New Study Finds 25-45% Of The Instrumental Warming Since The 1950s Is Due To Urbanization, Not CO2

Why have sea surface temperatures and proxy temperature reconstructions so strongly diverged from the instrumental land record in recent decades? Because “0.36 ± 0.04 °C” of non-climatic warming from roofs, asphalt, machines, vehicles…artificially enhances the post-1950s global temperature trend.

A new analysis (Scafetta, 2021) suggests:

• Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects can raise city temperatures 6-9°C above the temperatures in surrounding rural areas. These significant biases are not sufficiently removed from instrumental records.

• Sea surface temperatures and land temperatures showed matching variations and amplitudes from 1900 to 1980. After 1980, the land surface temperatures rose substantially more, suggesting nearly half of the land temperature increase is non-climatic.

• Tree ring temperature reconstructions showed a strikingly similar pattern of amplitude and oscillation prior to the 1980s. After the 1980s, the instrumental record claims more than twice as much warming as the proxy records.

• Between 25-45% of the warming from 1940-’60 to 2000-’20 appears to be artificial, or non-climatic.

• Climate models overestimate the 1940-’60 to 2000-’20 climatic warming by about 40% in hindcasts.

Image Source: Scafetta, 2021

19 responses to “New Study Finds 25-4519 Of The Instrumental Warming Since The 1950s Is Due To Urbanization, Not CO2”

  1. Richard Greene

    It’s my opinion that the surface temperature numbers are not accurate enough to determine the effect of small changes to UHI over long periods of time.

    The UAH satellite temperature data, with far less guessing (infilling) may be accurate enough, but is not available before 1979.

    The typical way to estimate the effect of economic growth on a weather station is to compare an urban station located in a growing city, with a rural station, that remained rural, in the vicinity of that city.

    That methodology could work in the US, but for most of the world there are far too few rural weather stations, that remained rural, and had continuous temperature records for a century or more.

    Another problem is that rural weather stations could be warmed more by economic growth in their vicinity, than an urban weather station that remained urban as the city spread out.

    In the end, 71% of the planet’s surface is water, not affected by UHI.

    And the UAH weather satellite data, measured in the troposphere, completely eliminates the potential bias from UHI.

  2. S. K. Dodsland

    We don’t live in the troposphere or stratosphere and the surface temperature data sets have been altered.

    Tony Heller of realclimatescience.com has on numerous occasions compared the altered and unaltered data for the US on his website

    The raw surface temperature data for the last 120 years does not indicate a warming trend.

    1. The Indomitable Snowman, Ph.D.

      I’ll second that last.

      My own analyses (years back) of raw surface temperature data clearly show no systematic trend of any sort – just statistical stability with any variability being due to statistical noise.

    2. tom0mason

      Well said S. K. Dodsland,

      Tony Heller has shown this for more than a decade but still the crazy AGW advocates don’t see it as they are still trapped in their illogical ‘greenhouse’ paradigm.

      1. David Appell

        tom0mason wrote:
        but still the crazy AGW advocates don’t see it as they are still trapped in their illogical ‘greenhouse’ paradigm.

        Do you think CO2 doesn’t absorb infrared radiation, or do you think the Earth’s surface doesn’t emit any?

  3. Richard Greene

    S.K. Dodsland
    Indirect temperature calculations from satellites in the troposphere have several important advantages over surface calculations:

    (1) Measured in a consistent environment not affected by economic growth,

    (2) Measured exactly where the greenhouse gas effect occurs, and

    (3) Requires little infilling (guessing)– only for small areas over both poles.

    For surface measurements, there is very little Southern Hemisphere coverage before 1900, and insufficient S.H. coverage before 1920.

    There is a lot of guessing (infilling) before World War II and there is still too much infilling today.

    The global average temperature HAS been rising since 1979, when weather satellite data began (UAH weather satellite data does show less warming than surface temperature statistics, but both methodologies reflect global warming).

    While it is possible there was no warming in the past 120 years, because data in the early 1900s include so many estimates (due to s such poor global coverage), there has been warming in the past 325 years, since the late 1600s, and in the past 50 years, since the 1970s.

    Our planet is always warming or cooling.

    It would be unlikely that the global average temperature stayed the same for a century.

    The anecdotal, climate reconstruction, and measurement data, all strongly suggest a warming trend has been in progress for over 300 years, since the Little Ice Age centuries. And that makes Mr. Heller very likely to be wrong about the global average temperature change the past 120 years.

  4. Jeff

    Years ago the BBC made a series about a Victorian garden; in one episode the gardener showed how a walled garden trapped heat. He used 3 thermometers; one in the shade at the foot of the garden, one in the middle catching full sun and one against a red brick wall at the top. The thermometer against the wall recorded several degrees more heat than even the one in direct sunlight. The reason was the wall; the Victorians grew peach trees against walls for this very reason. When one wall allows a peach tree to fruit and survive in the UK, the billions of tons and steel in out cities is bound to have an effect.

