With these heatwaves, many cities in France, Italy and England are at times *hotter* than cities in the tropical SEA! No wonder the bananas are starting to fruit.
> He added that growing banana plants in the UK is not new for a "geek in the plant world", but perhaps still niche to the average person.
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.
Because you never looked. What he's saying is a true and well known problem in climatology. Population increases create an appearance of warming in the dataset.
There are two sources of corruption.
The first is the urban heat island effect. Many weather stations are corrupted because although they were once in fields or other natural sites, over time cities expanded to meet the needs of the growing population and ended up building around the stations. This distorts readings by pushing up the min on the min/max thermometers, as tarmac absorbs heat during the day and re-radiates it at night. If you compute the average temperature for a day by just taking the midpoint between the min and max this makes it appear that the site is warming even if the max doesn't change i.e. there is no actual climate warming.
The second is that a large number of weather stations sit next to runways. It's intentional: pilots need to know runway temperature for takeoff calculations. But climatologists obviously shouldn't use them because not only are they next to tarmac, they're also being blasted with jet exhaust. So as population increases due to immigration (as western countries have below replacement fertility), jet travel goes up and this causes more traffic which warms the air at these weather stations.
In some countries this is a serious problem. For example, the UK is very built up with unusually high population density. The World Meteorological Organization has a classification system for weather stations in which class 1 is the best (lowest uncertainty) and class 4/5 are the worst (uncertainty of 2/5 degrees respectively, which is higher than the 1.5 degrees of warming claimed to have happened since 1850). Unfortunately nearly 90% of all British weather stations are class 4 or class 5, but the Met Office still use them to make claims about record breaking temperatures.
Climatologists have techniques they say correct for these problems, but the algorithms don't actually work. US GHCN uses something called homogenization, a kind of interpolation which spreads warmth from cities and runways into colder rural areas, creating an appearance of global warming across the entire dataset that's not there in the thermometer readings from uncorrupted sites.
Yes, I'm sure the reason the UK had its hottest mean June temperature ever and recorded its highest ever June temperature in the village of Lingwood, Norfolk is all down to how many weather stations are located next to runways.
Some time ago an FOI (Freedom of Information) request to the UK Met Office got the following response:
Background:
Class 1–2 are regarded as excellent or very good exposures,
Class 3 permits uncertainties up to about 1 °C,
Class 4 permits uncertainties up to about 2 °C, and
Class 5 permits uncertainties up to about 5 °C because of nearby artificial heat sources or other exposure problems.
According to analyses of the released data, approximately:
22% of stations were Classes 1–3,
about 49% were Class 4,
about 29% were Class 5.
I guess there must be very good reasons for not ensuring that the majority of stations are Class 1-3.
The Lingwood site is class 5 because it's in some guy's garden and surrounded by trees/hedges that block airflow. Class 5 sites have +/- 5 degrees of uncertainty and shouldn't be used for climatology under any circumstances.
As to the runway point you're being sarcastic about - yes, that can happen. The UK set a record temperature in July 2022, which the BBC reports was set at Coningsby in Lincolnshire:
In fact it was set at RAF Coningsby at the exact moment two Typhoon fighter jets landed, and lasted only for a minute or two i.e. it was recording jet exhaust from the landing.
This fact had to be dug up through FOIA requests, it wasn't advertised by the Met Office or British media anywhere. Brits were led to believe this had occurred in some open field near a village somewhere.
Every time you read about a record breaking temperature in Britain, you aren't being told about the atrocious state of the weather station network there. Almost all the records are being set at weather stations that can't measure change in the climate due to urban corruption or being sited at runways.
OK, got you. Clearly everywhere that recorded record temperatures last month was either next to a runway or in heat islands (which we definitely haven't had for decades) or in someone's garden, whereas all the historical benchmarks exceeded were flawless. The UK recording a temperature of over 40 celsius was actually an anomaly because of the first time a jet ever landed at a British airport.
Wouldn't immigration be a real effect too, not just poor measurement? If a person moves from a low emissions per-capita country to a high emissions per-capita country, the emissions attributable to that person would increase because of their lifestyle changes adapting to the new country.
If you look at the raw data for Kew Gardens, that site can see spikes of 2 degrees or more from hour to hour, which isn't natural in origin. It happens because it's right next to a greenhouse that sometimes vents hot air.
This is exactly the kind of urban heat island problem that is so important to avoid.
If a person living in x country has a climate change impact of 1 and when they move to country y where they have a climate change impact of 3. Do you think that the climate change will be impacted to a greater or lesser degree by moving from country x to y?
What do you think when that is repeated with 100 million people that have moved from country x to country y in 25 years?
The population of London isn't much more today than it was in 1930. And the population density is more or less the same too. I think it's unlikely that people's bodies are the cause of heating. Greater London for example would receive about 1572 MW of solar irradiance on a sunny day.
The city burns quite a bit of fossil fuel for heating and transportation every day though. That certainly has effects on microclimates (think vents from the tube, which is getting ever hotter).
Also, do you think that it may have something to do with being cities with stone and steel that absorbs and radiates heat, and that cities are no longer as filled with trees due to urbanization and immigration filling them with people?
For context, London, Rome, and Paris have respectively gone from 2.6M, 175K, 1.05M populations to 14.5M, 4.3M, and 12.4M; so basically a 6–25x population size in ~125 years. You don’t think that may have something to do with it?
More context 10 million people produce about 1-1.5 gigawatts of continuous heat energy alone. That’s energy that would also be absorbed into stone structures of European cities even if to an unapparent degree, especially in the summers.