Urban Heat - 322

We all know cities are hot. And some places in cities are deadly hot. The placement of meteorological stations anywhere can significantly impact the accuracy of the data they collect. In urban areas, weather stations may be near buildings, roads, or other heat sources, where the equipment registers higher temperatures.

As we would suspect, the temperature readings at these stations are going to be higher than those at the stations in rural areas. But is the rate of increase in UHIs higher? Climate scientists need to know the rate of temperature increase!

Scientists have long known UHIs could distort their temperature data. To ensure they are not misleading us, here are some of the ways scientists counter UHI anomalies:

1. Data Adjustment: Scientists use statistical methods to adjust temperature data from urban weather stations, accounting for the UHI effect. These adjustments help to provide a more accurate representation of temperature trends.
2. Comparison with Rural Stations: Temperature data from urban weather stations are often compared with those from nearby rural stations to identify and correct discrepancies.
3. Relocation of Stations: Sometimes, weather stations are relocated to more suitable sites away from urban heat sources.

Despite these safeguards, the climate denial community in the 2000s was sure that UHIs were distorting the rate at which we were warming. Looking back, it is hard to believe these were honest criticisms because for decades, the Arctic and the Antarctic have been the fastest warming regions on earth, and there are no UHIs there!

          In response to the accusations of false data, a few small-scale science investigations were conducted using sampling and proven statistical methods to evaluate meteorologists' methods. They found that the meteorologists and scientists were accurate.

    Despite these studies, the denial community was still in full-scale uproar, telling us the earth is not warming because weather stations near UHIs were giving false data.  One denial blogger asked his followers to find weather stations, take pictures of them, and send them to him. He selected 50 photographs of stations appearing to be unreliable and posted them.  

     Eventually, truth prevails. In this case, it came from an unlikely source. This time, honesty came from a well-known climate denier named Richard A Muller, a physicist and professor at the Berkely National Laboratory. He saw 50 photographs and suspected that stations near UHIs might have corrupted data.  He announced he and his daughter would form an independent non-profit organization and put the question to rest one way or the other. They formed the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature Project. (BEST)

   By 2011, he and his team had inspected all the suspect weather stations. The data and computational methods were subjected to intense scrutiny.

       In short, the BEST team found NO major anomalies.

In October 2011, Muller wrote in an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal. He said, "When we began our study, we felt that skeptics had raised legitimate issues, and we didn't know what we'd find. Our results turned out to be close to those published by prior groups. We think that means that those groups had truly been very careful in their work, despite their inability to convince some skeptics of that. They managed to avoid bias in their data selection, homogenization, and other corrections. Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans, and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that. Existing data used to show global warming have met with much criticism. The Berkeley Earth project attempts to resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses by making available an open record to enable rapid response to further criticism and suggestions. Our results include our best estimate for the global temperature change and our estimates of the uncertainties in the record."

In August 2012, Muller was interviewed by Amy Goodman of Harvard, describing the process. Muller tells the BEST story, "So, it began to come together about a year ago. We were able to show that the poor station quality, although it affected the temperature measurements, didn't affect the temperature changes. We were able to use 100 percent of the data, not the 20 percent that others had used. We found that data selection bias didn't affect things…. the rise in that curve (temperature rise) was dead on to human production of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. At that point, the data had led me to a conclusion I would not have expected a few years earlier."

Later, Muller went on to call on the world to reduce carbon emissions.

For his professionalism demonstrated by thoroughly investigating the data and then courageously reversing his position, led “Foreign Policy” to name Muller one of the world's best thinkers in 2012.

Muller's journey from skepticism to acknowledgment of human-induced climate change highlights the importance of rigorous scientific inquiry and the willingness to change one's views based on evidence.

UHIs are real but do not skew the data because our professional meteorologists and climate scientists have made the appropriate adjustments.

Some climate myths, like this one, resurface and crawl out of the grave after being killed and buried. In the climate science world, they are called Zombie Myths. Don’t be confused when this UHI Zombie Myth crawls out of the grave again.

For more in-depth research:

Ref: Muller-is-a-believer-Hallelujah.pdf (Harvard.edu)