Picking out the UHI in climatic temperature records – so easy a 6th grader can do it!

The Urban Heat Island effect on temperature records is real, despite what some people wish you to believe. Peter, a sixth grader, and his dad, thought so too, and take the data from NASA GISS and show in a simple video, what we’ve been saying for years here at WUWT. Urbanization, land use, and station siting matter.

Peter - shows how UHI is easy to spot

Watch Peter’s excellent video below:

They used a simple pairing of rural and urban sites to show the differences. This shows why homogenization, which smears all the data from urban and rural sites together, is a bad idea, and gives trends that don’t exist in reality.

I like the ending where he says in the rolling credits “Peter’s dad is not employed or funded by any energy or oil companies”. It’s funny that they’d feel a need to say this. No National Science Foundation funding needed either.

This video appeared in comments on WUWT, if anybody knows how to contact Peter or his dad, please advise. We are in touch now.

One wonders what the response of the well funded Hadley Centre, Met Office scientist Dr. David Parker, might be to this video.

Parker’s 2006 paper published in the Journal of Climate titled: “A Demonstration that Large scale warming is not urban” claims:

The analysis of Tmin demonstrates that neither urbanization nor other local instrumental or thermal effects
have systematically exaggerated the observed global warming trends in Tmin. The robustness of the analysis to the criterion for “calm” implies that the estimated overall trends are insensitive to boundary layer structure and small-scale advection, and to siting, instrumentation, and observing practices that increasingly influence temperatures as winds become lighter. Furthermore, even at windy sites (e.g., St. Paul, Aleutian Islands, in Fig. C1), the calmest terce and especially the calmest decile will be strongly affected by occasions with very light winds in passing ridges or blocking anticyclones, and should reveal any urban warming influence.

…the results of the present study also suggest that they have not affected the estimates of temperature trends.

Steve McIntyre gave Parker’s paper a scathing review in 2007’s article: