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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.
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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:
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Is “Global Boiling” Based On Biased Data?
An elegant new study that eliminates the effect of “urban islands” throws doubt on both the extent and the causes of global warming.
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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.
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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.
What Changes the Earth’s Climate?
I am aware that many of my readers care, one way or another, about climate change, and we have our ideas of what changes climate and what does not. I am not trying to change your mind - I am still making up my own. In this post, I want to explain what the scientists found - and you can have any opinion about their findings as your heart desires.
Soon et al. set out to consider the effects of the leading forces affecting climate: solar, volcanic activity, and human-caused changes in our planet.
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To remind you, the consensus of “climate science” is that human-caused factors explain most global warming.
Soon et al. set out to replicate the standard climate attribution methodology, using only the rural stations instead of the primarily urban set prone to urban bias.
They used linear regressions, a tool to find correlations, that we are familiar with from my mortality articles.
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It turns out that both the slope (the size of the effect) and the r-squared (the explanatory power) of human activity were much lower for the rural-only dataset. For rural-only stations, human activity explained only 38% of climate change, whereas for the urban-centered “all stations,” human activity explained 80% of climate change.
Since most of the land mass of our planet is rural, trying to use rural weather stations that are more representative of the whole-planet conditions makes sense, right?
If so, the rural-only data shows that the Earth only changes its climate by 0.55 degrees C per century, and only 38% of that change is explained by possible human factors. This means our collective car driving, meat-eating, HVAC, and other activities are only responsible for 0.55*0.38 = 0.20 degrees per century!
The standard IPCC model, giving heavy weight to urban weather stations, suggests that climate change is 0.89 degrees per century, 80% of which is explained by human activity, so we, the humans, get blamed by 0.89*0.8 = 0.7 degrees per century.
So, is humanity responsible for 0.7 degrees per century, as the urban-biased data set suggests, or 0.2 degrees, as the rural-only (representative of most of the planet’s landmass) dataset suggests?
In other words, we measured the wrong thing by placing most weather stations near cities.
If so, we can ask, is the global boiling happening, or is that another error of scientific and political groupthink?
Let’s be Humble
I am not trying to tell you that I know more about the Earth’s climate than “97% of scientists”. Climate is complicated, and the scientific community is only beginning to understand it.
I am a humble Substack author who reads science magazines. I am trying to find interesting scientific studies to report, with some attempts made to stick to “good science” and exclude scientific junk.
I also appreciate the importance of climate for the well-being of our planet and recognize the limitations of my knowledge.
The Earth’s Climate Changes - With or Without Us!
There was an abandoned sand mine near my summer house where I lived during summers as a child. Many readers would be surprised to hear that it was not fenced (it was 1980s in the USSR). The sand mine was a huge pit that contained a 10-ft thick layer of ocean sediment. I liked to hang out in that sand mine and dig through the ancient fossils. I even brought a couple of them when I immigrated to the United States:
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This means that many millions of years ago, that area (almost the middle of the Eurasian continent) was covered by the ocean. That happened 200-145 million years ago, during the Jurassic period when the ocean was 330ft higher than currently. Sediments and fossils from that period can be found in most low-lying places.
That is proof that the climate and ocean level of the past were nothing like the now.
As climate changed, life on Earth changed also, and the previously thriving species represented by the above fossils died off and were replaced by modern fauna.
The Earth will change again in unpredictable, possibly violent, and devastating (to some species) ways. It is our only planet, so let’s respect it and make sure that it is livable - while remaining true to real science in assessing our impact without giving in to corrupt hysterics, groupthink, and commercialized alarmism.
My role here is to share the latest advances in science - while letting you form your own opinions.
So, what do you think? Are we being scammed by the global boiling, or is it happening as they say? Both opinions have their place, and my comments section is a free speech zone where you can say almost anything as long as you remain polite.
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