Last week was great fun for global warming deniers. There was an almighty cock-up on the monthly temperature front as NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies released a “record” month temperature for October. Trouble was that the temperatures for a bunch of stations in Siberia were for September, not October. Not our fault, said the chaps at GISS. Blame the chaps at NOAA.
(Gotta love those government bureacrats and their CYA antics.)
But the real fun ensued later as the bloggers at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That started taking a look at the Siberian stations in question with help from Google Earth. The little Siberian towns where the temperature stations are located all have district heating systems, where steam is distributed from a central power station to heat the buildings in the town. What about the urban heat island effect from all that?
Then an alert commenter came in with the coup de grace. All the heat that is generated in a city, big or small, escapes into the environment, wrote Willis Eschenbach (04:05:35).
That’s why it doesn’t matter if the steam pipes are insulated or not … the main heat loss is from the houses and factories that are heated by the steam. All of the heat piped around the town ends up warming the environment.
Of course. The whole argument about the size of the urban heat island (UHI) effect is moot. Of course it’s there, and of course it is substantial. You just have to do an energy budget on a city, and figure that almost all the energy it uses, in electric generation, in space heating, in transportation, all of it, pretty well, is discharged to the environment.
And it ain’t chump change.
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