A new peer-reviewed study in the journal Climate, has made the case that the global warming hypothesis is challenged by an examination of the location of temperature measuring stations. It was found that most of these are in urban areas, giving rise to a heat island effect. If the measurement of temperature changes was using rural stations only, the extent of global warming changes from 0.89 degrees (C) per century to only 0.55 degrees per century. This alone would refute the climate emergency narrative that is being used to eliminate fossil fuels and farming in the West.
Thus, this is an important piece of evidence for our side. The issue about the accuracy of the thermometers measuring temperature in urban areas has often been raised as an objection to the global warming hypothesis. The counter is usually that there are so many stations, that any errors will get averaged out. That strikes me a bogus, as the error will apply to each station in an urban area, with all of them being inaccurate, so there is no averaging process that will work satisfactorily. An average of bogus data, is just averaged bogus data.
https://www.igor-chudov.com/p/is-the-planet-truly-boiling-or-are
“An elegant new study that eliminates the effect of “urban islands” throws doubt on both the extent and the causes of global warming.
It turns out that we were measuring the wrong thing all along! Due to understandable reasons of convenience, scientists placed weather stations near where they live, in or near urban areas.
It turned out to be problematic: instead of measuring the warming of the planet, we measured the warming of the cities.
Most people live in urban areas; however, most land is not urban: metropolitan areas occupy only three percent of the land mass, as this picture shows.
Scientists demonstrated that if we measure temperature changes using rural stations only, the extent of global warming changes from 0.89 degrees (C) per century to only 0.55 degrees per century.
Two different temperature estimates were considered—a rural and urban blend (that matches almost exactly with most current estimates) and a rural-only estimate. The rural and urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 °C/century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 °C/century. This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases.
Furthermore, using the standard climate change attribution models shifts the causal determination from human forcing to natural forcing as the main cause of temperature changes.
What Changes the Earth’s Climate?
I am aware that many of my readers care, one way or another, about climate change, and we have our ideas of what changes climate and what does not. I am not trying to change your mind - I am still making up my own. In this post, I want to explain what the scientists found - and you can have any opinion about their findings as your heart desires.
Soon et al. set out to consider the effects of the leading forces affecting climate: solar, volcanic activity, and human-caused changes in our planet.
To remind you, the consensus of “climate science” is that human-caused factors explain most global warming.
Soon et al. set out to replicate the standard climate attribution methodology, using only the rural stations instead of the primarily urban set prone to urban bias.
They used linear regressions, a tool to find correlations, that we are familiar with from my mortality articles.
It turns out that both the slope (the size of the effect) and the r-squared (the explanatory power) of human activity were much lower for the rural-only dataset. For rural-only stations, human activity explained only 38% of climate change, whereas for the urban-centered “all stations,” human activity explained 80% of climate change.
Since most of the land mass of our planet is rural, trying to use rural weather stations that are more representative of the whole-planet conditions makes sense, right?
If so, the rural-only data shows that the Earth only changes its climate by 0.55 degrees C per century, and only 38% of that change is explained by possible human factors. This means our collective car driving, meat-eating, HVAC, and other activities are only responsible for 0.55*0.38 = 0.20 degrees per century!
The standard IPCC model, giving heavy weight to urban weather stations, suggests that climate change is 0.89 degrees per century, 80% of which is explained by human activity, so we, the humans, get blamed by 0.89*0.8 = 0.7 degrees per century.
So, is humanity responsible for 0.7 degrees per century, as the urban-biased data set suggests, or 0.2 degrees, as the rural-only (representative of most of the planet’s landmass) dataset suggests?
In other words, we measured the wrong thing by placing most weather stations near cities.
If so, we can ask, is the global boiling happening, or is that another error of scientific and political groupthink?”
https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/11/9/179