Removing
UHI distortion - the elephant in the sitting room
Climategate 2.0 shows climate apologist Phil
Jones referring to climate scientist Goodrich as a "jerk"
for producing this beautiful demonstration of the magnitude
of the UHI effect:

Getting UHI accurately removed from
our trends is essential for three reasons. First,
it completely removes the alarming recent spike in "global"
warming and shows that variation is well within natural
bounds. Second, the record then shows solar correlation
again, showing that the cause is well within natural explanations.
Third, UHI has been falsely quantified in IPCC 2007 AR4 (see
below). I've gone down the route of examining clean data separately
from infected data: inspired also by Anthony Watts' essay
showing UHI
alive and well; and Steve
McIntyre's comments on the disinformation about UHI at
RealClimate (and in official sources generally). My Primer
notes the wide range of data
distortion issues.
The seasonal temperature record for Salehard,
Siberia, shows remarkably a huge upsurge in recent years for
winter temperatures. The only reasonable conclusion is the
Urban Heat Island effect, which in chilly Siberia is most
noticeably increasing in winter months, as district heating
improves. Click on the picture to enlarge.

Ira Glickstein
at WUWT suggested 0.8°C/century global warming due
to: (1) Data Bias 0.3ºC, (2) Natural Cycles 0.4ºC,
and (3) AGW 0.1ºC. But I think
there is much more artificial biassing.
Steve Mosher's comment points to IPCC AR4's
sleight of hand by Trenberth and Jones, in sweeping
McKitrick and Michaels' 2004 paper on Urban Heat Island effects
under the carpet, thus leaving Jones' faulty 1990 paper to
continue to allow ridiculously small UHI corrections to the
global temperature records (see below). The Abstract of McKitrick
and Michaels' latest
(2007) paper says that by using their method, "...nonclimatic
effects reduces the estimated 1980-2002 global average temperature
trend over land by about half." Unlike Jones, Trenberth,
and the rest of "the Team", Ross uses appropriate
statistics properly.

Let's continue with a favourite of mine, the
presentation of Dr Andrei Illarionov at the 2010 Heartland
Institute conference (U-tube here
and here).
Andrei shows locations for the 476 Russian records actually
available, then cuts it to Phil Jones' 121, then cuts it further
to 37, 12, and finally 4. Using Phil Jones' methods, he shows
that just four records suffice to show the whole graph with
1.29°C temperature rise over the last 100 years - the
four oldest records, which of course are urban. Arkhangel'sk
(1813), Yeniseysk (1871), St Petersburg (1733), and Astrahan
(1837).

Then Andrei divides the data into groups of
different population size. He takes the average temperatures
for the period 1921-1945, and compares them with the averages
for 1961-1990, then with the averages for 1991-2006 (see two
insets). Where there are no local residents the trends are,
in both cases, a huge 0.6°C less than those for urban
areas. Unfortunately it looks as if there are not enough stations
from unpopulated places to show trends for the full century.
The records for zero / very low population appear to be significantly
lower than many records classed as "rural", as Roy
Spencer's work below bears out. Even without this lowest group,
a trend difference of nearly 0.5°C between the 10 most
rural and the 10 most urban stations emerges. And since the
urban stations' trend approximates to Jones' official Russian
trend, Illarionov's evidence shows that Jones' trend is completely
overrun by a 0.5°C per century urban heat island effect.
If that is true in Russia, what about elsewhere?
Striking evidence emerges regarding the LACK of significant
temperature increase in a number of significant places. First,
there is the average of 24 US rural records, as picked
out by a 6th grader schoolchild in order to compare with
"twinned" urban records* right across the States.
These show no overall temperature rise in a century of records.
The urban records, on the other hand, show an overall rise
of ~1.5°C. Second, look at New
Zealand temperatures, when they are relieved of the fraudulent
weighting they were given. No significant increase whatsoever.
Third, look at a rural record from Pretoria,
South Africa, chart adapted from Henry
P. Temperature records for May to September were used
as the Pretoria climate is sunny during this time and therefore
provides a sensitive record without scattering from cloudiness,
so it should show any overall global warming during this period.
No increase here either. Fourth, another
look
at US rural and urban records, from a paper by Dr Edward
Long. Here we see the familiar up-down-up, with a significant
difference: rural temperatures recently are LOWER than they
were in the 1930's; the overall trend is up, but only slightly,
and visibly well within natural variations. Urban data show
the familiar AGW picture. The difference between urban and
rural records in 2000 AD looks like about 0.6°C.
 
