybody wants to add an estimate of what UHI bias might be into their error bars, but it seems to me that rather than trust folk lore that there is a uhi bias, they first need to find one systematically in the network. Until they do that, the former is just hand waving to appease the know-littles. Jim Hansen adjusts his urban stations (based on night-lights) to nearby rural stations, but if I recall correctly (I’ll send that paper shortly), he warms the trend in 42 percent of the urban stations indicating that nearly half have an urban cold bias. Yet error analyzers want to add a one sided extra error bar for uhi…..
      Regards,
      Tom

      http://www.ecowho.com/foia.php?file=1057.txt&search=Hansen+adjust
      Bold in the original.

      Does Best believe, like Hansen thinks, UHI makes 42 percent of cities colder?

    • gymnosperm says:

      Furthermore, quoting their paper,

      “locations in the Berkeley
      Earth merged dataset are reported only to the nearest tenth of a
      degree in latitude and longitude. This makes it impossible to identify
      each station as definitively urban or rural”

      Undaunted by this insignificant little problem they follow,

      “Rather than
      compare urban sites to non-urban, thereby explicitly estimating UHI
      effects, we split sites into very-rural and not very-rural.”

      Ooohhh! I see…not.

      Now, throw that paper in the bin, roll up your sleeves, and do whatever it takes to EXPLICITLY compare urban and non urban sites!

      • Anything is possible says:

        “locations in the Berkeley
        Earth merged dataset are reported only to the nearest tenth of a
        degree in latitude and longitude.”

        =====================================================

        ^^^^^^^This.

        Doing it to that degree (sic) of “accuracy” introduces a location error of up to 7 miles in latitude and longitude (longitude depends on distance from the equator) which can put weather stations in some “interesting” places – like in the ocean. Use Google Earth to try it for yourself.

        The whole thing is FUBAR.

  3. Alan Poirier says:

    Ignoring UHI is no different than ignoring the Holcene Optimum, the Minoan Warming, the Egyptian Warming, the Medieval Warming, the warm decades of the 30s and 40s. They cannot see it for what it is — confirmation bias. This is the very definition of mass hysteria. It’s happened before, but never on so large a scale. Then again, the world was never so interconnected.

  4. Don says:

    “…… all of the rural stations show a long term cooling trend, with some recent warming.”

    Yeah, but wait until they homogenize them. That’ll teach ’em not to show long term cooling.

    *************************************

    Oh please! Don’t homogenize me again, I’m warm, I’m warm.

    Good! And you’ll get warmer when we homogenize you some more.

    Yes, yes, only please, homogenize me gently.

    We’ll see about that…………

  5. Eric Simpson says:

    After a snowstorm, and then a day with highs in the 40s, as night and freezing temperatures approached, I was talking with a neighbor about the prospects of me getting off the mountain (Big Bear) without hitting ice as the hour would be late. Now, and this neighbor is a warmist btw, he said that the black highway asphalt will store a lot of heat into the night, and so I would probably be ok despite temperatures starting to drop below 30°F.

    It’s just absolutely insane to think that there isn’t an urban heat effect.

    What’s with Curry? Is she batting for the other side now?

  6. ren says:

    The snow and increasing wind will move into the central Appalachians during the day Saturday and will reach the Interstate-95 corridor in the mid-Atlantic and southern New England Saturday afternoon and evening.
    http://vortex.accuweather.com/adc2004/pub/includes/columns/newsstory/2015/650x366_02121903_hd21.jpg

  7. sfx2020 says:

    You are dealing with a known phenomenon, in which facts that challenge a belief are not actually “thought about, then discarded”, they actually trigger a change in the brain, and this has been shown with science and actual experiments.

    “In the heated election campaign of 2004, the researchers found supporters of presidential candidates George Bush and John Kerry and took MRI pictures of their brains as they watched video footage of their favorite candidate completely contradicting himself. So what happened in people’s brains when they saw information that contradicted their worldview in a charged political environment? As soon as they recognized the video clips as being in conflict with their worldview, the parts of the brain that handle reason and logic went dormant. And the parts of the brain that handle hostile attacks — the fight-or-flight response — lit up.” http://time.com/110643/how-to-win-every-argument/

    It’s worth reading the entire article, for to defeat your enemy, you must first understand them.

