Imagine there was a cheap way to save 2,000 people and cool cities but it didn’t make anyone rich?

By Jo Nova

A new paper estimates that if we increased our tree canopy in cities to 30% we could cool our cities by nearly half a degree. Works better than a windmill…

Photo by Maria Orlova

The trillion dollar global warming camp obsesses over 1.5°C of heat, but the urban heat island has already made our cities 1.5°C hotter than the countryside around them, and nobody gives a toss. Cities are where the lived human experience is for most of us, and despite the threat of that extreme heat made “worse by climate change”, no government does the obvious and sets a tree cover target. There are no Ministers of Regreening, and no carbon credits for suburbia. All we’re getting is concrete bollards and fifteen-minute-cities of pain.

In the green revolution instead of growing gum trees, people are cutting them down because they shade their solar panels. In our capital city they razed a majestic avenue of trees in order to add light rail. A true Green hates cars more than they like trees.

Urban flora not only cleans the air, it also reduces suicides, improves cardiac health, and reduces particulate pollution. One Canadian study estimated that […]

February 2nd, 2023 | Tags: , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

ABC suddenly notices the ‘heat island’ effect in cities

Skeptics mention the Urban Heat Island and its crickets from the ABC.

A green group mentions the Urban Heat Island effect and the ABC is happy to advertise:

Australian cities are increasingly becoming concrete jungles as trees and canopy coverage disappear, according to experts who warn this is contributing to an urban “heat island” effect.

“We know a tried and tested strategy is the introduction of more trees and green roofs in urban spaces, reducing surface temperatures by up to 40 per cent,” Griffith University urban and environmental planner Tony Matthews said.

40% of what, we might wonder, but the ABC doesn’t.

Could this huge heat effect possibly affect temperature records creating a systematic century scale bias inflating and creating fake hottest ever records. Nothing to see here, nevermind.

What radiates like an oven but doesn’t heat thermometers?

A national initiative — called Greener Spaces Better Places — brings together academic, government and industry groups to promote further greenery in our cities. Its research says black bitumen and dark roofs compound the already-hot days by creating a so-called heat island effect, absorbing heat and radiating it back like an oven.

Radiating like an […]

February 13th, 2020 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

Feast your eyes on Streaky Bay’s thermometer — over bitumen for 31 long hot years

Ken Stewart rates the Streaky Bay site as one of the worst he has seen This is an influential site because it’s in a remote area, is used to “correct” official ACORN sites, and has been running for a long time. Last October the BOM finally moved it to a completely new (and much better site) — only three decades too late. Strangely, they didn’t give the new site a new station number? Normally the old and new sites would be run concurrently with two different numbers so the data from both could be compared and the differences in temperature between them could be worked out. Is that an accident? Does it hide the terrible quality of the previous site?

The Streaky Bay information (site 018079) tells us it opened in 1865 but the site only has monthly data from 1926 and daily data from an even shorter period. The rest presumably hasn’t been digitized yet. As best as I can tell, the station metadata appear to mark this site as being at the post office from 1865 to 2018, and record the ground cover as becoming asphalt in July 1987. That means for 31 years the Australian Bureau of […]

August 9th, 2019 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |

China is warming fastest where the cities are, not where the models predicted – classic UHI

The biggest changes in temperature (“divergence” in dark red brown Fig 6) occurred where the most people lived (blue dots). In the 60 years to 2010 China was reported to have warmed by 0.79 ± 0.10 °C. However Scafetta et al calculate at most, China could have experienced a real warming of only 0.46 ± 0.13 °C.

Somehow the combined might and supercomputers at NOAA, NASA, Hadley and the Bureau of Met experts all missed this.

It’s another third of a degree gone from the Glorious CO2 Narrative. Just like that.

Fig. 6. Map of the divergence (ΔTMin − ΔTMax) between the warmings registered by the minimum and maximum temperature records (CRU TS4) between 1945 and 1954 and 2005–2014. The cyan dots indicate the 200 most populated cities in China according to the Free World City Database. (White regions over India and the ocean indicate missing data).

Is there a more perfect nation to study the Urban Heat Island effect than China?

The worlds most populous nation has made a blistering transformation in two decades. As recently as 1995 the population was 75% rural. Now it’s approaching 60% urban. Shenzhen, which is near Hong Kong, grew from 3000 people […]

July 24th, 2019 | Tags: , | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post Print This Post | |