The Walmart effect: Another reason to discount things climate change alarmists say

摘要

This sounds like a good title for an episode of the Big Bang Theory, but it came from looking at a Google Earth view of a town where temperatures should have dropped but did not. All of this started as part of an effort to see if there was anything driving temperature changes besides those nasty coal-fired power plants. The idea was that the growth of cities might account for some of the temperature increases in the weather stations in or near those cities. I remember my teenage years in St. Louis when you could always count on a summertime temperature drop of 5 degrees or more as you traveled from downtown St. Louis where I worked to the suburbs about 10 miles away in the small town of Kirkwood where my family lived. Maybe this sort of difference is universal.