    • Andy Oz says:

      I believe the “enemy” should refuse all things carbon. They should limit themselves to hydrogen and oxygen. They will feel satisfied that they have a zero carbon footprint and will reduce the earths population at the same time, increasing the collective IQ.

    • Gail Combs says:

      Yes the article is very much worth the read.

      It can be readily applied to Steve’s recent post Gotta Love The Sense Of Humor About “..the big blowup last summer where Anthony Watts…and Judy posted some crap from Zeke and Mosher accusing Paul Homewood of cherry-picking a few stations….”

      Anthony Watts is the simplest and most straight forward. Stark Dickflüssig identified it as the Not Invented (or in this case Discovered) Here problem.

      The source of the difficulty here lies in who comes up with the solution. Paul’s suggestion makes him look smarter, and Eric less smart. This impacts their relative status, which Eric is likely to fight against. The better Paul’s answer is, the more likely Eric might resist it. It’s bizarre… Paul’s giving out suggestions also threatens Eric’s autonomy: it’s no longer Eric’s choice to follow a specific path…

      You can get people to do things your way or accept new ideas. There’s not necessarily a status game/ego threat there — unless you demand credit for the idea…

      [So expect Anthony to do his Own Research and come up with the same basic idea]

    • Gail Combs says:

      Judith Curry is more complicated. As I said she is a politically savvy lady.

      When Mikey Mann wrote in a climategate e-mail “I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing, but its not helping the cause,” It just proved Mann is too dense to understand what Curry was up to and not necessarily that she has switched sides.

      In my recent comments linked above, I showed back in 2006 Curry had identified the loss of public trust and the growing influence of the “ever-growing groups of citizen scientists, auditors, and extended peer communities that have become increasingly well organized by the blogosphere”

      She also says:

      My own experience in making public presentations about climate change has found that discussing the uncertainties increases the public trust in what scientists are trying to convey and doesn’t detract from the receptivity to understanding climate change risks (they distrust alarmism). Trust can also be rebuilt by discussing broad choices rather than focusing on specific policies.….

      From sfx2020 article we get:

      This is what happens when a discussion becomes an argument. It’s no longer an exercise in logic and reasoning. It’s just a fight. And being in a fight brings its own frame of mind, a whole set of attitudes, expectations, and conditioned reactions that go along with arguing. As soon as that happens, no one cares who is right and who is wrong. All that matters is who is friend and who is foe. So if you’re trying to win over someone whose natural allegiances are not with you, getting into an argument is a sure way to fail….

      1) “I want to influence them to do things my way.” …

      The only category that makes any sense is #1. But arguing isn’t the way. Persuasion is. How do you do that? I’ve described a number of methods:

      Here’s how FBI hostage negotiators do it.
      Here’s how persuasion guru Robert Cialdini does it.
      Here’s what “How to Win Friends and Influence People” author Dale Carnegie says.
      Here’s how to give feedback or give a friend advice while dodging the status game issue.

      From Hostage Negotiations:
      http://bakadesuyo.bakadesuyo.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/hostage-negotiation.jpg

      The Behavioral Change Stairway Model was developed by the FBI’s hostage negotiation unit, and it shows the 5 steps to getting someone else to see your point of view and change what they’re doing.

      It’s not something that only works with barricaded criminals wielding assault rifles — it applies to most any form of disagreement.

      There are five steps:
      * Active Listening: Listen to their side and make them aware you’re listening.

      * Empathy: You get an understanding of where they’re coming from and how they feel.

      * Rapport: Empathy is what you feel. Rapport is when they feel it back. They start to trust you.
      * Influence: Now that they trust you, you’ve earned the right to work on problem solving with them and recommend a course of action.

      * Behavioral Change: They act.

      The most critical step in the Behavioral Change Staircase is actually the first part: Active listening.

      From Dale Carnegie:
      “Make the other person feel important – and do it sincerely.”

      From What’s the best way to give feedback?
      “If you merely guide with questions, but they come up with the solution themselves, they’re less likely to feel threatened and more likely to follow through….”

