I & I Editorial BoardEditor’s note: In its ongoing effort to silence dissent about “climate change,” Google’s AdSense immediately stripped its network ads from this page, saying this editorial contains “unreliable and harmful claims” (see below). Because, you know, the truth is unreliable and harmful. You can tell Google where to stuff its policy violations by donating directly to I&I. Just click here.
Media reports are laced with unsubstantiated claims that man is overheating his planet. Every time climate change is mentioned in a story, even features in a newspaper’s food or fashion pages, it is understood that humans are turning Earth into a muggy greenhouse by burning fossil fuel. No evidence is provided to corroborate the claim. Man-made global warming just is and skeptics are deplorables.
But the facts tell a different story.
Roy Spencer, a University of Alabama-Huntsville climate scientist, has determined that “65% of the U.S. linear warming trend between 1895 and 2023 was due to increasing population density at the suburban and urban stations; 8% of the warming was due to urbanization at rural stations. Most of that (urban heat island) effect warming occurred before 1970.”
In other words, man has built heat sinks, which skew the temperature data upward.
Researchers have known about the urban island effect for almost two centuries. It “is mostly due to the replacement of vegetation and aerated soils with buildings and impervious pavement.”
Spencer and co-authors John Christy and William Braswell explain that “global warming trends calculated for land areas have been spuriously inflated” because “most surface air temperature measurements are made in or near human settlements, and most of those settlements have grown over time.”
It’s inarguable that urban settings have amplified temperature readings. Three years ago, the Heartland Institute published a paper written by meteorologist Anthony Watts, which demonstrated that the ground-based system for measuring surface temperatures in the U.S. is unreliable. A follow-up to a 2009 study, the report noted that “approximately 96% of U.S. temperature stations fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be ‘acceptable,’ uncorrupted placement. These findings strongly undermine the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends.”
The stations have been recording tainted data are “located next to exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, located on blistering-hot rooftops, or placed near sidewalks and buildings that absorb and radiate heat.” Nine of 10 stations failed to meet the National Weather Service’s “own siting requirements, which stipulate that stations must be 30 meters (100 feet) or more away from an artificial or radiating/reflecting heat source.”
Then there are the “many stations” that often have missing, incomplete, or erroneous data. In some instances data gaps are plugged with “infilled” temperatures from nearby sites.
The downside to the facts found by Christy and his colleagues is the frightening possibility that eco-radicals will use it to agitate for forcibly relocating urban residents into rural areas to, as Al Gore would say, “fight global warming.” This isn’t as unthinkable as it might seem, because climatistas have already suggested that skeptics should be prosecuted for the crime of questioning the narrative. Yes, they are that deranged.
— Written by the I&I Editorial Board
“… the frightening possibility that eco-radicals will use it to agitate for forcibly relocating urban residents into rural areas …”
Anything’s possible, but the eco-radicals will first have to figure out how to reconcile that effort with their decades-long fight against “urban sprawl” and clear desires in the “urban planning” community to pack people into congested urban areas like sardines.
You have misquoted Dr Spencer et. al. by selectively cherry-picking passages from the paper. Shameful!
not sure how you misquote someone by citing their work….
useless comment without example(s).
I reply to both Doyle and goodbeavis:
The I&I Editorial Board article exhibits all the hallmarks of ideological advocacy masquerading as scientific interpretation: cherry-picked quotes, unsupported extrapolations, and a profound misrepresentation of the scope and limitations of the original research. While these are certainly within the purview of editorial writing, they are not a substitute for scientific evidence, and are a disservice to informed discourse.
The article selectively extracts the most provocative claims from Spencer et al., while omitting the critical methodological caveats and empirical limitations clearly stated in the original paper. Most notably, it presents the authors’ finding that urban heat island (UHI) effects contribute to warming trends in high-population-density areas (67% in urban settings) as though it discredits the entire framework of anthropogenic climate change. This is a gross distortion.
Spencer et al. are explicit that their work pertains to surface station trends in the continental U.S. during summer months, not global temperatures, not full-year data, and not satellite records. The I&I article implicitly universalizes these localized findings without justification, turning a narrow, site-specific analysis into an indictment of global climate science.
The article seizes on Spencer et al.’s statement that 24% of the average CONUS summer surface warming since 1895 may be due to UHI effects, falsely implying that this figure applies to all observed warming. It disregards the statistical methods underlying that estimate (including regression against log-transformed population density) and omits discussion of the assumptions required to extrapolate UHI effects over time, most crucially, the assumption of a constant relationship between population density and temperature, which Spencer et al. do not empirically validate.
The I&I editorial Board also failed to engage with the authors’ acknowledgment that their method attributes all population-correlated temperature differences to UHI, without accounting for possible confounders (e.g., station siting, land-use changes, instrumentation), meaning the estimated UHI contribution is an upper bound, not a definitive measurement.
Spencer et al.’s study is confined to in-situ surface station data from the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN), specifically during summer months, when UHI effects are strongest. Yet the I&I article offers no such nuance, instead asserting, without any scientific basis, that these findings undermine the credibility of the global warming record. This is not just a logical leap; it is a deliberate obfuscation of scientific boundaries.
Bottom line is that Spencer et al., regardless of one’s views on their methodology, contribute to the technical literature with a well-documented statistical analysis. The I&I article, by contrast, contributes nothing but distortion. It reflects neither scientific literacy nor intellectual integrity.
Your final paragraph sums it up. A good, balanced, rebuttal.
So says Arkady Ivanovich et al.
Ira Einhorn, Earth Day guy, killed his wife and put her in the closet. End ecocultism.
Ira Einhorn, who claimed to have founded Earth Day, (not true) was one of many outlandish people around the Penn campus in those days.
As mentioned above, Ira killed his wife/girfriend, put her body in a steamer trunk and stored the truck on his porch; the giveaway to detectives was the neighbor’s cat’s attraction to the lovely Holly Maddox’s decaying flesh in Ira’s trunk.
Then add the Duck Lady, Dirty Ankles, the Professor, The Tobacconist, Wendy, I think her name was, who burned herself to death in a single woman protest at 34th and Walnut, and the thoroughly awful inhumane and cruel as could be MOVE people. Oh, and the fellow who axe murdered three nurses in their apartment at 40th and Locust.
Those were the days in West Philadelphia, Yes, as Earth Day was initiated.
Good for you!
What about temperature data for the rest of the world, especially Greenland and above the Arctic Circle? what about ocean temperatures? It’s perfectly fair to question the evidence in an informed and dispassionate way, but to focus only on flaws in U.S. temperature data as evidence that the science is wrong, while claiming that there there is no evidence of man made climate change at all seems disingenuous.
There is no reliable temperature data “for the rest of the Earth” outside of the West. The southern hemisphere is especially undocumented as is most of the second and third world. The only true “global” record is from satellites and not a single one of them actually records temperature. The data is extrapolated from information obtained from sensors which are not thermometers. And how could those sensor be thermometers? Thay are in orbit. So even the satellite data is not truly a record of local temperatures. The entire green fraud is built on a house of cards. I don’t think there have been any studies proving that trees are good proxies for thermometers yet that is what many of the temperature studies use for data, or so they say.
Since the reject the truth we reject them