In climate science, the urban heat effect is local warming around populated regions. Globally it is a very minor effect; less than 1% of climate change. But since most climate stations are located near urbanized areas, especially airports. On statistic I saw claimed that 60% of weather stations are at airports!
Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects can raise city temperatures 6-9°C above the temperatures in surrounding rural areas. These significant biases are not sufficiently removed from instrumental records. So 25% and 45% of warming in the instrument record is due to urban heat. A recent study by Nicola Scafetta, 2021, found “0.36 ± 0.04 °C” of non-climatic warming from roofs, asphalt, machines, vehicles…artificially enhances the post-1950s global temperature trend.
Comments: NoTricksZone, and WUWT
- Causes of UHI
- Station bias is another issue. The Arctic and Antarctic are the least populated regions, so it follows they will have bad climate station coverage.
Dr Fed Goldberg notes a massive bias was introduced into the climate record when many Soviet Union climate stations in cold Arctic locations closed in the early 1990s.
Here we see very rapid [temperature] increase and this of course is said to be caused by human emissions well what really took place is the following: here you see the global average temperature year by year and here's the amount of weather stations recording the temperatures and they slowly went down and then something dramatic happened they fell down very rapidly at the same time the average global temperatures jumped up quite a bit and what happened here? Well the Soviet Union collapsed and not only Soviet Union but more or less all their weather stations in the Arctic. So suddenly there was a heavy imbalance between cold and warm stations making the warm stations dominate and the global average temperature skyrocketed as we see here.
Dr Fred Goldberg