      >>>>>>>>>>>>>

      Judith started surfing the skeptic blogs in 2006. Remember that Mann’s hokey stick had been challenged by McIntyre/McKitrick in 2003 and Climateaudit was up and running by at least 2005. (No wonder Mann was miffed that Judith was reading what the ‘Enemy’ had to say!) The Aspen Global Change Institute that Judith’s partner belongs to has been around since at least 1996.

      Judith obviously identified the growing problem skeptics represented as did the other ClimAstrologists. Whether or not she reinvented the hostage negotiation technique, did some research and discovered the technique or someone suggested she use the technique really does not matter. It is her success in implementing it to sway people to the side of the Climate Alarmists that we must DO SOMETHING that matters.

    • stpaulchuck says:

      oh heck, all you have to do is wander over to Yahoo! News (sic) and post an anti-AGW entry on any related thread and stand back! You won’t want to get the spittle and spew on you from the warmists.

  8. I hate to say it, but the urban heat island effect is “settled science”.

    OK, here I have problems. As I too have just introduced new ideas, such as thermal expansion contraction of the crust is the cause of the ice-age cycle and around half of all tectonic plate movement.

    So, let’s compare my theory and there’s

    1. It is simple physics that the crust will contract and expand during the ice-age cycle
    2. It is a anti-science and anti-common sense to suggest that areas with less plants and so less cooling from transevaporation will have the same temperature.

    …. DOH!!!

    Now I see what they’ve done reading their abstract. They aren’t looking at a normal urban area where we see the normal change from wilderness forest to concrete with a massive change in evaporative cooling. Instead, it’s an area of hard permafrost turning to hard concrete.

    So comparing apples with frozen bananas.

    How CO2 could control the climate (via plants & transevaporation)

  9. Joseph says:

    Being right (pretty much all the time) really has to piss of people like Mosher and Curry. No wonder why everyone resorts to calling you names and refusing to debate you.

  10. If you read Mosher’s CV it’s quite clear that he has no real scientific background.

    • gofer says:

      “Steven Mosher is co-author of “Climategate: The Crutape Letters” and works as an independent consultant in the San Francisco area. He attended Northwestern University where he graduated with honors and BA’s in both English Literature and Philosophy.”

      • Edmonton Al says:

        If he has a degree in Literature it must be GREEK literature.
        I have given up reading anything he says as it is nearly always “Greek” to me.
        I guess that must be the Philosophy part of him coming out.
        All his statements seem like “bluster” with no “content”.
        IMO

    • Gail Combs says:

      A CV has ZERO to do with a person’s intelligence or ability to get things done. Best statistician I have ever met had a high school education. A very savvy business man I knew had a fourth grade education.

      What matters is an open mind and a willingness to continue to learn not a useless piece of paper.

      Haven’t we seen enough examples of closed minds with Phd’s to learn that lesson?

      • Dr. AndyG55 says:

        A PhD is a lot of hard work, especially when you are no spring chicken. !

        (first and last time I put the Dr in front !)

        • Gail Combs says:

          Andy, It may be a lot of hard work but the guy with the 4th grade education lived in a house with no electric or plumbing. His Daddy farmed with horses. When they killed a cow his Mama canned the entire carcass in a day because that or smoking was the only way to preserve food. He got yanked out of school because he was needed to help on the farm.

          Most of us have no idea of what real back breaking work is. I am well aware that a PhD is hard work but that does not negate the accomplishments of people who went another route in life through choice or necessity. It also say ZERO about their intelligence or ability to reason or even their actual level of education.

  11. Andy Oz says:

    In line with their kooky climate theories, “experts” are now saying a global CO2 spike ended the last ice age. (Face-Palm):
    http://www.techtimes.com/articles/32509/20150212/carbon-burped-oceans-helped-end-ice-age.htm

    They say CO2 came out of the ocean and warmed the Earth, not the Earth warmed and CO2 came out of the ocean. How these people manage to feed themselves is beyond me. I blame their father for not using birth control that night long ago.

