True, Washington Publish, rural areas are considerably cooler than cities, however please learn to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit

An article in the Washington Post (WaPo) on August 3 entitled Study suggests that rural areas near cities can cool down by almost 30 percent”, admits what others, including the Heartland Institute, have been noting for years: rural areas are much cooler than cities. What is new, however, is that they suspect that rural areas actually keep cities cooler by transporting cooler air from rural areas into the city. They write:

Rural areas surrounding urban areas could help to reduce cities by up to 32.9 degrees Fahrenheitsuggests an analysis in Nature Cities and offers a hint of a way to cool increasingly sweltering urban areas.

To understand how rural land cover affects urban heat islands—a phenomenon in which cities become significantly warmer than their surrounding areas—researchers examined data from 30 Chinese cities between 2000 and 2020. They examined the land cover around urban areas and ranked the ability of different urban-rural configurations to cool cities.

Note the bold 32.9 degrees Fahrenheit from the WaPo article. We've often said that journalists have no idea about the most basic science, let alone complex climate science. In this article, WaPo reporter Erin Blakemore makes that abundantly clear.

The University of Surrey press release referred to in the WaPo article states: “Rural zones surrounding cities can increase temperatures in cities by more than 0.5°C.”

Why this difference? Apparently the WaPo reporter cannot convert Celsius and Fahrenheit correctly. She wanted to “Americanize” the story and wanted to display the temperature in Fahrenheit, the unit commonly used in the USA.

If you don't know the formula, you can use Google to calculate it, which is probably what she did. On Google, 0.5 °C converts to 32.9 °F.

But this is clearly wrong, because Blakemore assumes that 0.5°C is an absolute temperature, not a temperature difference due to the cooling effect between rural and urban areas. If what she says were true, a comfortable city temperature of 65°F would not possibly be cooled to 32.1°F (near freezing) by the effect of nearby rural areas. How embarrassing.

Despite this ridiculous failure of academic science, the Washington Post article shows how rural areas help cities stay cooler. The study, conducted in China, says that heat is transported from cities to rural areas by a meteorological mechanism. The reason for this is a matter of physics, they write:

In cities, the air warms up, creating a low-pressure area near the ground that brings cooler air up from the surrounding rural areas. The rural areas then absorb the heat.

The study has implications for very large cities, which often record new temperature records while surrounding cities do not. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect has been known for some time, as the figure below shows.

From “Climate at a Glance: Urban Heat Islands” we know:

• Urban heat islandswhich grow with the size of the cities, create artificial warming at many long-term temperature stations.
• On average, urban heat islands increase the global surface Temperature trend by almost 50 percent.
• Nearly 90 percent of temperature stations in the United States are affected by the effects of urbanization.
• Almost half of The reported warming in the USA disappears if only stations that are not distorted by heat islands are reported.

One of the biggest concerns surrounding UHI is its impact on the planet's surface temperature records.

The data in the figure below show that temperature stations that have not been distorted by the urban heat island effect report significantly less warming than temperature stations that have been distorted by the urban heat island influence, as shown in Figure 1 below. Despite this known problem, distorted temperature stations make up the majority of stations used to report official U.S. temperature data.

Figure 1. Unadulterated stations (classes one and two) report much less warming than stations distorted by urban heat island factors (classes three, four and five). Source: Anthony Watts

The biggest UHI problem is the fact that thermometers in cities tend to skew the “global warming” trend upward because cities are overrepresented in station temperature records as a percentage of the Earth's surface. Rural areas, where thermometers have not been affected by UHI, show a much lower 30-year temperature trend.

It's good that the UHI is finally being acknowledged by the Washington Post, but given the scientific skill of the author of this story, it's doubtful he will ever figure out how much the UHI distorts the surface temperature records he finds so alarming. I expect, unfortunately, that the Washington Post and its scientifically illiterate writers will continue to push the climate narrative that blames climate catastrophe on carbon dioxide generated by human use of fossil fuels, despite mounting evidence that recent temperature increases, when measured correctly, are not alarming.

Anthony Watts

Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at the Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business on and off camera since 1978 as a television meteorologist and currently produces daily radio forecasts. He has developed weather graphics presentation systems for television and specialty weather instruments and has co-authored peer-reviewed articles on climate issues. He runs the world's most visited climate website, the award-winning wattsupwiththat.com.

Originally published at ClimateREALISM

Editor's note. In the cover image, the “32” is circled in red, the cause of the WAPO error. The addition of the 32 in the classic formula only applies to absolute temperatures, not to a delta change in temperature.

Like this:

How Is loading…

Related