ACK, thank you for the clarification about the SE Pacific underpass and traffic lights. A marine biologist I knew, visited the Galapogos and understood why no one from the Beagle investigated the marine biology of the Galapogos, and why the marine iguanas have to spend time sunbathing on the rocks before and after every swim. It is blooming cold!

Does the name Humboldt feature in geology textbooks? His name survives in place names and currents, and written on the underside of penguins.

golfCharlie. I somehow doubt his name occurs in modern geology textbooks. I never had cause to mention him, but I do know of him. I don't remember if he was mentioned when I was an undergraduate.

Why written on the underside of eponymous penguins?

ACK, Humboldt was a celebrated and noted explorer and scientist. All we in the UK know him for is a Current and a Penguin, which hardly makes for a healthy lunchbox. He named a squid aswell, which must be difficult with a marker pen.

His name is a common place name in atlases, I wondered whether geology also honours him.

Watts Up shows a new and pertinent study.
========

kim 12:52 do you mean this one?

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/09/22/new-usgs-study-shows-heat-retaining-concrete-and-asphalt-have-encroached-upon-us-climate-stations/

lots of interesting links too.

Thanks kim and gc.

I need to read the full report to be sure of the details (and the paper's robustness) but my preliminary thought is that since it covers the period 2001 - 2011, it's a useful update to Petersen. Like Petersen, however, I suspect it covers only the contiguous USA, but to that extent it is a useful counterpoint to Petersen.

I particularly liked this comment from Anthony Watts, which I think mirrors the views of most of us on here:

"What this suggests, is that like Las Vegas, which has had huge infrastructure boosts in the last 50 years, that the minimum temperature is creeping upwards, and that biases the mean temperature used to look for the “global warming signal”.  NOAA would do well to remove stations that have been encroached upon like this, but they stubbornly hold onto this flawed data, insisting they can “adjust” it to be accurate. I say bollocks to that. Since the USA is so highly over-sampled with thousands of weather stations, it is far better to discard noisy and imperfect data, and use only those stations that have not been biased by infrastructure increases, but retain only the best stations with pristine data."

Mark Hodgson, it all brings me back to the concept of looking at records of first daffodil in flower etc at places like Chatsworth and Blenheim Palace.

I do not doubt that spring might be a week earlier, but I doubt anything particularly dramatic, in comparison to the end of the LIA. Which then leaves the basic question of, so what? What exactly is the problem?

Mark Hodgson. There is also an interesting comment attached to the report on changing urban environments that makes the point that rural sites may undergo important changes also. Worth thinking about.

ACK 10:08 sort of why my previous comments about glider pilots looking for thermals generated by wheat fields. If in still conditions a change in crop can cause thermals hundreds of feet in the air, it must be drawing in more air from the wider area at ground level.

I doubt any such breeze would spin a wind turbine, but someone somewhere, has probably had more taxpayer funding to investigate....

https://www.london.gov.uk/what-we-do/environment/climate-change/climate-adaptation/heat

"Island effect (UHI). The UHI can cause London to be up to 10’C warmer than neighbouring rural areas. This is a result of the sun’s rays being absorbed by hard surfaces rather than by vegetation such as trees, plants and grass. Radiation from our hard surfaces is released into the air as heat. The UHI reduces the ability for cities to cool and impacts on our own capacity to regulate temperature."

Also:

"And London’s micro-climate – known as the urban heat island – means it can be as much as 10C warmer than neighbouring rural areas.

This is because sunlight is absorbed by hard surfaces like concrete and asphalt, rather than earth and vegetation.

Mr Jones said climate change means extreme weather is happening more often, giving the capital less time to prepare.

Last year, 41 people died in the city’s summer heatwave – meaning London was the only UK region with a statistically significant increase in deaths."

https://www.citymatters.london/london-must-lose-keep-calm-attitude-extreme-weather/

"The term “urban heat island” refers to the fact that cities tend to get much warmer than their surrounding rural landscapes, particularly during the summer. This temperature difference occurs when cities’ unshaded roads and buildings gain heat during the day and radiate that heat into the surrounding air. As a result, highly developed urban areas can experience mid-afternoon temperatures that are 15°F to 20°F warmer than surrounding, vegetated areas."

https://nihhis.cpo.noaa.gov/Urban-Heat-Island-Mapping/Understand-Urban-Heat-Islands

Mark Hodgson
UHI has always been one of my biggest niggles or sticking points with the claims made by Climate Scientists.

2020 started with a warmer than normal winter and spring. Summer has been dismal until the last fortnight.
2020 has seen record deaths, but the accuracy of the methods used to record these records has come under some scrutiny, in terms of the attributed causes.

Attribution, or the Blame Game is now a lucrative occupation and profitable enterprise for con artists, cash for crash fraudsters, and some notorious law firms looking to sue businesses with cash or insurance policies.

Climate Science is trying to deny UHI, and attribute everything to Global Warming. Climate Science relies on unreliable models, so it may be sensible to assume that attributionists do to. If a computer program can be adjusted to produce the desired result, why waste time on accurate data?

Are there statistics for "No increase in Deaths" due to Global Warming in hot weather amongst country bumpkins? It takes a bit more effort to prove that no connection exists than attribute a connection based on assumptions.

The Legal rules for Burden of Proof don't apply, if you are an attributionist.

