Climate science is a wild and woolly multi-disciplinary field in which virtually every proposition is controversial. It is only the politics that is settled; the science is up for grabs.
A recent study in Climate illustrates the point, not by introducing new concepts but by measuring the obvious:
A new study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Climate, by 37 researchers from 18 countries suggests that current estimates of global warming are contaminated by urban warming biases.
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It is well-known that cities are warmer than the surrounding countryside.
We all understand this. “Chance of frost in outlying areas.”
While urban areas only account for less than 4% of the global land surface, many of the weather stations used for calculating global temperatures are located in urban areas. For this reason, some scientists have been concerned that the current global warming estimates may have been contaminated by urban heat island effects.
There is no question that the Urban Heat Island Effect exists. The question is, how much does it skew current temperature readings in an upward direction?
In their latest report, the IPCC estimated that urban warming accounted for less than 10% of global warming. However, this new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the warming since 1850.
Given the IPCC’s obvious bias, I find that conclusion highly plausible.
But that’s not all:
The study also found that the IPCC’s chosen estimate of solar activity appeared to have prematurely ruled out a substantial role for the Sun in the observed warming.
One hundred percent of the energy that heats the earth–that prevents it from being a cold, dead rock–comes from the Sun. So the suggestion that variations in the Earth’s climate, which have occurred for millions of years, might relate to variations in solar activity, is an obvious one that Greenies have tried hard to obfuscate.
When the authors analysed the temperature data only using the IPCC’s solar dataset, they could not explain any of the warming since the mid-20th century. That is, they replicated the IPCC’s iconic finding that global warming is mostly human-caused. However, when the authors repeated the analysis using a different estimate of solar activity – one that is often used by the scientific community – they found that most of the warming and cooling trends of the rural data could actually be explained in terms of changing solar activity.
I don’t doubt that adding CO2 to the atmosphere has some small effect on global temperatures. But the models that are the sole basis for climate hysteria use wholly hypothetical feedback effects to transform a benign level of warming that can be accounted for scientifically into a supposedly catastrophic apocalypse. This study suggests that if we eliminate the Urban Heat Island Effect and properly account for variations in solar activity, what is left is the very modest increase in temperatures that science actually supports. (My conclusion, not necessarily that of the authors.) Or perhaps the small residual warming is due to something else entirely.
In any event, if the West actually succumbs to Green nonsense and de-industrializes and impoverishes itself, so as to yield global domination to China and India, who have no intention of doing any such thing, it will be the dumbest action by any governments in world history.
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