Are Urban Heat Islands Global Warming?

administrators are feeling the heat to mandate energy efficient design in chicago and phoenix due to a real "type" of global warming. "urban heat islands" have somehow cemented that ice glaciers are in fact melting….

….the observed behavior has to be modeled on the basis of physical principles - not simply empirical observation. It takes a while to develop such models - but wherever we notice that models appear to be doing a poor job, that is where we focus on developing the appropriate models. Clouds were one of the weakest links in the past, the carbon cycle another and so is the behavior of ice.

But we are working on all three fronts, and have made a great deal of progress on the first, somewhat less on the second and clearly need to do more work on the third. At the same time, this also leaves the first question unanswered, and it would appear that we may be underestimating the rate at which the system as a whole evolves given that all subsystems are coupled, either directly or indirectly, with stronger or weaker coupling between the subsystems. If we underestimate the rate at which one subsystem evolves, it would seem that we are underestimating how all evolve, to one extent or another. [realclimate]

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Posted: September 23rd, 2007
at 9:35pm by Koookiecrumbles


Categories: green,politricks,design,science

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