 
Phil Jones of UEA famously said to climatologist Warwick
Hughes, "Why should I make the data available to
you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with
it?" Warwick Hughes wrote
a critique of the Australian data used by East Anglia
to arrive at their 0.8°C/century, saying
Our conclusion is that Australian temperatures have
exhibited no upward trend over the past century. This conclusion
is in contrast to the continental warming trend implicit
in the East Anglia study from the stations chosen. The main
reasons why our conclusions differ are that the East Anglia
study:
• included a number of heat island affected city records;
• excluded other long term records from rural Australia.
The East Anglia study drew heavily upon data from major
urban centres. One reason for this is the likelihood that
such centres' temperature records have been kept more professionally;
in addition, it is easier to trace... adjustments due to
station shifts in major centres... It may well be that the
records from more remote stations are inferior to those
of the city sites. However, an examination of peaks and
troughs for city and remote sites show a consistent pattern
after adjustment for the trend. This indicates that one
possible source of error - human error - is unlikely to
be systematically present... Although the East Anglia study
claims to have taken [UHI] into account in deriving its
trends, we consider it to have done so inadequately. Our
own findings... are consistent with those others have produced,
especially in the U.S.
Hughes' graphs compare the average temperature trend for
the 25 regional and remote Australian stations, for which
data was available over the years since 1882, with the average
temperatures for the six Australian capital cities. The East
Anglia study used five Australian capital cities out of its
13 long term stations. These 25 records are: Geraldton (1),
Narrabri (2), Hay (3), Albany (4), Rottnest Island Lighthouse
(5), Walgett (6), Deniliquin (7), Bourke (8), Cape Naturaliste
Lighthouse (9), Coonabarabran (10), Echuca (11), Cooma (12),
Darwin (13), Moruya Heads Pilot Station (14), Omeo (15), Dubbo
(16), Gabo Island Lighthouse (17), Bathurst (18), Strathalbyn
(19), Mt. Gambier (20), Yamba (21), Wilsons Promontory Lighthouse
(22), Newcastle Signal Station (23), Cape Otway Lighthouse
(24), Alice Springs (25).
In rsearching this article, I viewed every one of the 250-odd
graphs obtained by John Daly from the GISS records: "What
the Stations Say". These will be less tampered-with
than more recent GISS records, nevertheless they are recent
enough for their pattern to be - what is that famous word
- "unequivocal" - in showing little, if any, overall
rise. Every record chosen has a message. Most are rural records
which, while varying considerably from year to year, show
little if any significant overall rise. This is particularly
evident with the US. It is John Daly about whose death Phil
Jones remarked to Michael Mann "In an odd way this is
cheering news!" and the comparison here reveals why Jones
might say this. The comparison is startling. The time periods
are actually compatible since both stop slightly short of
now.
Jones published a study in the Journal of Geophysical
Research in 2008, that incorporated "improved" data
for the stations that had been used in the 1990 study. Figure
6 (above, right).
"shows the comparisons (as anomalies
from the 1954-1983 period) between the averages of the 42
rural and 42 urban sites used in 1990 compared with averages
from the same stations from the CMA network. The dashed
lines are the averages for the rural and urban sites in
eastern China from the 1990 paper. The solid lines are the
averages from the same stations from the CMA network. It
is clear from the graph that the trends of the CMA data
for both the rural and urban networks agree almost exactly
with the results from the 1990 paper."
And still, the divergence between rural and
urban records that all other studies show, is not there.
"The 2008 study undertook additional
analyses and did conclude that there was a likely urbanization
trend in China of 0.1 °C per decade for the period 1951-2004.
The study maintains that, allowing for this, there was still
a large-scale climatic warming of 0.15 °C per decade
over the period 1951-2004 and 0.47 °C per decade over
the period 1981-2004."
OR WAS THE "WARMING" IN THIS STUDY,
ACTUALLY UHI?

Finally I'd like to recall the work of Roy Spencer
(here
and here)
in attempting to quantify UHI corrections needed. While I've
bypassed this route, and simply gone for trustworthy individual
rural records and/or trustworthy statistics to sieve out the
rural records, his work is important, in making a case for
a significant presence of UHI, and UHI increases, that correlate
to population, and population increases, in tiny populations
that would generally be deemed rural and "beneath the
radar" of UHI. Much of this may also apply to Jones &
Wang's Chinese studies. Could it correlate to land use changes
perhaps? Spencer's figures do seem to bear out the work of
Illarionov above, that suggest perhaps adding an extra 0.1°C/century
to the 0.6°C of Long or the 0.5°C of Illarionov. That
however is speculative and needs further quantifying.
Now we can return to Ira Glickstein's figures
distributing causes of the 0.8°C agreed global temperature
rise of the last century. I'm going to plump for Natural
Change 0.3°C (with fluctuations far exceeding
this overall figure) and Data Bias 0.5°C.
As to genuine human effects,there is still room for land use
change. But for CO2 there is no room, in my opinion. The continuing
steady CO2 rise can be explained in the centennial time scale
we know exists in ice-core records for CO2 following temperature:
the time between vast quantities of CO2-rich water sinking
in polar waters during the Little Ice Age, and emerging in
the tropics to out-gas, centuries later. Check here
to compare our contributions with the natural CO2 cycle.
*Pairs of NASA GISS records used by "Peter":
Gardiner to Portland, West Point to Central Park, Maryland
to Albany, Lowville to Syracuse, Hemlock to Rochester, Angelica
to Buffalo, Smithfield to Raleigh, Santuck to Charlotte, Arcadia
to Fort Myers, Inverness to Tampa, Newnan to Atlanta, Philo
to Columbus, Vevay to Cincinnati, Whitestown to Indianapolis,
Brinkley to Little Rock, Amite to Baton Rouge, Albia to Des
Moines, Saint Peter to Minneapolis, Kingfisher to Oklahoma
City, Boerne to San Antonio, Los Lunas to Albuquerque, Tombstone
to Tucson, Roosevelt to Phoenix, Morgan Como to Salt Lake
City, Cuyamaca to San Diego, Lemon Cove to Fresno, Colfax
to Sacramento, Hood River to Portland.
Page updated 1st December 2011
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