When you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em.
The authors of a new study in the Journal of Climate claim:
“This study shows that the urban heat island effect is a relatively minor contributor to warming, contrary to what climate skeptics have claimed. Greenhouse gases and particulate black carbon cause far more warming.”
But its contribution to global warming is not the reason that skeptics raise the urban heat island effect (UHI).
The UHI artificially skews urban temperature readings upward, thereby distorting trends and giving the misimpression that more warming is occurring than is actually happening.
This “study” is little more than an attempt to confuse the media and public.
It’s astounding how effective the infusion of large sums of money to a grantee can be to obtaining research results desired by the grantor.
Puzzling over:
“One way to reduce emissions while simultaneously reducing summer air conditioning demand is to install photovoltaic panels on roofs. Such panels not only generate electricity, reducing emissions of fossil fuels from electricity-producing power plants, but they also reduce sunlight absorbed by buildings because they convert sunlight to electricity. Because photovoltaic panels do not reflect the sunlight back to the air, unlike white roofs, reflected light is not available to be absorbed again by pollutants in the air, creating heat.”
So the use of electricity doesn’t generate heat? I seem to remember somewhere that energy was never lost, just transformed. Electricity moving through wires produces heat. Moving parts in an air conditioner produces heat. So I get the “produces less pollutants” part but it doesn’t remove heat – it just shuffles the heat around. In fact, nor certain on this but it seems likely because panels are black they actually result in more heat overall (heat from absorbing most of the light bands, and heat shuffled about through electricity use). A white roof should reflect more light into outerspace and convert less into infrared.
More Garbage In therefore Garbage Out.
“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bull.” – W.C. Fields