In Holy Flying Cow!, Nick Schulz interviews Randy Cerveny, author of Shattered Consensus: The True State of Global Warming, about man’s effect on the weather, starting with the “heat island” effect:
Right, the urban heat island effect. Here in Phoenix, Arizona for example, the temperature that we have in the airport which is in the center of town, is generally about five to seven degrees warmer at night than it is out at the surrounding areas. And that’s due to the fact that the concrete and the asphalt absorb all of this heat and then release it during the night, so that that central part of the city becomes much warmer. Now, that’s solely due to us, I mean, that’s not a natural type phenomenon.
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That’s at the local level. I also, as I started to say, had done some research with a colleague of mine where we demonstrated that people are apparently having an impact at a regional level. That off the coast of the United States, the Eastern seaboard of the United States, we demonstrated pretty conclusively, that it rains more on the weekends than it does on the week days. And this is due to human activity.And the reason is because in nature there is no such thing as a seven day cycle. The seven day cycle is manmade. It’s something that we created as part of our civilization.
So, if you find seven day cycles in nature, the likelihood is that it’s something that we’ve done. Well, we’ve found seven day cycles in rainfall off the Eastern seaboard. We were able to link it back to pollution. That as pollution during the week builds up and reaches a maximum towards Friday and Saturday and then gets pushed off into the Atlantic Ocean, that pollution acts to produce more rainfall, so it’s kind of odd, but at a regional scale, all along the Eastern seaboard we tend to find that just off shore, weekends are going to be rainier.
At the global level, things aren’t so clear.