Talk:Urban thermal plume

Not relevant to this page
I removed this material:

"In some reports, aerial carbon dioxide has increased by as much as 22% over the past hundred years. It is now said to approach 390 parts per million (0.039%) of the atmosphere.  In accumulating this data, a very large proportion of measurements have been made along the Atlantic and Pacific seaboards.  We know that both the Atlantic and Pacific have become warmer in this period, and that, because carbon dioxide is less soluble in warmer water, both these oceans have discharged carbon dioxide. Thus we can not tell how much of the increase in aerial carbon dioxide is due to oceanic warming, and how much is due to burning fossil fuels.  In any case, because CO2 only contributes 9% - 26% to the overall atmospheric Greenhouse effect, the impact of a 22% increase in CO2 will be only 2% - 5.7%."

This isn't relevant to the discussion on this page, and I found it confusing when reading, so I took it out and put in a sentence to introduce the idea of urban thermal plumes affecting arctic sea ice. Let's keep the global warming debate stuff on its own pages where it belongs. Megalophias (talk) 23:37, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

Low signal-to-noise ratio
This article seems to take a lot of words to say very little indeed. I learned the following bits of information:


 * 1) Urban thermal plumes exist, but not very much is known about them
 * 2) Unlike thermal plumes from chimneys, they are difficult to model
 * 3) We cannot determine what effect urban thermal plumes have on natural wind patterns because we can't turn them off (this seems like rather a lazy argument, as we can still get time series data)
 * 4) Climate change skeptics like urban thermal plumes because they provide an alternative to carbon dioxide as a culprit for global warming
 * 5) In particular, the loss of arctic ice cover has been blamed on urban thermal plumes.

I was particularly impressed by the ratio of references to concrete facts in the article (which seems to be tending towards infinity). --Specrat (talk) 02:43, 2 September 2010 (UTC)