It's Man's Fault

Timothy Birdnow

Our old friend Dr. Roy Spencer has some solid research proving the Urban Heat Island Effect is at the root of the modest planetary warming being blamed on carbon dioxide.


https://www.drroyspencer.com/2025/05/our-urban-heat-island-paper-has-been-published/

Spencer showed that:

The Urban Heat Island Effect is a fancy name for the obvious principle that cities or urbanized areas are warmer due to heat sources and even body heat. Also land use changes mean it's warmer; cut down a forest and pave it with blacktop and the land will be warmer.

For decades Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. of UC Boulderf argued this case and was largely dismissed by the media and even most climatologists. Dr. Spencer told me "he's monomaniacal on the subject" about Pielke, or something to that effect anyway. But Spencer decided to look into it and voila! Pielke was correct.

And this comports with what we know about the surface temperature stations. Meteorologist Anthony Watts did a survey of all U.S. temperature stations around the country and the results were eye-opening; stations that had at one time been isolated in the country were now surrounded by suburbia. Many were cited near air-conditioning compressors, or by sewage treatment plants, or other heat sources. Visit www.surfacestations.org for the whole enchilada.

Planetary warming is most likely entirely an artifact of urban warming.

Which brings up another point which I just had to argue recently with a liberal; much of this business about "increasing natural disasters" stems not from any increase in natural calamities but because there are more people building in places they ought not, and with 24 hour news cycles what would have been a very minor story on the back page of a local newspaper is now trumpeted as a disaster. Yes, there is more property damage, but that's what happens when you, say, build in a flood plain where people in bygone days had the good sense not to build.

Take for example the town of Grafton Illinois. Grafton was a quaint, sleepy little village along the Great River Road at the confluence of the Mississippi and Illinois rivers. There were a lot of old building that were sitting vacant and degrading because the town floods every couple of years, and if there is a BIG flood the whole thing is under water. But like everything else these days people thought it was cool, and started renovating the properties there. Now they are building all sorts of new things, condos, a huge marina, a skylift to a wine garden on top of the bluffs, etc. It's now a major resort town. But it still floods every two years (leading the owner of the Piasa winery to move his operation to the top of the bluffs) and if another huge flood hits the whole thing will be under water. Then the insurance companies will be hit with a staggering bill and the government will likely bail the town out.

The point is Grafton should never have been so developed; it's the flood plain. It's really nice, I'll grant you that, but it was just foolish. And it will be added to the numbers that will be presented when the Gang Green claims "climate change" is leading to more and worse disasters. It's not true.

All of our problems are man made, but not the way the environmentalists claim. They are principally artifacts of how we tabulate data.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 07:57 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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