    • Andy Oz says:

      PS I was born about 35 miles (60km) from Deniliquin, NSW
      Not enough is said about Deniliquin these days in the LSM.
      Lovely countryside to grow up in.

    • “We found that very high concentrations of dissolved CO2 in surface waters of the Southern Atlantic Ocean and the eastern equatorial Pacific coincided with the rises in atmospheric CO2 at the end of the last ice age, suggesting that these regions acted as sources of CO2 to the atmosphere,” Gianluca Marino of the Australian National University, said.”

      As I’ve stated on my blog (Toward a new theory of ice-ages III (Global Warming and Earthquakes) global warming must lead to warming of the crust and therefore expansion, causing subduction of rock and the release of CO2 through volcanic activity.

      And as a lot of volcanoes are sub-sea, this seems to fit very nicely with the fact that the crust will expand/contract as we enter/leave the ice-age and that this will cause tectonic plate movement.

  12. Hew Manatee says:

    It’s not that hard to understand.
    When this global warming scam finally falls over, it will very quickly become a case of “Anthony -who-?” and “Judith -who-?” and “Lubos -who-?” No more “World’s most viewed site on global warming” and so on.
    It’s not always the money.

  13. Figure 5 says it all. All the variation & different between modern rural sites and modern urban sites occurs over one hundred years ago from 1850 to 1900.

    From which I can conclude that modern urbanisation caused cooling in the past!
    (Although there’s an alternative explanation which is just too extreme to believe and that is massive data manipulation removing all sites that show any cooling – so predominantly rural cooling sites – except those showing cooling before 1900)

    • … and using the “what is unusually low one decade will tend to warm in later decades” … if you were cherry picking sites to show late 20th century warming, you would tend to get a marked cooling trend before the period where you were trying to bias the results.

      So, paradoxically, the change from high-variability and cooling, to much reduced variability and no net trend in figure 5 may be some of the strongest proof of wholesale data manipulation that I’ve seen.

  14. AndyG55 says:

    Anyone that gets into bed with Mosher, deserves all the contempt they get.

    Worse than a shonky used car saleman.

    Only sells lemons !!

    • Gail Combs says:

      Actually Mosher is much worse than a shonky used car saleman.

      He has ZERO idea of how to smooze the mark like a real conman does. I am sure that Judith and Muller really really regret latching on to him because he is a lead weight for their side.Not as bad as Mikey Mann only because he is such a light weight.

      As the article,How to Win Every Agument that sfx2020 presented shows, being argumentative is very counterproductive.

  15. Tom says:

    It is interesting to note that the Melbourne site has been closed as of 6 Jan, 2015. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/averages/tables/cw_086071.shtml

    Site information
    Site name: MELBOURNE REGIONAL OFFICE
    Site number: 086071
    Latitude: 37.81 °S Longitude: 144.97 °E
    Elevation: 31 m
    Commenced: 1908 Status: Closed 06 Jan 2015
    Latest available data: 06 Jan 2015

    • anthonyvioli says:

      Its been closed because the city has so many buildings now on days when we have cool SW winds the CBD is 10 degrees warmer than surrounding areas. Enough was enough and the BOM decided to act on all our requests of putting a new station in 2 kms away unaffected by buildings. Since then the CBD has seen a massive temperature drop.

      Steve, we are in Coldstream, an outer suburb of Melbourne. Every night it is 6 to 10 degrees cooler than the CBD. Even though its in the metro area its rural and you could not get a more pristine site location with the weather station in an open field. The trick is though the BOM closed the old one, and opened this one in 1994, like many others in Oz. Their excuse is because the old ones had to be manually checked and these are Automatic Weather Stations.

      Whatever, but UHI is massive here.

  16. ren says:

    Shortly before the onset of the ‘Younger Dryas’ cold phase (about 11,000 14C y.a.)
    http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/NAmpreDryas11kyr.gif

  17. markstoval says:

    As any informed, honest, and rational person knows; Moshere and Curry are engaged in a propaganda war against the truth. They have different approaches and different roles in this war on facts, but they are truly extreme liars like all of major alarmists.

