{"id":338783,"date":"2024-08-08T10:30:11","date_gmt":"2024-08-08T08:30:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=338783"},"modified":"2024-08-08T10:30:13","modified_gmt":"2024-08-08T08:30:13","slug":"right-washington-post-rural-areas-are-significantly-cooler-than-cities-but-please-learn-how-to-convert-celsius-to-fahrenheit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=338783","title":{"rendered":"Right, Washington Post, Rural Areas Are Significantly Cooler Than Cities, But Please Learn How to Convert Celsius to Fahrenheit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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From ClimateRealism<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

By Anthony Watts<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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An August 3rd article in The Washington Post<\/em> (WaPo), \u201ctitled Study suggests nearby rural land can cool cities by nearly 30 percent<\/strong><\/a>,\u201d<\/strong> admits what others, including The Heartland Institute, have noted for years: rural areas are much cooler than cities. What is new is they are suggesting that the rural areas actually keep the cities cooler by transport of cooler air from the rural regions into the city. They write:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rural land surrounding urban areas could help cool cities by up to 32.9 degrees Fahrenheit<\/strong>, an analysis in Nature Cities<\/a> suggests, hinting at a way to cool increasingly scorching urban areas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In an attempt to understand how rural land cover affects urban heat islands \u2014 a phenomenon in which cities become significantly warmer than the areas surrounding them \u2014 researchers studied data from 30 Chinese cities between 2000 and 2020. They looked at land cover surrounding the urban areas and ranked the capacity of various urban-rural configurations to cool the cities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Note the bolded 32.9 degrees Fahrenheit <\/strong>from the WaPo story. We\u2019ve often said that journalists don\u2019t have a clue about the most basic science, much less complex climate science. In this story WaPo reporter Erin Blakemore makes this abundantly clear.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study press release from the University of Surrey<\/a> referenced in the WaPo story says: \u201cRural belts around cities can reduce urban temperatures by over 0.5\u00b0C.<\/strong>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Why the difference? Apparently the WaPo reporter can\u2019t convert between Celsius and Fahrenheit correctly, due to an attempt to \u201cAmericanize\u201d the story, she wanted to display the temperature in Fahrenheit, used in the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you don\u2019t know the formula, you can use Google to do it, which is what she likely did. With Google 0.5\u00b0C converts to 32.9\u00b0F<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But that\u2019s clearly wrong<\/em>, because Blakemore is assuming that 0.5\u00b0C is an absolute temperature, rather than a difference in temperature due to the cooling effect between rural and city areas. If what she said were true, a pleasant city temperature of 65\u00b0F would be impossibly cooled down to 32.1\u00b0F (nearly freezing) by the effect of nearby rural areas. How embarrassing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite this laughable failure of grade-school science, the WaPo story does point out the mechanism for how rural areas help keep cities cooler. The study, done in China says that heat is transported from the cities to the rural areas through a meteorological mechanism. The reason is a matter of physics, they write:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Air warms in cities, leaving a low-pressure zone near the ground that then helps transport cooler air from surrounding rural areas. The rural areas then go on to absorb the heat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study has implications for very large cities which often set new high temperature records when surrounding cities do not. The Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect has been known for quite some time, as shown in the illustration below.<\/p>\n\n\n

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From Climate at a Glance, Urban Heat Islands<\/a> we know:<\/p>\n\n\n\n