Media in a fever over summer heat, blames fossil fuels but ignores other causes, study says

For many Americans, summer still conjures images of "those lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer" romanticized by the legendary Nat King Cole: hot dogs, picnics, beer, and girls in bikinis at the beach. But for many media outlets, summer is a time to panic about deadly threats from heat waves that will continue to get worse until the world stops using fossil fuels.

New research, however, casts doubt on the theory that carbon dioxide levels are the primary driver of rising temperatures. A phenomenon called the “urban heat island effect,” according to the study, could be contributing much more to global warming than originally thought. As populations in an area begin to rise, so do temperatures, the study found. 

If true, this means efforts to reduce fossil fuel use, which experts warn will mean more frequent blackouts and render industry at scale impossible, may not be entirely effective at lowering temperatures. 

Media's headlines sung from same choirbook 

Bloomberg News reported Sunday about how some isolated areas will experience heat waves in the coming days. “The scorching conditions threaten to tax power grids, wilt crops and send energy prices soaring across three continents,” Bloomberg warned. Nowhere does the article mention that crops across multiple regions are seeing record-high yields over trends lasting decades. 

The Associated Press reported last week that summer will bring “illness, death, crop losses, and strained energy and healthcare systems.” The article cites the World Weather Attribution as its source for these warnings, which is a group of climate activists developing research that seeks to win climate lawsuits against oil companies. 

“Without phasing out fossil fuels, heat waves will continue becoming more severe and frequent and protective measures against the heat will lose their effectiveness,” the Associated Press article warned. 

Dr. Matt Wielicki, former assistant professor in the Department of Geological Sciences at the University of Alabama, told Just the News that the data regarding urban heat islands (UHI) largely gets ignored because there’s too much money directed towards researching the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions and renewable projects to replace fossil fuels. 

“It's hard to regulate development and cities, and nobody's going to go along with dismantling cities and taking apart airports, right? So there's no money, there's no profit to be made in admitting that the land use changes are definitely a big factor in changing temperatures,” Wielicki said. 

Ignoring "urban heat islands"

Wielicki provided a couple of examples of recent headlines in The Guardian and San Francisco Chronicle sensationalizing summer’s high temperatures and blaming it all on fossil fuels, in his “Irrational Fear” Substack.

“These sensationalist stories conveniently omit crucial context: urbanization and land use changes, rather than GHG [greenhouse gas] concentrations, drive much of this observed warming. Airports and city centers, common locations for temperature measurements, amplify heat readings due to extensive concrete and reduced vegetation,” Wielick wrote. 

The urban heat island effect is a well-known phenomenon, and researchers have been studying its impacts for decades. As the population of an area increases, so does the amount of development. The concrete and asphalt in roads, bridges, buildings and other infrastructure increases temperatures. Air conditioners cool spaces by removing heat, which is then ejected out of a building, and that is believed to raise city temperatures as well. 

New research by two University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) climate scientists found that the warming effect of urbanization may play a larger role in rising temperatures than much of the media lets on. 

The study, which was published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatatology, found that 65% of the total warming trend between 1895 and 2023 was due to increasing population density at the suburban and urban weather stations. Increasing population density, according to the study, contributed to 8% of the total warming at rural stations. 

Dr. Roy Spencer, UAH Earth System Science Center research scientist, along with co-author Dr. John Christy, director of the UAH Earth System Science Center, examined the average temperature differences between nearby stations that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains as part of the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). The researchers then compared the population density between the two stations to determine how much population increases compared to temperature observations. 

The effect was non-linear, meaning the temperature doesn’t consistently rise with population increases. According to the study, the amount of warming observed at stations where the population increases from 10 people per square kilometer, or 0.62 square miles, to 20 people per square kilometer is the same amount of warming observed with population increases from 1000 people per square kilometer to 2000 people per square kilometer.

“That's one of the things that kind of surprised us. When you start increasing the population of rural areas just a bit, you get one or two degrees of spurious warming pretty fast,” Dr. Roy Spencer, UAH Earth System Science Center research scientist and co-author of the study, told Just the News. 

On the flip side of that, Spencer explained, Miami, Florida, could take in thousands of new residents and see very little increase in warming. 

“Their urban heat island is pretty much maxed out. So that's the way that works. It's a non-linear effect. You also can't just assume that rural areas don't have urban heat island effects. They do,” Spencer said. 

Homogenized data

NOAA attempts to adjust for the impacts of urbanization in its GHCN data using a process of homogenization. During the peer review, Spencer explains on his personal blog, one of the reviewers who seemed to know a lot about the process said that Spencer and Christy couldn’t use the NOAA data because the data is adjusted for urbanization trends. 

So, Spencer and Christy ran the study with the raw, un-homogenized data and discovered that homogenization warmed the past at the same rate as today’s urbanized condition, making their past temperature data as warm as present-day observations. 

“We think that their homogenized data has not removed the urbanization effect, at least not very well. But at this point, we can't prove it. We got to work a little harder, think a little more deeply about how to do that,” Spencer said in an interview. 

Wasting time and money

Las Vegas in July 2024 broke all-time temperature records. Wielicki, who was not involved in the UAH study, shows in the article that this was based on a temperature station on the south side of Harry Reid International Airport. Aerial images of the airport from 1977 compared to satellite images from 2024 show extensive concentrations of urban development all around where the station is located. Ignoring this fact, Wielicki said in an interview, is creating wasteful policies. 

“That's the part that irks me the most — how much we could have done if we didn't waste so much time and money chasing trace gases,” he said. 

Spencer is often characterized in the legacy media as a “climate denier,” a disparagement he disputes.  He doesn’t deny recent warming trends, nor does he deny that humans are contributing to them. 

“I just wish that when they report record high temperatures that they would give more weight to the fact that some of this is not due to global climate change. It's due to urbanization,” Spencer said.