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Cities' Heat Can Affect Temperatures 1000+ Miles Away
Living in dense cities makes for certain efficiencies: being able to walk or take mass transit to work, living in buildings with (at least potentially) efficient HVAC systems, and more. That's why cities have been lauded in recent years for their (relatively) low environmental impact. But it seems at least one aspect of city life has an environmental effect felt at extreme distances from the cities themselves: waste heat. All those tightly packed sources of heat, from cars to banks of AC units, result in temperature changes not just directly (and locally) but by affecting weather systems surrounding the source city.
From the article:
"The released heat is changing temperatures in areas more than 1,000 miles away (1609 kilometers). It is warming parts of North America by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) and northern Asia by as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius), while cooling areas of Europe by a similar amount, scientists report in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The released heat (dubbed waste heat), it seems, is changing atmospheric circulation, including jet streams — powerful narrow currents of wind that blow from west to east and north to south in the upper atmosphere.
This impact on regional temperatures may explain a climate puzzle of sorts: why some areas are having warmer winters than predicted by climate models, the researchers said. In turn, the results suggest this phenomenon should be accounted for in models forecasting global warming."
more than 1,000 miles away (1609 kilometers)
Seriously, if you have one rough rounded number you can't do an exact convert and add false precision to the statement...
... But this directly contradicts those greenhouse-gas warming models that assume that the "heat island" effect is of little or no significance. To the best of my knowledge, that is the majority of them.
One of the concepts that interested me in Larry Niven's classic science-fiction work Ringworld is a civilization having to move its planet out from its sun in order to avoid perishing in their waste heat. I haven't seen that possibility explored so much in the years since. With studies like this, along with Kurzweil-ish woo-woo of extrapolating growth, can we talk an amusing guess at how long until heat waste renders the Earth, or at least certain parts of it uninhabitable?
Serious, first thing to look for a thermal is the local town, absent mountains or hills. A large parking lot already does do fine. I know of a military airport which has a cemetary nearby, the dense black marble is sufficient.
I've seen a map of thunderstorm frequency for UK which shows that a majority occur directly downwind (in prevailing wind direction) from cities, and size and frequency of storms is related to size of the city. Thunderstorm frequency and severity also relate to frequency and severity of lightning damage and hailstorms. If I can find that again, I'll post a link (unless someone else gets there first).
"Cock Up Your Beaver" does not mean what you think. This sig is intended to clog filters and annoy do-gooders
The basis of the scientific method is:
1. Formulate hypothesis.
2. Formulate experiment to test hypothesis.
3. Perform experiment.
4. Evaluate results against hypothesis.
5. If results don't match, start over from step 1, using what you learned from the experiment to refine the hypothesis or make a new one.
How do you conduct the experiment to validate a climate hypothesis, such as the one that is the subject of this article?
Remark: The gold standard for validation of a simulation model is to run it on historical data and see how well it predicts what actually happened. To date, NONE of the "anthropogenic global warming/climate change" simulations have passed this test.
Yet another significant factor not accounted for in climate change models.
Also: News flash - Concentrated heat sources effect weather, back to you Tom Tucker.
Also your "NONE of the ... simulations" thing is a lie since that is the way these things are tested in the first place! Is it your lie or somebody else's lie?
Time to destroy the cities before we are all swimming, or over heated, or something.
Be seeing you...
Only countries in the world to still use Fahrenheit.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.
I love it when when, when converting US customary units to SI units, the precision of numbers suddenly increases by orders of magnitude. 1000 miles is obviously an approximation. Let's be charitable and say it means 10x10^2. If you convert it to kilometers the precision should stay the same. 10x10^2 miles is about 16x10^2 or 1600 km.
When questioned with PR company lies that answer is a fairly obvious response.
When one "side" pretends that if the other is not omniscient then everything they say can be rejected and replaced with a handy PR lie that's when you get assertions of certainty in response. Certainty is possible in general terms even if unreasonable levels of precision is not.
There is a website called "google scholar" now so there is no longer any reason to pretend there is no rigorous testing just because you can't be bothered to ever set foot in a library before making these wild claims. What is this bullshit about flooding the net with noise to try to shout down anyone with a clue? Do you realise that your anti-expert bullshit is having fallout in other fields, and if you are good at anything at all such a line is going to backfire on yourself if it catches on?
