Put This Into Your Pipe And Don't Smoke It

I caution "don't smoke it" in the headline because smoking would involve lighting a match which would contribute to global warming, and we can't have that!

But here's the latest to stuff into the Warmie pipe:

Scientists in Puerto Rico have been measuring the "urban heat island" in the relatively small tropical city of San Juan and have found that heat (measured two meters above ground level has been increasing at a rate of 0.06°C per year for the last 40 years, and that by 2050 the increase will lead to an urban heat island effect "as high as 8°C for the year 2050."

The upshot of that, the Web site CO2 Science says, is:

Clearly, past urban heat island warming of San Juan and other major cities of the world (see Urban Heat Island in our Subject Index) totally dwarfs any greenhouse-gas-induced warming that may have occurred concurrently; and it would appear that the same will hold true for the future. Hence, even modest-sized cities must have urban heat island signals that match or exceed the sought-after greenhouse-gas signal, making the latter anthropogenic effect almost impossible to detect with any degree of confidence, especially when it is realized that solar, volcanic and aerosol (both natural and anthropogenic) effects must also be factored into the analysis.

Urban heat bubbles are human-induced, but they are not global in nature, and they certainly have far less effect than previous urban pollution, where coal and wood smoke choked the air and raw sewage and harmful industrial effluent flowed unchecked into rivers, streams and oceans.

Warmies are both simplifiers and doom-sayers. They simplify the complexity of global climate, focusing on the narrow band of factors that suit their viewpoint, and from that they draw conclusions of imminent doom. Of course, my saying that will draw a comment from someone demanding I read reams of studies to the contrary -- but that's just the point. They study what they want to study and read the studies they want to read, and they see no bias whatsoever in that.

I am biased; I admit it. I think the Warmies are nuts and I'll admit that influences my take on global warming theory. The apocalyptic human-induced global warming theory espoused by the Warmies is just as nuts.

hat-tip: Town Hall
Related Tags: Global warming