I've lifted my post from Unthreaded this morning, and (slightly edited) reproduce it below. It might as well be on the appropriate thread:

"Weatherwatch: rural areas feel the heat from urbanisation
Impact of replacing vegetation with asphalt extends far beyond city boundaries, study reveals"

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/nov/27/weatherwatch-rural-areas-feel-heat-from-urbanisation

"More concrete equals more heat. We’ve heard about the urban heat island effect, where replacing vegetation with asphalt leads to greater localised warming, but what impact do urban heat islands have on the countryside around them? A new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, shows that the warming impact of urbanisation extends far beyond the city boundaries.

In Great Britain 5.8% of land area is covered by artificial surfaces, up from 4.3% in 1975. It is one of the most urbanised countries in the world with 83% of the population living on 6% of the land. Using air temperature and wind speed measurements, researchers created a statistical model to estimate the warming impact that Great Britain’s cities have on the surrounding countryside, and investigated how this has changed over time.

They show that Great Britain’s urban areas are responsible for about 0.04C of the warming the country has experienced to date, with the last 40 years of urbanisation pushing warming rates up by 3%. The UK’s fastest urbanising regions are feeling the heat most, with warming rates up to three times faster in the south-east. But the good news is that the urban heat island effect can be diminished, for example by painting roofs white and planting more vegetation....".

Well, that IS interesting, to me at least. I set off this discussion thread here many moons ago asking whether UHI was being adequately measured and whether its effect was being under-estimated, such that the impact of greenhouse gas emissions was being over-estimated. I still don't know the answer, though I continue to have my suspicions, and this adds fuel to that particular fire.

For those interested, the link to the study is here:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/abbb51/pdf

"Abstract
Urbanisation is changing the climate of the world we live in. In Great Britain (GB) 5.8% of the total land area is covered by artificial surfaces, increasing from 4.3% in 1975. Aside from associated loss of farmland, biodiversity and a range of ecosystem services, changing to urban form warms the Earth’s surface: the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Standard estimates of temperature changes do not account for urbanisation (i.e. use of rural-only stations or removal of urban bias in observations), meaning that anthropogenic modifications to the land surface may be causing the surface-level atmosphere to warm quicker than those estimates suggest. Using observations from a high-density urban monitoring network, we show that locally this warming (instantaneously) may be over 8 ◦C. Based on the relationships between UHI intensity, urban fraction and wind speed in this network, we create a statistical model and use it to estimate the current daily-mean urban warming across GB to be 0.04 ◦C [0.02 ◦C –0.06 ◦C]. Despite this climate contribution appearing
small (94% of GB’s land cover for the time-being is still rural), we show that half of GB’s population currently live in areas with average daily-mean warming ~0.4 ◦C. Under heatwave conditions our high estimates show 40% of GB’s population may experience over a 1 ◦C daily-mean UHI. Furthermore, simply due to urbanisation (1975–2014) we estimate GB is
warming at a rate equivalent and in addition to 3.4% [1.9%–5.0%] of the observed surface-level warming calculated from background stations. In the fastest urbanising region, South East GB, we find that these warming rates are up to three times faster. The methodology is straightforward and can be readily extended to other countries or updated as future land cover data becomes available."

From a quick skim-read on my part this looks like an attempt to say that things are even scarier than we realised, but I think they've shot themselves in the foot. If UHI is having a greater impact than anyone realised, surely the obvious flip-side of that coin is that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing less to warming than previously claimed? For example:

"UHI intensity is known to increase with urbanisation, particularly in rapidly expanding cities (e.g. Ren et al 2007). To date most urbanisation studies focus either on quantifying urban bias within long-term global observation networks or changing UHIs from local growth (i.e. single cities). Urban bias estimates in national temperature networks range from 0.05 to 1.1 ◦C century−1 (Karl et al 1988, Easterling 1997, Hansen et al 2001, Kalnay and Cai 2003, Li et al 2004,
Zhou et al 2004, Ren et al 2008, Sun et al 2016, Shi et al 2019), with the large range arising from different scales of urbanisation in each country. These studies are particularly relevant in certain regions; for example 90% of Chinese meteorological stations are influenced by urbanisation despite urban land only accounting for 1% of the total area (Shi et al 2019). However, these studies do not quantify the overall urbanisation-UHI contribution to climate change, i.e. weighted by regions."

That last sentence is worth digesting in full, I think.

Climate crisis will cause falling humidity in global cities – study
Research says planting trees in urban areas could mitigate rising temperatures

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jan/04/climate-crisis-will-cause-falling-humidity-in-global-cities-study

Urban regions around the world are likely to see a near-universal decrease in humidity as the climate changes, a study has found.

The research suggests that building green infrastructure and increasing urban vegetation might be a safe bet for cities looking to mitigate against rising temperatures.

Half of the world’s population lives in urban areas, but cities only account for about 3% of global land surface. Lei Zhao, a scientist from the University of Illinois and the lead author of the paper published in Nature Climate Change, says this has meant that previous climate models have not produced data specific to cities.

“Almost all the models do not have urban representation,” Zhao said. “Although cities occupy such a small area, that’s where a lot of the human impact [of global warming] takes place. So we closed this gap by providing multi-model climate projections which are specific to urban areas.”

Scientists and urban planners have known for a long time that temperatures in cities are higher than in rural areas. Infrastructure such as dark asphalt and concrete surfaces absorb more solar radiation, while reduced tree coverage contributes to what is called the “urban heat island effect”. This means that temperatures in cities can be up to 5C (9F) warmer than in the surrounding rural areas.