I think it's about time to graduate from the childrens dictionary Bongo if you are attempting to be credible.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I always thought that anything you plugged into something that was measured in thousands of Megawatts ought to get pretty hot.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
If it were 1000 miles downstream, and even 0.1C temperature difference, then figure out how much area the power output of a city would be spread out to give that increase in temperature.
Now divide by 1000 miles.
How wide is that?
A few cm. A couple of inches.
Oh dear. I guess that this isn't such a big effect on the GLOBAL FUCKING TEMPERATURES after all.
PS I wonder how it affects the entire bloody pacific ocean. Not a lot of cities for thousands of miles there... But still there's no discernably different trend for ocean temps from satellite and landmass temps from the same satellite.
Isn't this comment more or less an archetypal example? Veiled and nonspecific allusions to error, uncertainty, and weakness? No actual substance? Nonspecific accusations that could be leveled at any piece of research? Let's look at the issues you raise.
"The question is always, how do they know? What did they do to arrive at that result?"
It's in the papers. And countless popular accounts.
"...does not sound like a high standard."
That's why your rhetorical scenario is not the standard to which climate science is held. If you're interested it's... in the papers, and in the countless popular accounts.
"Where's your rigorous testing for that assertion?"
It's in the papers, and countless popular accounts. Assuming, of couse, you do not set an arbitrarily strict limit for "rigorous" that excludes them.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
No thanks to Anthony Watts and his dastardly cohorts who have been whining for years about using weather stations sited near the exhaust vents of HVAC units, tennis courts or on blacktop -- for climate modeling purposes.
So instead of moving the stations we had applied a little "hot devil's breath" adjustment to the lot, a dash of cayenne and an extra egg.
Now it looks as if the whole city will need a whole other egg and an extra yolk.
Give us a moment to adjust for this finally-documented urban heat island effect. We have retroactively bumped all temperatures from the network -- up! -- by 1.8 degrees.
"Computer models worse than predicted" "Global Warming Accelerating More Than We Imagined" "Temps rising Faster Than Surmised" "Heat Hotter Than Previously Thought" "Urban Heat Islands will be Completely Underwater by 2050"
This is good news for Oklahoma City and Dallas, whose inhabitants had Previously Thought that the odd prevalence of tornadoes and freakish thunderstorms around the urbanized areas was the act of a vengeful god.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
Think of the impact this would have, if many of the data-recording points for temperature were slowly surrounded by urbanization or in the 'heat shadow' of urban areas?
http://www.john-daly.com/ges/surftmp/surftemp.htm
He makes a compelling case, the refutation of which has been on the order of "of course they considered this, they're experts"...when there's no trace of such analysis or correction applied to East Anglia conclusions or IPCC reports through at least 2005 (after which I stopped bothering to read them).
-Styopa
Did anybody else smell something funky when reading the assertion that Cities are more environmentally friendly than the countryside? The first article linked seemed to talk only about lower emissions resulting from more efficient per capita household energy consumption and transportation costs. I wonder what would happen if we account for all the other goods the urbanite consumes, the emissions for their transportation, etc. After all Industry plays the bigger role in pollution. And that is not even to mention that pollution is not a one-dimensional variable, but a highly complex concept involved intense non-linearities. As we have seen above - again we see shit is more complicated than we gave it credit.
What really made me sick about the article (which you see everywhere these days) is the assertion that since the population will grow to the size of 9 billion people "we must accommodate this growth". Yay! Lets grow the human population until we reach the very boundary of the planet's capacity so that random fluctuations can result in major catastrophes and risk life on the planet for the whole human race!
Its not like I think country side dwellers are saints - I am sure they consume and pollute more than they did a few hundred years ago - its just I recon that the null hypothesis should be "low concentrations of human population are less polluting the high concentrations". Don't mistake this for an argument for everyone going to the countryside - I argue for limiting population growth. The ecosystems we live in are highly non-linear and this means we can be facing extreme fluctuations as the result of relatively small events. This is an argument for environmental conservatism - and the argument made well by Nassim Taleb in his new book is that when dealing with complex systems fraught with non-linearities which evolved over long time we should assume anything we do effects the system adversely, and the opposite assertion is the one that needs proving.
The glider pilots in the DFW area refer to the plowed black-earth fields east of Dallas as "Texas brick lifters" in what I have been told is only mild exaggeration. So apparently heat island effects are not relegated to urban areas.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
On a more serious note, we all know that man-made stuff affects weather patters, but every large natural thing affects weather patterns as well. The weather is easy to affect, but what we should care about is not whether we affect the weather, but whether we do harm. Too many people run these together.