    No one who can read does not realize that the “official” temperature at Orlando International Airport is way higher than one in the small rural communities that lie a few miles away from it. One would have to be deluded, idiotic, or a paid liar to dispute that the asphalt and building around the site did not warm the readings to the point that their only use is for the site itself.

    As has been pointed out by our host and others; they take the artificially warmed reading and use those to “infill” or “homogenize” the surrounding sites. Utter deception!

    The entire warming enterprise is a war on humanity. They disgust me.

  18. gator69 says:

    UHI should be a litmus test for all climate scientists. Failure to recognize it should be grounds for stripping of credentials, and removal of all citations.

  19. richard says:

    I have black weather boarding on part of my house. At night time after the sun sets you walk past the white walls of the house and then when you get to the weather boarding- wham – a wall of heat, this lasts for several hrs. Hate to have a weather station situated to close to that.

    I guess the EPA are not on board yet.

    Chap. 3 – Environmental Protection Agency
    http://www.epa.gov/heatislands/resources/pdf/post…/chicago_chap3.pdf
    buildings has dramatically altered the temperature profile of cities. In fact … city an average about 5°F higher than the surrounding rural area. …. insulated buildings, and those in hotter, drier regions, will have greater energy savings. As the.

  20. richard says:

    “Satellite technology, which offers a more uniform view of heat islands, is in the process of changing this. The group of researchers from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., presented results based on a new method for comparing heat islands at the AGU meeting”

    https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/02/13/moshercurry-say-that-there-is-no-urban-heat-island-effect/

    • _Jim says:

      Its a simple matter of LOOKING at a LWIR image from a presently active and operational GOES weather satellite of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex and one can SEE the damned warmer metropolitan area as evening progresses into night and the outlying areas cool while the metro area can be seen staying some number of degrees warmer!

      It doesn’t take a sponsored university study to see the warmer urban areas!

      All these clowns (NASA GISS, BEST, Mosher et al) have ‘overshot’ reality by a bazillion miles …

  21. Tel says:

    When you go to Bathurst, all of the buildings in the city center are untouched… same as they were 50 years ago. I mean, it’s a lovely city but the 21st Century won’t be happening around those places for a while yet.

  22. SMS says:

    Nasa says there is UHI and Steve McIntyre did a posting in 2007 showing the effect of UHI using stations selected by Tom Peterson, chief scientist for NOAA. http://climateaudit.org/2007/08/04/1859/
    Notice how significant UHI is. NOAA does not correct for UHI based on the very flawed Tom Peterson study even though Steve McIntyre showed how significantly UHI impacts thermometers in Urban settings.

    Years ago the warmists were using Pt. Barrow Alaska as an example of AGW. People noticed that the inner city was free of snow but when they drove outside the city limits there was plenty of snow. Someone did a UHI survey and found the answer. Turns out Pt. Barrow was suffering from UHI.

    You can google UHI and find any number of UHI surveys to show how extensive UHI is and how much it can impact a thermometer site. Here is one from Melbourne: https://clearwater.asn.au/user-data/resource-files/Urban_Heat_Island_in_Melbourne2009.pdf

    I think the posting by Steve McIntyre is very informative on how much UHI can impact Urban sites.

    So why would anyone want to deny UHI exists? Must be a money thing.

  23. Eliza says:

    BTW WUWT totally supports UHI. Watts did a major study on it. I would say its really only the BEST crowd that was paid to come up with the drivel temp graph and the no UHI effect.

  24. _Jim says:

    I routinely observe 5 degrees F warming just going from open space on my bicycle into an adjacent neighborhood.

    See, *this* is the _real_ problem: ppl like Mosher and Curry don’t get out often enough into the real world any more (NOT that they ever did). Experience behind a keyboard and excellence in math can take one only so far, and unless the concepts assumed to be driving the math are cross-checked with reality its all simply a glorious masturbatory exercise designed to ‘win’ favor from pols and the press and impress peers …
    .

  25. Douglas Hoyt says:

    I live in the country but near a town that GISS classifies as rural. The temperature in town averages about 1.5F warmer than at my house. The largest differences are winter mornings after a clear night, such as this morning. I just checked and it is 5F warmer in town.

    • gator69 says:

      I also live in the country, the closest towns have populations less than 400, and even those have UHI, when compared to my acreage.

