Here's the problems with his reasoning.
That's for 24 hour 7 day a week 52 week a year measurements of temperature. If you went into those numbers and divided it into two charts, daylight & nighttime, you'd find that daylight hours, the temperature around the globe has remained constant. Not risen at all.
First, your wrong, they have risen during the day. They rise faster at night, though. This is covered in the IPCC report.
Second, even if you were right, and it hasn't risen during the day, but it has risen at night, that would mean that average temperatures have gone up, no? You can't just exclude part of the data you don't want to deal with.
Why would you only want to focus on daylight? The answer probably lies in a solar bias. If temperatures rise faster at night (they do), it isn't due to the sun's incoming energy but rather the earth's re-radiated energy being trapped -- that is, the greenhouse effect. (This is also in the IPCC report.)
(Aside: The stratosphere is cooling. Explain that one.)
2) So where does that rise in those charts come from? Most locations where temperature has been measured since the 90s began in the outskirts of cities, away from development. Through the 90s and into 2000, these locations have gone from rural to suburban. Meaning, development has sprung up around them. It's known that human development raises night time temperatures up to a degree.
Ah, the bogus heat island claim *again*
Every one of those stations undergoes a correction for heat islands -- urban stations are adjusted based on the nearest rural stations. If three nearby rural stations show a trend of +1c/decade (pulling a number out of my ass here), but the urban one shows +3c/decade, the urban one is adjusted in accordance to the nearby rurals. All of this is detailed in the public domain on GISS's website, along with code to run this yourself with publicly-available datasets.
Three nails in this coffin that the above doesn't cover:
1) GISS matches up well with the satellites, which aren't subject to the UHI.
2) A skeptic at ClimateAudit obtained the correction algorithm and base datasets from GISS, wrote his own code to replicate the algorithm, and compared the full GISS to only the rural stations (as determined by SurfaceStations.org's criteria). Lo and behold, GISS's total system (including the supposedly corrupt urban sites) agreed with those stations that remain purely rural.
3) If the UHI were to blame, you'd expect that a plot of GISS's temperature analysis (which includes UHI-influenced stations) to roughly correspond to urban areas, as those are warmer. Instead, the two do not match up at all. (
Urban areas at night,
GISS analysis). Note especially the Arctic -- polar amplification was predicted due to increased GHG emissions back in 1979 with the Charney Report. (More sophisticated ones later on included a better ocean model, which explains why only one of the two poles is as extreme as it is. See also
here.)
Now, we've stumbled upon a concrete problem: human night life not only raises the temperature of the night, but the way it raises the temperature is most typically through excess use of light which has an adverse and tangible affect on many insects and mammals who cannot adapt to a nighttime environment that is not dark.
Whoa, whoa, whoa. You don't even understand the UHI argument you just used?
The increase in temperature in urban areas is *not* due to street lights. It's due to concrete, asphault, and similar absorbing sunlight and re-emitting heat at night far better than the fields they were normally built over, plus a bit of change in air currents.
In short, you lose and are throwing smokebombs. "Oh noes think of the cutesy birds".
CO2 levels and pollution need to be controlled, but Global Warming is just a hot topic to get people riled up. Yes, there are things in our environment that are negative, that humans are responsible for, that need to be addressed, but more often than not they're lumped into this thing called Global Warming which has no answers because it's not real. All the small things that make-up and lead to the idea of Global Warming are real though, and those need to be addressed.
I note that you avoid the shrinking ice sheets, melting glaciers, ocean acidification (and the commesurate destruction of oceanic food chains), pine beetle infestations, thawing permafrost, shifting precipitation patterns, and so on.
All of these are consistent with an increase in global average temperature. How are they all happening without it?
As soon as you step away from the idea of Global Warming and start focusing on the smaller problems that typically start making people talk about it, you'll start finding solutions and making progress.
How would you treat ocean acidification without reducing atmospheric CO2?