... author gets published by quantifying it somewhat in a certain context. Move along.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
About damn time someone was considering the impact of human heat sources, such as cars, electricity generation etc.
I've been wondering this for a long time - why no one is considering this?!
Basicly that heat has no where to go - some of it does radiate to space, but the heat what planet earth radiates away is rather limited, space being vacuum.
I wouldn't be surprised if the whole "global warming" would be all human heat caused, while pollution is minimalistic. Seriously tho, we shouldn't even blame pollution as long as we allow the super tankers, which of there is tens and each causes more pollution than 55 million cars.
Global warming got changed to climate change, as heat generated in Brazil might cause UK to get cooler etc. due to changing weather patterns.
Someone talking about "europe's temperatures getting lower": Realize this is not isolated to continents, the locality of these is this whole planet. Heat generated in New York will affect australia, and heat in australia will affect Moscow.
If one particular place is getting cooler, another place is getting warmer by the same amount.
In other words, what matters is the total energy content (heat) of the planet. Specific locality (city) only matters in the where and how.
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Forced relocation from densely populated urban environments is the only solution to save the world from global warming.
A wonderful side affect would the inevitable increase in self reliance. Two wins!
You must gather your party before venturing forth.
"Living in dense cities makes for certain efficiencies: being able to walk or take mass transit to work, living in buildings with (at least potentially) efficient HVAC systems, and more."
None of these are valid justifications for cities.
Transportation: I can and do walk, rarely needing a vehicle. No need for mass transport either. I live on a farm and work there as well as in the forest. No need to drive. I often go months without getting in a car or truck.
Efficient HVAC: Our high thermal mass, well insulated home is far more efficient requiring far less energy for heating than city buildings and it requires no cooling. It also doesn't affect the local or distant environments.
Cities stink, are filthy dirty, centers of disease and filled with vermin of both the four legged, six legged and two legged sort. Cities can't produce their own food or fuel and they can't get rid of their own wastes. Studies show that they are black holes, blemishes on the environment, soaking up the resources and polluting thousands of square miles around them.
The only question is where else do we put all those people?
the last digit in your number is Not Quite N or More Than N-1 (down to what your measuring device reads off)
so if you have a Imperial Ruler you can say 3 inches and a bit more than 1/16 inch
you brits can say a touch under 8 cm for your ruler (note little r ruler not Big R Ruler)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
I'm going to give you the septic metaphor. The septic tank is a 60 year old,1500 imperial gallon, three chambered Goliath concrete fecal bunker. The leviathan pecan tree in the center of the leach field uses 107 gallons per day of water of unknown quality. The sandy soil has a maximum percolation rate of 1.2 imperial inches per hour in a region with an annual average 14.6" , with annual maximums of 30 to 32" occurring twice in eighty years. Functioning as the sole waste water disposal system for a compound with a family of as many as eight full time residents, half of them the other gender, the septic system has performed flawlessly throughout it's six decade existence with three exceptions: Christmas '03, Thanksgiving '06, and Christmas '13. Correlation being the better dressed cousin of coincidence (perhaps the same corollary as a realtor to used car salesman), I give the variable in the equation the benefit of the doubt. In '03 the presence of my niece in the household was statistical noise, in '06 it was a minor residual deviation, and even in '13 it was only at most a statistical coincidence based upon a too small a sample. I would be remiss in reporting accurately, however, if I told you it didn't cross my mind to consider that there might be a link. That's how it is with climate change, cherry-picking facts, quotes and opinions aside, it has crossed my mind there may be a link between earthly human activities and a deviation in the planet's weather. It has crossed your mind, too, and you are either a denier or one who proceeds with the caution your only home deserves.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Sorry just bogus. 1000 miles is beyond the horizon, not possible. Urban Heat Island effects can go no further than line of sight. http://surfacestations.org
Driving into Atlanta heading East into the city on I-20 some days you can actually see a big yellow dome over the city. Not a 1000 miles across but it does cover the whole city and is clearly visable.
Weather comes into Georgia mostly from the West. You can watch the radar and see a storm hit and go around the dome. Thats right it actually rains more to the West of Atlanta than it does in the actual city or to the East of the city.