    • Gail Combs says:

      In a location just outside the small town of Pittsboro NC (Fearrington) = 30.9 °F
      It is west of the Jordan Lake reservoir in a ritzy development.

      In another small town near there (New Hill) 23 °F

      Windy Hill Alpaca Farm, Pittsboro, NC 23.7 °F
      This is really in the middle of nowhere just off the four lane 64 half way between Pittsboro NC and Siler City (Not reporting)
      The Siler City station is at an airport.

  26. Brad says:

    If there is any response, it will be “Tony only showed a tiny sample not indicative of the complete temp record.” Mosh will proclaim his usual “Wrong.” And the wheels just keep on turning. They are caught up in minutia and ego.

  27. _Jim says:

    LWIR sat imagery showing DFW area “heat island” (Curry and Mosher take note):

    http://i59.tinypic.com/2ladg5s.jpg

    Courtesy of these folks:

    http://weather.rap.ucar.edu/satellite/

    • Gail Combs says:

      WOW!

      And the ClimAstrologists want us to believe they can use krigging to infill up to 1200 kilometers away? ( 745mi)

      And that their global average temperature is accurate to 0.01C

      I guess they agree with Gruber. We are to STUPID to tie our own shoelaces.

  28. rogue says:

    I ready your blog daily, so I’m sure the immediate response will be that you have already laid out the issues out with BEST ( & GISS etc) in technicolour detail. Your ability to analyse and present data is impressive. On the other hand Mosher & Zeke claim that you can take out all the adjustments and not make any difference to the underlying science of climate change.

    Your analysis of the problems with data series stand on two legs( as far as I can see). 1) invalid adjustments, 2) corruption of good rural temperature series with poor quality urban sites subject to UHI & artificial heat sources.

    WUWT did work on qualifying US HCN stations, but his final results had nothing deterministic with regards to UHI & artificial heat source corruption of the temperature record.

    It is very clear that there will be no resolution of your diagreements with the BEST temperature series through a discussion with Steve Mosher.

    For the sake of moving the debate forward is it possible to you and Paul Homeward to work with Judith Curry in reaching a defininition of the errors in the BEST temperature series?

    • emsnews says:

      Big big problemo: none of these idiots want to talk to our blog host at all. EVER.

    • Gail Combs says:

      Judith Curry’s goal is to move skeptics FROM skepticism TOO an agreement that we must install renewable energy like Windmills.

      See why I say that in my series of comments on her
      starting Here

      On Peter Webster her business partner HERE

      And the psychology she uses HERE

      Judith’s company CLIMATE FORECAST APPLICATIONS NETWORK, LLC secured 1.2 million in grants.
      What were those grants for?

      2012?/?STTR?/?Phase I
      DOE
      Principal Investigator: Judith Curry, Dr.
      abstract

      Abstract:
      Goals of 80% clean energy production for the United States by 2035 and 20% of the countrys power being supplied by wind energy by 2030 imply nearly a tenfold increase in wind power production. This means that the need for forecast information will extend to longer projection windows with increasing penetration of wind power into the grid and also with diminishing reserve margins to meet peak loads during significant weather events. In addition to more complex issues regarding maintenance planning, energy trading of oil and gas will be influenced increasingly by anticipation of wind generation on timescales of weeks to months, and on longer time scales, future scenarios on decadal time scales are needed to support assessment of wind farm siting, government planning, and the regulatory environment. CFAN will expand upon its hybrid statistical/dynamical forecasting scheme that delivers probabilistic wind forecasts on time scales from one day to seven months…

      2013?/?STTR?/?Phase II
      DOE
      Principal Investigator: Judith Curry, Dr.

      Abstract:
      This proposal addresses the challenge of providing weather and climate information to support the operation, management and planning for wind-energy systems. There is a growing need for extended range forecast information as wind power increases its penetration into the grid. Future scenarios on decadal time scales are needed to support assessment of wind farm siting, long-term purchase agreements and the regulatory environment. To address this challenge, CFAN has developed a hybrid statistical/dynamical forecasting scheme for delivering probabilistic forecasts on time scales from one day to seven months using what is arguably the best forecasting system in the world….

