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revised 01/06/11
The Surface Temperature Record and the Urban Heat Island
There are quite a few reasons to believe that the surface temperature record – which shows a warming of approximately 0.6°-0.8°C over the last century (depending on precisely how the warming trend is defined) – is essentially uncontaminated by the effects of urban growth and the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect. These include that the land, borehole and marine records substantially agree; and the fact that there is little difference between the long-term (1880 to 1998) rural (0.70°C/century) and full set of station temperature trends (actually less at 0.65°C/century). This and other information lead the IPCC to conclude that the UHI effect makes at most a contribution of 0.05°C to the warming observed over the past century.
[Read more…] about The Surface Temperature Record and the Urban Heat Island
The Bore Hole
Contributors
The current contributors to content on this site are:
William Connolley was a contributor, but has now left academia; Ray Bradley, David Archer, and Ray Pierrehumbert are no longer active; Jim Bouldin was a contributor from 2009 and Caspar Ammann and Thibault de Garidel were early supporters of the site. Group posts can be assumed to be the from the whole set of current contributers, or will be individually signed.
Caspar Ammann
Caspar Ammann is a climate scientist working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). Dr. Ammann is interested in the reconstruction of natural climate forcings, natural climate variability, coupled modeling of natural and anthropogenic climate change, and data/model intercomparison. Dr. Ammann got his B.S. from Gymnasium Koeniz (Switzerland), his M.S. from the University of Bern (Switzerland), and a Ph.D. from the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts.
William M. Connolley
When I joined RC, I was a climate modeller with the British Antarctic Survey. Now I’m a software engineer for CSR. I’m still interested in communicating the science of climate change, but can no longer do so at a professional level.
I’m also elsewhere: the wikipedia project is developing into a useful resource, and my profile is User:William_M._Connolley. My personal vanity site is at www.wmconnolley.org.uk.
One of the people in the picture is me. Guess which.
ps: all my contributions online are released under the GFDL, unless I explicitly note otherwise.
Thibault de Garidel
Dr. de Garidel received his Bachelor’s degree in Earth Sciences from the Université Lyon I, France, completed a Master in the Université Bordeaux I, France and a Ph.D. in Geosciences at CEREGE, Université Paul Cézanne (a.k.a. Aix-Marseille III).
More information about his research and publication record can be found here.
What does the lag of CO2 behind temperature in ice cores tell us about global warming?
This is an issue that is often misunderstood in the public sphere and media, so it is worth spending some time to explain it and clarify it. At least three careful ice core studies have shown that CO2 starts to rise about 800 years (600-1000 years) after Antarctic temperature during glacial terminations. These terminations are pronounced warming periods that mark the ends of the ice ages that happen every 100,000 years or so.
Does this prove that CO2 doesn’t cause global warming? The answer is no.