China is warming fastest where the cities are, not where the models predicted – classic UHI

Is there a more perfect nation to study the Urban Heat Island effect than China?

The worlds most populous nation has made a blistering transformation in two decades. As recently as 1995 the population was 75% rural. Now it’s nearly 60% urban. Shenzhen, which is near Hong Kong, grew from 3000 people in 1950 to more than 10 million in 2010. Around Beijing thousands of towns have been built in a networked carpet a mere 2km apart (zoom in on Google satellite view). The stations in these areas are effectively not rural anymore.

Prof Nicola Scafetta and Shenghui Ouyang wondered how this massive growth affected the temperatures. They discovered the regions that warmed the fastest were also the largest population centers. Proving the warming might be “man-made” but half the warming is due to heated concrete and all the assorted infrastraucture and industry around thermometers. That part is not CO2.

There would be more CO2 produced from those population centres too, but we all know that given five minutes CO2 will head for Tahiti or Siberia, or anywhere. In any case, Scaffeta et al compared what the top greenhouse models driven by CO2 predicted. And lo, the models were totally […]