  5. Harry Dale Huffman

    The basic problem is not “urbanization” but fraudulent temperature adjustments, always in the direction to “show” global warming. The temperature records are incredibly noisy in the first place, which makes them incompetent, but on top of that is the blatant fraud of the adjustments.

    Way back in 2012, I wrote the short but definitive blog post:

    http://theendofthemystery.blogspot.com/2012/10/us-temperatures-have-been-falsely.html

    and commented on Tony Heller’s site a number of times, to bring it to his attention (it’s his data, for heaven’s sake). It took him 2 years (exactly 2 years, to the day, as a matter of fact) to make the same point himself, without of course mentioning me.

    I mention it in this way, because even the “good guys” — and Heller, alias Stephen Goddard, is one of the very best — have been following their own pet dogmas for too long, making them oblivious to correction (as Richard Greene shows himself to be here).

    Blind obedience to false dogmas over good, honest reasoning is the underlying problem, across all of science, and later in politics, since 1988 and the UN’s intrusion into the false science arena, on the side of lies and abuse of true science.

    I write as the Galileo of this age, with the next scientific paradigm in hand.

    1. David Appell

      The temperature records are incredibly noisy in the first place, which makes them incompetent, but on top of that is the blatant fraud of the adjustments

      The real world is noisy. Deal with it.

      That’s what statistics are all about. They show a strong warming trend over the 20th century and into the 21st, with no explanation except for CO2.

      And HDH is most certainly not Galileo. A legend only in his own mind.

      Now watch Pierre censor this comment. [Do you ever stop whining, David?]

  6. Richard Greene

    Mr. Huffman: Good work way back in 2012.

    Add infilling to the “adjustments”, and

    Re-adjustments

    Re-Re Adjustments

    Ignoring satellite “temperature” data

    Claiming a +/-0.1 degree C. margin of error, in spite of few measurements in the 1800s, and early 1900s.

    Claiming a bizarre water vapor positive feedback, tripling the expected global warming effect of CO2 alone (which is only assumed, based on lab experiments).

    The IPCC dismissing natural causes of climate change as “noise” back in 1995, after 4.5 billion years of HUGE climate changes, with ONLY natural causes.

    Claiming to be able to predict the future climate, when climate models predict double the actual warming, and have NOT been getting more accurate over time.

    And the worst problem, in my opinion, is ignoring actual experience with global warming in the past 45 years, which has been pleasant — most affecting colder areas of our planet — and beneficial — greening our planet too.

    Then ignoring actual experience with warming, and claiming continued warming will be a crisis, just the opposite of our actual experience with global warming since the 1970s.

    I call this mainly junk science, plus a little real science — infrared gas lab spectroscopy experiments, that suggest CO2 ought to cause mild harmless warming in the atmosphere … which is EXACTLY what we have had since the 1970s.

    Such as warmer winter nights in Siberia !

    That’s a climate emergency?

  7. New Study: 25-45% Of Warming Since 1950s Is Due To Urbanization, Not CO2 | altnews.org

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  8. New Study: 25-45% Of Warming Since 1950s Is Due To Urbanization, Not CO2 – Menopausal Mother Nature

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  9. CO2isLife

    If you control for the UHI and Water Vapor, you will discover that the stations show no warming. Here are 265 Stations that show no warming uptrend. Some go back to 1880.

    https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/12/urban-heat-island-effects-on-u-s-temperature-trends-1973-2020-ushcn-vs-hourly-weather-stations/#comment-3181833

    Here is my Favorite:
    Alice Springs (23.8S, 133.88E) ID:501943260000
    https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show_v3.cgi?id=501943260000&dt=1&ds=5

    1. David Appell

      265 stations out of how many total?

      Controlling for water vapor is wrong, since it’s increasing with global warming. Its effect on temperature therefore has to be taken into account.

      Watch Pierre censor this comment too.

      1. JackEddyfier

        In the Ganges plain, in India, more irrigation increased relative humidity by 2%. This is associated with an 0.8C fall in average temperature over the past 40 years. Study: Anukesh Krishnankutty Ambika1 and Vimal Mishra1, 2020 Environ. Res. Lett. 15 124060; https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abc8bc

        Surely the cooling is dues to more surface evaporative cooling; with extra water vapor is not sufficiently compensating with infrared downwelling warming due.

  10. Nick Bennett

    There is a huge amount of historical observations archived with the
    UK Met Office, which is environmentally untainted, suppled from
    world wide ships surface observations. Send in every 6 hours over a
    large span of years. Wonder if genuine climatologists
    have used any of tgis data?

  11. David Appell

    S. K. Dodsland wrote:
    The raw surface temperature data for the last 120 years does not indicate a warming trend.

    If you don’t adjust the raw data to remove biases, you don’t get useful scientific results.

  12. David Appell

    Has anything Scafetta has ever published ever been confirmed?

    On the other hands, how many things that Scafetta has ever published have been borne out?

  13. David Appell

    Richard Greene wrote:
    The UAH satellite temperature data, with far less guessing (infilling) may be accurate enough,

    UAH now must compare raw data over about 11 different satellites, some of which never existed at the same time so were never calibrated together.

    How do you do that and get “accurately enough?”

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