A challenge for Jfuh and other AGW Acolytes.

[Gill]

If I do, will you pack your bags and finally go home? We seriously do have people that research this stuff for a living, you know...

Peterson is actually an excellent researcher and has produced some good work.

Peterson did not classify the 289 stations he used in this paper. He used other researchers work to classify the individual stations as urban, suburban, or rural. Unfortunately, the stations he used in this study were classified using the satellite lights method. The lights method is very crude. The researcher looks at nighttime satellite photos and finds the approximate location of the weather station. If there are bright lights in the general area of the station, it is classified as urban, or suburban if the lights are not as intense.

The real problem with this system is that it does not take into account any micro UHI unique to the site. There are also a lot of mistakes made.

Peterson classified 13 USHCN sites as rural, but the GISS lights on these were as high as 19. Peterson classified 48 USHCN sites as urban, but 15 of them had lights less than or equal to 19. Three of these sites had lights of zero. So, as you can see, the rural, urban, suburban classification procedures are muddy and cannot be relied on.

Of the 13 Peterson USHCN sites classified as "rural", the GISS lights were as high as 19. Checking the 48 Peterson USHCN sites classified as "urban", 15 had GISS lights less than or equal to 19 (including 3 with lights=0 as noted above.)

The problem with Peterson’s paper is not his analysis of the data, it’s the data itself or more correctly the classification of the data. His rural/urban sites are mixed up and there is little difference between many of the urban and rural station sites. Better classification of the stations would have made this research clearer and more believable.

NASA/Goddard and Columbia University did an excellent study of New York City’s UHI problem and recommended possible solutions. They analyzed different types of UHI mitigation and the cost/effectiveness of each. It’s an excellent paper on UHI.

If UHI is not a problem, then why are cities throughout the U.S. passing laws to mitigate it? Many cities including Chicago and Atlanta have passed laws to reduce UHI. The entire state of California has strict laws to reduce UHI. An awful lot of time and money is being spent on a problem that you claim not to exist, or if it does exist, is inconsequential.

 

[jfuh]

A light bulb generates a lot of heat, like well over 300 degrees, while giving us light. A really well built house can heat itself with incandescent bulbs even on a cold winter night. In a poorly built house, that heat escapes...

At what energy level? The energy from a kilo of boiled water and a gram of boiled water is 1000x difference, one may have the ability to bring a small bathroom up by a few thousands of a degree, while the other may not even register.
That's the difference we are talking about here - at least what I'm talking of.
While there is plenty of energy in a city that is being generated and much released thermally, it's not enough by any means to be enough to heat a city to generate any "heat island" effect.
The heat island effect is overwhelmingly from the ability of those structures to retain energy from daylight energy - not from anthropogenic sources.
As I've shown with the graphs of energy usage vs thermal flux within a 24hr period while use is still at peak during twilight hours the temperatures have already begun to drop - thus far more causation/correlation to the sun than anything to do with anthropogenic generation.

 

[Simon W. Moon]

City temperature data should be removed or at least adjusted properly, because most of the temperature stations are located in or near cities. Thus, they are over represented in the data.

As I mentioned earlier, weighting them for representation justifiable and is quite different than merely removing them.

That's ... more data.

As noted, UHI is taken as a given.

 

[Gill]

As I mentioned earlier, weighting them for representation justifiable and is quite different than merely removing them. As noted, UHI is taken as a given.

I could agree with that.

One of the problems is the adjustments used by some organizations such as NASA/GISS. They use a system that adjusts temp data by using data from other stations as far away as 1,000 km. A station 1,000 km from a site has little relevance.

The other problem, as I mentioned in another thread, is the classification of rural, suburban, and urban. There are many mistakes in the classifications because of the methodology used.

UHI is not taken as a given by all. In fact, some researchers claim UHI does not have any affect on temp readings.