We are told that we live in an era of global boiling. Our planet is rapidly heating up, as calculated based on temperature readings from weather stations spread around the globe.
A new official organization, the Overshoot Commission, was recently set up to manage the global boiling, considering, among other things, darkening the skies to cool the planet as the climate emergency unfolds. (I discussed sun dimming before.)
From the Overshoot Commission:
An elegant new study that eliminates the effect of “urban islands” throws doubt on both the extent and the causes of global warming.
It turns out that we were measuring the wrong thing all along! Due to understandable reasons of convenience, scientists placed weather stations near where they live, in or near urban areas.
It turned out to be problematic: instead of measuring the warming of the planet, we measured the warming of the cities.
Most people live in urban areas; however, most land is not urban: metropolitan areas occupy only three percent of the land mass, as this picture shows.
Scientists demonstrated that if we measure temperature changes using rural stations only, the extent of global warming changes from 0.89 degrees (C) per century to only 0.55 degrees per century.
Two different temperature estimates were considered—a rural and urban blend (that matches almost exactly with most current estimates) and a rural-only estimate. The rural and urban blend indicates a long-term warming of 0.89 °C/century since 1850, while the rural-only indicates 0.55 °C/century. This contradicts a common assumption that current thermometer-based global temperature indices are relatively unaffected by urban warming biases.
Furthermore, using the standard climate change attribution models shifts the causal determination from human forcing to natural forcing as the main cause of temperature changes.
