London could see snow and temperatures that could drop to –2C this week, he added. Temperatures in most other areas will reach –3 or –4C, even in major cities, while in some rural areas they will drop to below –10C.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/nov/28/snow-freeze-chaos-uk-weather
But can they put two and two together? I doubt it.
If UEA does not admit UHI how can puppet media!
I guess the defense will be that temperatures are warmer in urban environments (easily measurable by experiment) but they’ll argue that the UHI effect has been pretty constant throughout the past 150 years, which unfortunately cannot be so easily tested.
I say that’s BS, but whatever…
-Scott
When I lived in England in the 1960s, there were few central heating systems. Difficult to imagine that ten million central heating systems now around London are not impacting the energy balance.
If you based it on population alone you can get a steady rise of about 2.1 million every ten years since 1750 but the increase of infrastructure, accomodation and technology has been accelerating. I suppose that energy consumption is a guage of expansion but it can’t indicate how and where the energy was used in relationtion to the temperature stations.
There’s a very complicated document detailing the adjustments made for station changes and UHI for the UKs Central England Temperature CET record. It runs up to 1991 but it seems to have additional hand written values up till 2003 (page 19)
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/Parker_etalIJOC1992_dailyCET.pdf
I once read the Guardian when I was a student… it was obvious then that it could not put two and two together… and it has only got worse over the years… but it is a comfort blanket for AGWers, government social workers, government health workers, unemployed graduates etc…
Personally I added Guardian readers onto the list of B-Arkers a long time ago 🙂
The useless third of the population (consisting of hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, management consultants, telephone sanitisers and the like) were packed into the B-Ark, one of three giant Ark spaceships, and told that everyone else would follow shortly in the other two. The other two thirds of the population, of course, did not follow and “led full, rich and happy lives…
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
LOL. Yes I often think that Douglas Adams was spot on about the B Ark. Cancun must resemble the captains bath scenes with uncanny similarity. Sadly Arthur and Ford are outnumbered.
But don’t forget the Infinite Inprobability Drive….
The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 sub-meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) were of course well understood – and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molicules in the hostess’s undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy.
Many respectable physicists said that they weren’t going to stand for this – partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn’t get invited to those sort of parties.
Another thing they couldn’t stand was the perpetual failure they encountered in trying to construct a machine which could generate the infinite improbability field needed to flip a spaceship across the mind-paralysing distances between the furthest stars, and in the end they grumpily announced that such a machine was virtually imposssible.
Then, one day, a student who had been left to sweep up the lab after a particulary unsuccessful party found himself reasoning this way:
If, he thought to himself, such amachine is a virtual impossibility, then it must logically be a finite improbability. So all I have to do in order to make one, is to work out exactly how improbable it is, feed that figure into the finite improbability generator, give it a fresh cup of really hot tea … and turn it on!
He did this, and was rather startled to discover that he had managed to create the long sought after golden Infinite Improbability generater out of thin air.
It startled him even more when just after he was awarded the Galactic Institute’s Prize for Extreme Cleverness he got lynced by a rampaging mob of respectable physicists who had finally realized that the one thing they really couldn’t stand was a smartass.
Steve McIntyre probably fits that scenario he needs to watch out 😉 Sadly there’s no Infinite Probability drive out there to come to our rescue. We’ll just have to rely on knowing where our towel is and remembering DON’T PANIC!
Last night was the coldest ever recorded in wales (UK) in November at -17.3 degrees C.
Caingorm Ski resort storm bound again! http://www.cairngormmountain.co.uk/
Here is the link to the record cold in Wales…http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-11856728
I have discussed this with Tim Legg at the Met Office. He tells me they allow about 0.2C for UHI. This adjustment was intro duced in the 70’s.
This raises the following questions ;-
1) Is 0.2 enough. As Scott points out, we are not talking about absolute differences between towns + rural, only the change in the differences. Nevertheless it is hard to believe that there has not been more divergence than 0.2 since even 1900 never mind 1750.
2) Has the UHI effect increased since 1970? 0.2 might have been an acceptable figure to correct 1970 temps to 1900, but no serious climatologist could argue that UHI effect has not increased significantly since 1970.
It’s almost impossible to compare the old CET records with the new ones because nearly all of the stations have changed. How far does a heat plume from a city travel? Weather conditions including wind strength and direction might change results. Most significant might be a lack of local pollution and fog. Mist and fog makes a big difference to ground temperatures and since fog is now very rare, it’s no wonder that autumn, winter and spring are warmer.
I know Roy Spencer has dabbled in this some by comparing urban vs rural thermometers located within a reasonable distance of each other. However, finding a “rural” site that is unaffected by UHI seems questionable.
If I remember correctly, Spencer estimates that about half of the warming in the land-based temperature record is due to UHI.
The thing is, someone like Tamino will go and find cities where adjustments to the raw data make the trend cooler or less warmer:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/10/13/the-great-conspiracy-to-destroy-freedom-sabotage-the-usa-increase-taxes-undermine-the-economy-institute-world-government-based-on-socialism-with-al-gore-as-dictator-and-of-course-drive-us-all/
However, do you think 1.9 C of corrections over 70-80 years is enough for a city like Tokyo? I’m actually thinking it’s not. On a run near sunset with a friend 2-3 months ago, I ran through the CSU campus within a quarter mile of the weather station. It was much warmer there than any other place in my entire run (except for a bit north of campus, which was about the same), likely due to the higher population density on campus. About 1500 m south of there though (once away from campus and the student population center), I hit the bike trail and it dropped by at least 6 C (10 F), and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was literally twice that big a drop. To be fair, there is a small creek there that might contribute some evaporative cooling, but even the difference from campus and the main part of town versus the rest of the run (away from the creek) was still on the order of 3+ degrees C.
I mentioned earlier that it would be tough to experimentally estimate UHI in the past, but I’ve thought a bit more and maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. For instance, if you want to know UHI from 100+ years ago, do extensive temperature measurements throughout and around an Amish or Mennonite community, right? Presumably, one could locate places throughout the world with varying “generations” of technology to estimate the effects of changing tech on UHI. Even if not successful, at the least the current UHI could be known accurately as well as the 100+ yr ago UHI, to establish bounds on the effect. Seriously, the task I’m proposing wouldn’t be that expensive, maybe $30-40k per experiment, with each experiment lasting at least one calendar year. The whole project could probably be accomplished with a budget of $1 million I’d guess, which is just a drop in the bucket compared to the funding for most climate research. For instance, one mass spectrometer for measuring aerosol composition is about half that.
Heck, if they wanted to get really serious about it, they could build their own “urban” centers from the past. If it’s just shacks and horses, it wouldn’t be all that expensive except for the land. 😉
However, you don’t see these kind of proposals being made (or if they are, then they’re not getting funded). I can’t help but wonder if this is because it’s a proposal to look for an improved system that will make the final temperature trend cooler rather than warmer.
-Scott