Today’s title is adapted from the peer-reviewed paper “The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data“, by Willie Soon, Ronan Connolly, Michael Connolly, many others, with meager contributions by Yours Truly, in Climate. It’s open source, so all can read.
The Abstract (with my paragraphifications and emphasis):
A statistical analysis was applied to Northern Hemisphere land surface temperatures (1850–2018) to try to identify the main drivers of the observed warming since the mid-19th century.
Two different temperature estimates were considered—a rural and urban blend (that matches almost exactly with most current estimates) and a rural-only estimate. The rural and urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 °C/century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 °C/century.
This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases.
Three main climatic drivers were considered, following the approaches adopted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s recent 6th Assessment Report (AR6): two natural forcings (solar and volcanic) and the composite “all anthropogenic forcings combined” time series recommended by IPCC AR6. The volcanic time series was that recommended by IPCC AR6.
Two alternative solar forcing datasets were contrasted. One was the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) time series that was recommended by IPCC AR6. The other TSI time series was apparently overlooked by IPCC AR6. It was found that altering the temperature estimate and/or the choice of solar forcing dataset resulted in very different conclusions as to the primary drivers of the observed warming.
Our analysis focused on the Northern Hemispheric land component of global surface temperatures since this is the most data-rich component. It reveals that important challenges remain for the broader detection and attribution problem of global warming: (1) urbanization bias remains a substantial problem for the global land temperature data; (2) it is still unclear which (if any) of the many TSI time series in the literature are accurate estimates of past TSI; (3) the scientific community is not yet in a position to confidently establish whether the warming since 1850 is mostly human-caused, mostly natural, or some combination. Suggestions for how these scientific challenges might be resolved are offered.
Idea is simple: cities are hotter than the countryside, as this picture proves:
This increased city heat is, indeed, a form of man-made “climate change.” It is real heat, which you really feel. But it is not different, qualitatively, to the man-made “climate change” you feel when you walk from the chilly outdoors into your cozy home. You have altered the temperature by manipulating the surroundings.
Think of it this way. Imagine putting an array of thermometers around the country in 20,000 BC. They will measure a certain January average maximum temperature, which will vary year on year because of various causes, none of which will be man’s influence. Leave the thermometers where they are and use them to measure this year’s average January maximum.
There will be a change because a new cause has entered: man. Some of those thermometers might land in somebody’s living room, others in cities. The average will, we suppose on conditional this evidence, have a large chance of being warmer. Further, if we have properly characterized all the old causes, we can calculate the influence man has, as long as we assume (as seems apparent) man is a cause.
We don’t learn from thermometers that man is a cause: we assumed it.
Anyway, it got warmer. Because of us. And so? Would you rather have it colder?
Like I’ve said many times, the real madness of “climate change” is the belief that man can only negatively affect his environment. People look at this temperature increase and instead of enjoying it, wring their hands and fret, sure that Earth disapproves and will punish them.
The scientific error comes in supposing the meager increase in carbon dioxide is responsible for the bulk, or even all of, the change. They forget, or dismiss, the obvious causes like you see in the picture.
Even some of my co-authors can’t quite divest themselves from the view of man-as-menace, as the headline of the paper’s press release reads “New study suggests global warming could be mostly an urban problem“.
What problem?
Since it always comes up: No, unlike the majority of scientists who seek and accept funding, and a lot of it, and constantly, from a most interested and corrupt Regime, I took none. My total remuneration, of any kind, from all sources, valued in 2023 USD, was $0.00. Like I say in the bio, I am completely independent and rely on the generosity of readers to survive.
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but the greenhouse effect of magically amplifying trace gases is acadæmically proven with 30 years climate intervals and oceans on one side, and hundreds of millions of years of dust-dry neighboring planets (Venus and Mars) on the other side …
1 – nice job!
2 – so what you (i.e. et al) have shown is that, “on average” the more widely accepted temperature records show a consistent urban/rural difference that’s well below the measurement error in the raw data more-or-less underlying the series you used. I suspect this is called meeting them on their own ground and beating them over the head with it – but because the formally recognized series you had to use to do this do not reflect reality very well the analysis contributes to the political fight, but not the science.
3 – people at wattsupwiththat and colleagues have done a lot of work on weather station siting and record accuracy (e.g.for some highlights see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/07/27/new-surface-stations-report-released-its-worse-than-we-thought/ ) but they have not (to my knowledge) systematically compared locally published daily temps to the official records. I did that many years ago using a dallas newspaper and found huge discrepancies – somewhat similarly I found that records for lethbridge (where I live) have been largely “interpolated” (which I read as made up) for the period before 1955 because the Air Force was responsible for the data before that but disappeared the raw records when the base closed.
4 – I wonder about the practicallity of computing a “contribution to the north american climate anomaly” for each of the underlying data series – D sub i,j,k where i = location; j=date; k = site and/or instrument iteration for i. If a defensible computation were done… ; ) I’d bet – substituting location for period! – that box-jenkins parametrization (spectral analysis ) would show nearly all of the claimed cumulative effect originating in a very small set D sub i,k of the data. -i.e. weather stations so subject to urbanization effects that their sites had to be changed at least once.
Walking across the vast black-asphalt parking lot of my local Costco on a recent August day, I was made very aware of the urban heating effect–it felt like an oven. On a large grass field, the same afternoon, the temperature felt relatively benign. Thermometers in those two locations, which are within a few miles of each other, would obviously give very different readings.
Warmth is a good thing. Warmer is better for animals, plants, and people. The warmest places have most bio-productivity, the most biodiversity, the best agriculture, the most residents, and the most visitors.
Allegedly since the Little Ice Age the world has warmed 3 x 0.55°C = 1.65°C according to the authors. Yippee, hooray, hooray! Thank heaven! It’s almost nothing considering the normal temp of Planet Earth for the last 250,000,000 years has been 10-12°C warmer than today.
Recall that a mere 20,000 years ago, a blink in geologic time, the Last Glacial Maximum was the coldest point in Earth’s history (with the possible exception of the Cryogenian Period in the Neo-Proterozoic Era 635 million years ago — the evidence is scant — when amoebas were the most advanced life form). We are a blink away from record coldest ever!
Instead of freaking out, jacking up energy prices, causing runaway inflation, destroying savings, buggering up the economy, resulting in untold deprivation, suffering, hunger, homelessness, etc etc, why not welcome a few degrees of warmth?
Yes, I know. Global Warming is a false crisis ginned up by totalitarian greedheads who want to kill off most of humanity and steal all the wealth, but that doesn’t mean we (me, you, the other guy) should knuckle under and buy into the absurdist crap that warmth is somehow bad.
Instead of arguing about how much the planet has allegedly warmed — in order to pacify the alarmists, which cannot be done — get jiggy with warmth. I DEMAND more warmth. Anyone who disagrees with me should be fired, cancelled, publicly humiliated, and interred in a re-education camp until their head gets screwed on correctly.
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