City Warmth Island Impact Is Actual, College of East Anglia Admits
Climate Change Weekly # 572— Urban Heat Island Effect Is Real, University of East Anglia Admits
By Sterling Burnett
Researchers at the University of East Anglia were front and center in the Climategate scandal which erupted in 2009 when emails from scientists there were leaked or hacked and released to the public. The emails detailed how a cabal of scientists used tricks to explain away inconvenient data; tried to enforce climate orthodoxy by suppressing dissenters’ research (such as by attempting to ensure it was kept out of journals and IPCC reports); proposed destroying emails open to Freedom of Information Act demands that could expose their efforts; and worked to get editors of prominent journals fired for publishing papers that cast doubt on the claim human greenhouse gas emissions were causing dangerous climate change. Multiple hearings whitewashed the wrongdoing, but damage was done to the reputations of various research institutions and many of the scholars involved in the activities disclosed.
East Anglia was one of the main bastions of the claim that “only greenhouse gas emissions could account for the reported rise in global average temperature” (a made-up metric), citing climate models and carefully selected (cherrypicked being a more accurate description) paleo-climate proxy data. Until now, East Anglia has ignored or downplayed the impact of the well-known urban heat island (UHI) effect on global average temperatures, but it seems that’s now changing.
A team of scientists and scholars, primarily from the University of East Anglia with one member from a research institute in Germany, none of whom were affiliated with the now 17-year-old Climategate incident, have come to the conclusion that cities are warming much faster than the surrounding countryside, and can be expected to heat up faster still in the future.
Gee, where have we at The Heartland Institute heard this before? Could it have been from our own Anthony Watts’ research detailing the biases of poorly sited temperature stations and how they compromise reported temperature data, or could it be from the dozens of other scholars, and even the U.S. government’s own agencies over the years, admitting the UHI exists and is a problem, even as they continue to claim it doesn’t really compromise the official temperature record because they’ve adjusted for it?
East Anglia’s research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, focuses attention on smaller and medium-sized cities with populations of 300,000 to 1,000,000, located in the tropics and subtropics. Because of their coarse scale, climate models fail to account for subregional temperature and weather anomalies and measurements well. This research aims to fill that gap.
To remove confounding factors that might influence temperatures—for example, hills, lakes, and oceans—the researchers excluded cities in mountain and coastal regions, to isolate temperatures changes based solely on climate and urban/suburban development. I understand what they were attempting to do by removing “confounding” factors, but I think it was a mistake. Those lakes, hills, and other natural features play a role in shaping an area’s climate. An area’s climate wouldn’t be what it is without the natural features it is composed of. For example, Denver wouldn’t be Denver if it weren’t a mile above sea level in a mountain chain, and Thessalonica wouldn’t be Thessalonica if it weren’t located on a warm coast. Locations and their geographic, natural, and built-up features are part and parcel of what makes up a particular area’s climate. Still, the researchers made the choices they made, and it wasn’t my study.
In total, the researchers ran statistical analyses to produce projections for 104 medium-sized cities. Their results indicate that due to population growth, density, and development, 81 percent of cities examined would warm by more than the surrounding areas, with 16 percent of those cities possibly warming by as much as 50 to 100 percent more than their surroundings.
Because the cities are in the warmer climates of the world, the authors, according to EurekAlert, say “these increases [are] even more significant for human health and the urban environment.”
“Medium-sized cities also represent a large proportion of global cities, with more than 2.5 times as many in this category than those with a population over one million,” writes EurekAlert. “Lead author Dr Sarah Berk, who did the work while a PhD student in UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences, said: “Under climate change, cities face not only the challenge of increasing temperatures in their surrounding areas, but also the challenge of potential changes in their heat islands.”
Even though suboptimal cold temperatures kill more people annually than excessive heat, even in warmer, tropical locales, this research is important because it suggests populations already prone to extreme heat or heat stress should prepare for even worse in the future. Their governments should adjust policies and infrastructure in anticipation of higher local temperatures than others in less-developed areas in the same region will experience.
Manoj Joshi, Ph.D., from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit at UEA, commented on the importance of this study, telling EurekAlert,
Urban heat stress under climate change is an increasing concern, as many cities in the tropics and subtropics can be warmer than their rural surroundings, heightening their vulnerability to rising temperatures.
This analysis shows even state-of-the-art projections likely underestimate future urban warming. For example, our results suggest that several cities in North-East China and northern India are projected to warm by 3°C, despite Earth System Model projections of their hinterlands showing a warming of 1.5-2°C.
Our research enables more informed planning for the future risks to human health and the urban environment, highlighting the need to complement conventional climate modelling with approaches such as machine learning and AI.
Three of the five largest cities by population—Jalandhar, India; Fuyang, China; and Kirkuk in Iraq—were projected to experience 0.7 to 0.8°C additional change in temperature above background warming, compared to their rural surroundings. Model outputs suggested that the two other cities with the largest populations would experience negligible additional warming. Some cities are projected to see even greater warming: the team’s models found Asyut (Egypt), Patiala (India), and Shangqui (China) would likely experience 1.5 to 2°C additional warming, more than double the warming experienced in rural areas not impacted by UHI.
Only time will tell whether these projections of warming are accurate, but that is true for the whole global warming exercise. Planning ahead can’t hurt, but for me the importance of the study is its direct acknowledgment that understanding UHI, not just global atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, is critical to understanding both global average temperature and regional impacts of warming on local environments and human flourishing, and that it’s not just the big cities for which models must be adjusted to account for UHI.
Sources: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences; EurekAlert; Watts Up With That?