Nobody can rightfully claim that summer 2023 did not generate its share of fantasy-laced headlines. In this regard, the United Nations still remains the world champ of propaganda by cranking out headlines including the phrase “the era of global boiling has arrived.”

The ink barely dried when it was followed by another work of climate sensationalism, this time with a headline claiming “Humanity has opened the gates to hell.”

Amidst the swirling vortex of lies, there’s new information from the CO2 Coalition. How many people are aware that, according to the EPA’s own data from 1948 to 2020, a total of 863 weather monitoring stations—that is, 81% of them—have reported that the number of hot days has either decreased or remained unchanged? For those of you who prefer visuals over words, there is a brilliant map at the link showing that, contrary to the UN’s hysteria, in the United States, at least, we are not facing an era of global boiling, nor are we looking into the gates of hell.

But there is another fact to remember when considering the UN’s apocalyptic predictions. Although urban areas occupy only about 4% of the land surface, most weather monitoring stations are located in urban regions. Those same regions because they have an abundance of concrete and asphalt, both of which have remarkable heat-absorbing properties. The result is that these urban islands are warmer than their rural counterparts. That raises an important question: If the majority of temperature readings are taken in areas of inherently higher temperature how much does this skew the claimed rise in temperatures?

Image: The United States (edited with randomly applied flames) by Open Street Map. CC BY 2.5.

The United Nations claims that the effect these heat islands have on global temperatures is less than 10%:

In their latest report, the IPCC [International Panel on Climate Change] estimated that ‘urban warming’ accounted for less than 10% of the perceived global temperature rise.

However, many scientists view that assertion as specious. Three papers recently published in respectable peer-review journals rigorously reexamined the data and concluded that the reported temperature increases were skewed by as much as 40%!

Climate published “The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming’ Climate.” The Journal of Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics echoed this concern: “Challenges in the Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Surface Temperature Trends Since 1850.” And the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology published a study that reached a similar conclusion: “Evidence of Urban Blending in Homogenized Temperature Records in Japan and in the United States: Implications for the Reliability of Global Land Surface Air Temperature Data.”

Just to be clear, these three recent studies published in respectable peer-reviewed journals annihilate the IPCC: They are all data-rich studies countering the claim that urban heat islands account for less than 10% of the reported global temperature rise. Instead, they argue that urban heat islands create as much as 40% of reported temperature increases.

If you go back to the CO2 Coalition’s map, ask yourself how many of those purported increased temperatures don’t reflect increases at all but, instead, simply reflect the heat-absorbing properties of concrete and asphalt in urban areas such as the Los Angeles Basin, the San Francisco Bay Area, the Phoenix Metro area, the Salt Lake City metro region, Miami, etc.

Irony is seldom this delicious.