Some Responsible Press Coverage of Record Temperatures
The Phoenix New Times blog had a fairly remarkable story on a record-hot Phoenix summer. The core of the article is a chart from the NOAA. There are three things to notice in it:
- The article actually acknowledges that higher temperatures were due to higher night-time lows rather than higher daytime highs Any mention of this is exceedingly rare in media stories on temperatures, perhaps because the idea of a higher low is confusing to communicate
- It actually attributes urban warming to the urban heat island effect
- It makes no mention of global warming
Here is the graphic:
This puts me in the odd role of switching sides, so to speak, and observing that greenhouse warming could very likely manifest itself as rising nighttime lows (rather than rising daytime highs). I can only assume the surrounding area of Arizona did not see the same sort of records, which would support the theory that this is a UHI effect.
Phoenix has a huge urban heat island effect, which my son actually measured. At 9-10 in the evening, we measured a temperature differential of 8-12F from city center to rural areas outside the city. By the way, this is a fabulous science fair project if you know a junior high or high school student trying to do something different than growing bean plants under different color lights.
