New Studies Suggest ‘Global Warming’ Is Mostly An Urban Phenomenon

A new study by 37 researchers from 18 countries has come to the conclusion that the global temperature record has been contaminated by urban warming biases. It also suggests that the most recent IPCC reports underestimate the role of solar activity.

The paper, entitled ‘The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming’, was accepted for publication in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Climate, on August 28, 2023.

Thermometers in towns and cities read warmer than the countryside counterparts. This is irrefutable fact that even the IPCC concede.

While urban areas account for <4% of the global land surface, the majority of weather stations used in official global temperature calculations are located in metropolis settings. For this reason, a growing number of scientists are questioning mainstream global warming reckonings, asking, have they been contaminated by the urban heat island (UHI) effect?

In their latest report, the IPCC estimated that ‘urban warming’ accounted for less than 10% of the perceived global temperature rise. This new study, however, contends that this number explains up to 40% of the documented warming since 1850.

The Science says towns/cities hold hotter than rural areas [NOAA].


In a double whammy, the study also found that the IPCC’s guesswork when it comes to solar activity appears to have erroneously ruled out a role for the Sun in the observed warming.

When the authors analysed the official global temperature data only using the IPCC’s solar dataset, they could not explain any of the warming since the mid-20th century — i.e. they agreed that Sun played only a minor part at best.

However, when the authors repeated the analysis using a different estimate of solar activity –one that is often used by the scientific community (read the paper for more, or see the below graphic)– they found that the temperature trends for the rural data, for both warming and cooling, could largely be explained by the natural ebb and flow of solar activity

The lead author of the study, Dr. Willie Soon, of the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences described the implications of their findings, “For many years, the general public has been assuming that the science on climate change is settled. This new study shows that this is not the case.”

Co-author of the study, Prof. Ana Elias, Director of the Laboratorio de Ionosfera, Atmósfera Neutra y Magnetosfera (LIANM) at the Universidad Nacional de Tucumán, Argentina, explained, “This analysis opens the door to a proper scientific investigation into the causes of climate change.”


Similar conclusions are reached in separate paper recently published in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics.

This second study, entitled ‘Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends since 1850’, led by Dr. Ronan Connolly, involved many of the same co-authors. However, the researchers took a different approach to analyzing the causes of ‘climate change’, using an additional 25 estimates of solar activity and three extra temperature estimates.

These two separate papers tackle the same problem, the detection and attribution of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures, but in different ways, yet they still arrive at similar conclusions.

And there’s a third paper, too:

Those interested in a deeper dive into the urbanization bias and the related issue of correcting for non-climatic biases in the temperature data might want to check out, Katata et al. (2023), ‘Evidence of Urban Blending in Homogenized Temperature Records in Japan and in the United States’, published in the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology.


Greenpeace co-founder Dr. Patrick Moore recently posted on X:

“I am one of 37 authors from 18 countries to publish in a reputable science journal the fact that the urban heat island effect accounts for 40% of the alleged warming and the balance can be explained by solar variability.”

Parisian officials, it would appear, recognize this fact with their plan to remove 40% of the city’s asphalt:


Further reading:

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