The authors of an article in Climate, a peer-reviewed journal, suggest that urban warming may be much more important than estimates assume. From the Center for Environmental Research and Earth Sciences (CERES):
“A new study published in the scientific peer-reviewed journal, Climate, by 37 researchers from 18 countries suggests that current estimates of global warming are contaminated by urban warming biases.” . . .
“In their latest report, the IPCC estimated that urban warming accounted for less than 10% of global warming. However, this new study suggests that urban warming might account for up to 40% of the warming since 1850.”
“The study also suggests that the solar activity estimates considered in the most recent reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) likely underestimated the role of the Sun in global warming since the 19th century.”
The authors, a group headed by Willie Soon of CERES, say:
“[T] he scientific community is not yet in a position to confidently establish whether the warming since 1850 is mostly human-caused, mostly natural, or some combination. Suggestions for how these scientific challenges might be resolved are offered.”
Image of Frankfurt, Germany, by Bruno of Pixabay.
Those are important considerations in attempts to determine the effect of climate change on the global average temperature (which appears to depend on who’s doing the averaging and how they’re doing it).