"Global Warming Was Caused by Urban Growth and Heat Islands."
 Part of the Common Arguments from Global Warming Skeptics Series
From Logical Science

        Many climate critics will use the urban heat island effect to try and discredit the global surface temperature readings.  The urban heat island effect is a phenomenon where a dense urban area ends up warmer than it's surrounding areas.  The effect is seen "mainly at night" and is most noticeable when there is no wind.  If urban heat islands were really tainting the surface stations then we would expect that the hottest areas would be around the biggest cities.  Below and to the left (Fig 1A) is a map of temperature changes provided by NASA.  Most of the warming has occurred at the North pole which is obviously devoid of major cities.  The image below and to the right (Fig 1B) is a night time image of planet earth.  The bright areas represent city lights.  As you can see very little if any of the global heating is occurring around the cities.

2005 Surface Temperature Anomaly Earth at Night

Fig 1A. Source: NASA Fig 1B.  Source: NASA's Astronomy Pic of the Day , Direct


A more detailed look documented by a paper rehosted on NOAA's website found no impact on the surface records by urbanization:
Using satellite night-lights–derived urban/rural metadata, urban and rural temperatures from 289 stations in 40 clusters were compared using data from 1989 to 1991. Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, no statistically significant impact of urbanization could be found in annual temperatures.
If this doesn't convince someone then you should tell them to look at the worldwide glacier retreat among dozens of other indicators we have.  And lets not forget that global surface temperature readings closely match those given by satellite measurements.  The image blow illustrates this by overlapping surface temperature readings in blue, UAH satellite readings of the lower atmosphere in red, and RSS satellite readings of the land and ocean in green.  The fact that these three independent measuring devices line up so well is very strong proof that the data is accurate.

Surface vs Satellite Temperatures
Source: GlobalWarmingArt.com



How To Respond

The following is a question frequently posed by readers of ClimateAudit.org and SurfaceStations.org (who are quite fond of the pejorative "contaminated") which was answered with one very simple sentence:
Climate Critic: Question is, why we should accept any data from these contaminated sites?

Answer: No reason to at all, since we can rely on satellite data that show the same warming trend that the surface data do. 

Driving the Last Nail Into the Coffin
(under construction)

Stanford's Stephen Schneider once retorted to a human measurement error argument by pointing toward animal proxies.  There is also the worldwide glacier retreat, sea ice melt, sea level rise, rising ocean temperature, boreholes and many other proxies that all point toward a warming world.


When this page is finished you will be able to comment on our BLOG!


Sources:

Notes to add later:
    McKitrick
    Animal Proxies
    Boreholes
    Glacier graphs
    and more...





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