      Her company is providing the support for siting and operating Bat chomping Bird Slicing Eco-crucifixes.

      Do you really think Judith is interested in any work that shows it is COOLING and CAGW is nothing but a con?

  29. hifast says:

    Great pre-hysteric (1969) paper on UHI by Dr. Leonard O. Myrup, U of Cal Davis. Its Ag Engineering Dept spun off the Meteorology guys into the Dept of Atmospheric Science.

    http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/1520-0450%281969%29008%3C0908%3AANMOTU%3E2.0.CO%3B2

    During the 70s cooling scare, he cautioned his students not to be fooled by stations in cities which failed to show much cooling over the previous 30 years.

  30. Antonio says:

    Things are really bad when we feel we have to prove that UHI exists. We shouldn’t be trying to prove it, we should be laughing and shaking our heads!

  31. Anything is possible says:

    “There Is No Urban Heat Island Effect”

    ====================================================

    Saturday Night
    Partly cloudy. Blustery. Bitterly cold. Lows 2 to 6 below in the suburbs…but 1 to 5 above downtown. Wind chills as low as 15 below to 25 below zero. Northwest winds 15 to 25 mph. Gusts up to 45 mph in the evening decreasing to 35 mph after midnight.

    http://classic.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/getForecast?query=zmw:60601.1.99999

  32. Bill Fish says:

    “We observe the opposite of an urban heating effect over the period 1950 to 2010, with a slope of -0.10 ± 0.24°C/100yr (2? error) in the Berkeley Earth global land temperature average. The confidence interval is consistent with a zero urban heating effect, and at most a small urban heating effect (less than 0.14°C/100yr, with 95% confidence) on the scale of the observed warming (1.9 ± 0.1°C/100 yr since 1950 in the land average from Figure 5A).”

    Well Stevie, I’d suggest you get a good statistician to help you interpret what Mosher/Curry are saying. They have made their adjustments to the urban heat island effect and those data have no effect “or at most a small urban heating effect.” The confidence interval is zero…got it no affect on the average temperature from urban heat islands. The adjustment of the data worked.

    Do what Stevie the weather guru says…Never seen so many sheeple all in one spot before! Seems no real scientists comment on this site as it would appear to give it credibility! Check NOAA for the raw data set and for the adjustments made, it’s all there. Adjustments are made in most statistical calculations to remove the bias i.e. heat island bias to come up with the most accurate value of what is going on. Of course, Stevie Goddard, the king of cherry pickers comes up with a different answer. Perhaps if you understood temperature adjustments you’d understand why Mosher/Curry said what they said.” There are also significant positive minimum temperature biases from urban heat islands that add a trend bias up to 0.2 C nationwide to raw readings.

    Because the biases are large and systemic, ignoring them is not a viable option. If some corrections to the data are necessary, there is a need for systems to make these corrections in a way that does not introduce more bias than they remove.” Meaning once the data affected by heat islands is adjusted it has no affect on the average temperature. http://judithcurry.com/2014/07/07/understanding-adjustments-to-temperature-data/

    Here’s a REAL science site, pick this apart….http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=255
    In case no-one looks at it here are the headings
    1. The data and software used to produce these reconstructions are publicly available.(Stevie, why don’t you get the data and the software and figure it out for yourself and publish it in a peer reviewed journal? Ooops forgot you are afraid of peer review! Wonder why?)
    2. The software has been successfully tested outside of NASA and CRU, and it works as advertised
    3. Similar results can be obtained using different software and methods
    4. The temperature increase is not an artifact of the GHCN adjustment process
    5. The temperature increase is not an artifact of declining numbers of stations
    6. The temperature increase is not an artifact of stations being located at airports
    7. The temperature increase is present in other data sets, not just GHCN

    Just in case no-one reads the link here’s the conclusions. Note the important item, global temperature is replicable… meaning more than one group using different methods get the same result. Means something to real scientists but doesn’t seem to matter to cherry picking pseudoscientist.

    “Conclusions
    The well-known and widely-cited reconstructions of global temperature, produced by NASA GISS, UEA CRU, and NOAA NCDC, are replicable.

