Asia Global Energy International News - Study: Heat From Megacities Making Winters Warmer

Study: Heat From Megacities Making Winters Warmer

America's climate change-obsessed media love to point to warmer winters in our country as proof of Al Gore's infamous money-making scam.

A new study from the journal Nature Climate Change reported by the Los Angeles Times Monday finds that in North America and Asia, heat from megacities is playing a larger part than anyone previously thought.

"So-called waste heat produced by human activities in major urban centers has altered aspects of the jet stream and other atmospheric systems, causing significant warming in some regions and cooling in others," the Times reported of the study.

"What we found is that energy use from multiple urban areas collectively can warm the atmosphere remotely, thousands of miles away from the energy consumption regions,"  lead author Guang Zhang, a research meteorologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, observed. "This is accomplished through atmospheric circulation change."

Although the overall heat produced might be small on a global scale, it is highly concentrated, "and in many cases, positioned directly beneath major atmospheric troughs and ridges."

According to the study, winter temperatures in Russia and northern Asia have increased by up to two degrees Fahrenheit as a result of this megacity heat. In the northeastern United States - conveniently the center of America's global warming-obsessed media! - and southern Canada, "the effect has raised winter temperatures by more than a degree."

America's media had a conniption fit recently when it was "reported" that 2012 was the "warmest year on record" for the 48 states on the U.S. mainland.

Exactly how much of an impact did all the heat coming from cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco have?

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Keep in mind that the authors of this study believe their numbers are conservative because they only studied heat from megacities.

When all of the world's heat sources are factored in, just how much of the warming that we've seen since the magical year 1850 - this is the year climate alarmists love to begin their calculations from! - is due to urbanization and NOT carbon dioxide?

Be advised that the authors of this study are not contesting global warming orthodoxy.

However, skeptics have noted for decades that there are many factors behind the global temperature rise since 1850, and that pinning the blame on a trace, naturally-occurring, necessary to life gas defies scientific reason.

This study goes to support such skepticism.

The only question remaining is how much play it will get from media hellbent on ignoring all reports that go against their climate ideology.

Asia Global Energy Review: No Need to Panic About Global Warming

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204301404577171531838421366.html

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word "incontrovertible" from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question "cui bono?" Or the modern update, "Follow the money."

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Speaking for many scientists and engineers who have looked carefully and independently at the science of climate, we have a message to any candidate for public office: There is no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to "decarbonize" the world's economy. Even if one accepts the inflated climate forecasts of the IPCC, aggressive greenhouse-gas control policies are not justified economically.