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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...
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.
Not really. The overall temperature difference is the same. This is just affecting how the change is distributed. It's notable, and explains a known issue with the models, but it doesn't in any way invalidate the overall predictions, i.e., things are getting warmer.
Seriously, the entire waste heat production of humanity is nothing compared to solar heating. Solar heating is ~170 petawatts. The total energy production of humanity isn't even a tenth of a percent of that. Closer to a hundredth of a percent, really.
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 heat island effect has always been taken into account for purposes of observation - when some of your data points are located in cities, you need to either discard them or compensate in some manner. This study shows that the effect covers a far wider area than previously thought. A few minor revisions to the models are needed. That doesn't mean previous predictions are suddenly all wrong - just that they are not as accurate as they will be once these revisions are implimented.
Yet another significant factor not accounted for in climate change models.
Also: News flash - Concentrated heat sources effect weather, back to you Tom Tucker.
Unfortunately tipping the balance is all that is required to mess it up.
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.
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?
Something doesn't have to be scientific to be truth. Philosophy, history, mathematics - all have means of determining "truth" without relying on the scientific method. The problem is that "science" is increasingly taken to mean "rational", when that is not true - science is a subset of rationality. Stating something is not scientific is not necessarily an attack against it; it's purely descriptive.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
It was covered extensively in the BEST study and the correction was found to be negligible. (They applied the correction anyway.)
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
As for your comment about digital computers modeling the theories of the climate scientists, THAT EXPERIMENT HAS BEEN TRIED. REPEATEDLY. Every single climate model out there, when started with available historical data and allowed to run, FAILS to predict today's climate. A model which provably does not match reality is, by definition, an invalid model, no matter how cheap or how fancy a computer you ran it on.
Unfortunately, that's just not true.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
"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?