A Tantalising Possibility

I'm sorry if you don't find this "tantalising" but I am amazed by one person's persistence.

A few days ago, I posted an article about a mis-reported "heatwave" in northern Asia resulting in higher than expected global temperatures in October.

The "Watt's Up With That?" blog, which is dedicated to getting good data on global temperature and exposing some of the fallacies and even just plain bad location of weather stations, has come up with a very interesting explanation for it.

Firstly he notes that there is a consistent anomaly where Siberia reports relatively high winter temperatures. He also notes that that part of the world is very sparsely populated and so there are not many weather stations. Hence one station that reports an unusually high or low temperature will effectively report that anomaly for a very large area. That's not so dissimilar to Australia- if the official BOM thermometer at Walgett were to be exposed to the sun each day, it might appear that a large part of northern NSW and southern Queensland has had a heat wave.

So using Google earth the author tired to find out where these Siberian weather stations are located. While the Google images are not terribly high resolution, he did notice some interesting features- pipes.

In many northern European cities steam from power stations is piped through the city streets and into buildings to provide cheap heating. So he looked for photos on Flickr of Russian streetscapes and this revealed that these pipes are not insulated. While we would immediately think that is wasteful and typical of the poor planning and construction of the communist era, he says, these pipes run along the main streets and in these very cold locations it would be a very desirable thing to have the  heat readiating past where you are walking.

So is it possible that these apparent winter heat-waves are being generated by man-made heating?

It seems that again an alternative to genuine global warming caused by CO2 is plausible .

To read the full article click on the link below where you will be treated to a short clip from "Seinfeld".

GISS, NOAA, GHCN and the odd Russian temperature anomaly - “It’s all pipes!” « Watts Up With That?