    Independent studies using different software, different methods, and different data sets yield very similar results.

    The increase in temperatures since 1975 is a consistent feature of all reconstructions, and is also a feature found in reconstructions from natural temperature proxy measurements. This increase cannot be explained as an artifact of the adjustment process, the decrease in station numbers, or other non-climatological factors.”

    Certainly says it like it is, don’t it? Just wondering how many commenters are creationists?

    Thanks for listening!

    • Dear Bill,

      You obviously didn’t read the post you are replying to. My objection is that they are incorrectly identifying UHI affected stations as rural.

      I hope you aren’t as dense, bigoted or arrogant in real life as you pretend to be.

      • Bill Fish says:

        Steve I did read your blog. You said. “So how did Mosher and Curry come to a conclusion so utterly daft?” You quoted the answer. Mosher/Curry adjusted the urban heat island data to correct for the bias that it is a lot hotter than a rural site as you so eloquently stated when you ride from the city to the country on your bike. You need to bone up on statistics!

        Bigoted. where did you get that from? Dense possibly, arrogant I doubt it. I hope you to are a lot smarter and scientifically savvy than you appear here. 15 minutes of fame being a denier when there isn’t one person on this blog, including yourself (BA Science/BA Engineering) who is a professional in climate science. I do agree with you on one thing, riding a bike is fantastic. Speaking at the Heartland Institute certainly tells who you are in bed with.

        Googled Who is Steven Goddard (Tony Heller)? This sums up quite well what other people think of you and I tend to agree:
        “Goddard is your typical know nothing AGW denier blogger. He used to be a regular guest author on WattsUpWithThat, except that he became a regular embarrassment, and he and Watts parted ways. In one of the worst examples (although there are so many to choose from), Watts had to apologize for the utter stupidity of one of Goddard’s articles:”

        “My apologies to readers. I’ll leave it up (note altered title) as an example of what not to do when graphing trends”
        http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/02/ar

        John Cook rebutted another of Goddard’s idiotic WUWT posts here as well:
        http://www.skepticalscience.com/Watts-Up

        Goddard now runs his own blog. Considering that he was too ignorant even for the exceptionally low standards at WUWT, not surprisingly, very few people actually read it. Apparently it’s not his real name and Steven Goddard is a pseudonym, which is funny, because Anthony Watts claims that everybody who writes on his site goes by their real names.”

        “Steve Goddard does not have a background in climate science. He has primarily published his articles in blogs and newspapers using a pseudonym, and it is unlikely he has ever been published in a peer-reviewed journal on the subject.” – DeSmog

        Give credit for admitting you were wrong once…good for you. I think a lot more retractions are required…Ha!…note: that’s my opinion and I am entitled to it!
        August 15, 2008
        Steven Goddard Published an article titled “Arctic ice refuses to melt as ordered” in The Register. Goddard claimed that the National Snow and Ice Data Center plot of the extent of Arctic Sea Ice was wrong. However, on August 25, Goddard retracted his claim, saying that “… it is clear that the NSIDC graph is correct, and that 2008 Arctic ice is barely 10% above last year – just as NSIDC had stated.”

        “Joe Romm at ClimateProgress reported that the retraction may have been too late, as Goddard’s article had already received over 70 references by blogs and websites skeptical of man-made climate change.” – DeSmog

        Thanks for listening

    • AndyG55 says:

      Bill, A REAL science site does not block and edit comments by people who disagree.

      SkS is NOT and will never be a REAL science site.

      It is propaganda, dis-information site for the chronically brain-washed..

      And you have fallen for it all hook line and sinker.

  33. Bill Fish says:

    Hmmmm…wonder if the my last comment will pass moderation…I’d guess it won’t…but stranger things have happened. Does freedom of speech applies here?

  34. stpaulchuck says:

    are all these people that truly incompetent or just that venal??

    • _Jim says:

      Both.

      If they had actual ‘skill’ at something they would be building workable and sale-able product instead of acting as ‘cheer leaders’ spreading propaganda.

      Perspective from a one-upon-a-time HW now FW eng but always an RF eng …

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