Pirate's Cove

Hmmm, I wonder which political persuasion tends to live in urban areas?

(Science Daily) The Nature Conservancy and Harvard University released a new study examining the effect of staggering urban growth on nature and people that finds if we don’t improve urban planning now, we may lose some animals, plants and natural resources for good.

“As a species we have lived in wild nature for hundreds of thousands of years, and now suddenly most of us live in cities—the ultimate escape from nature,” says Peter Kareiva, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy and co-author of the report. “If we do not learn to build, expand and design our cities with a respect for nature, we will have no nature left anywhere.”

The study, “The implications of current and future urbanization for global protected areas and biodiversity conservation,” was published in the current issue of Biological Conservation and is the first-ever global analysis of how urbanization will affect rare species, natural resources and protected areas in proximity to cities. 

What does this have to do with anthropogenic global warming? Actually, quite a bit. Urban areas change the normal weather patterns, due to buildings, asphalt, human crowding, and sprawl, among others.  Climate is basically averages. Average temperature. Average rainfall. Average humidity. Etc. The average temperature in cities is often 5 to 10 degrees higher then in the surrounding countryside, particularly to the west. What weather does is move cool air to where it is warm, and warm to where it is cool. Most weather patterns are west to east (but not all, particularly with tropical systems and flows off large bodies of water, such as the East Coast of the US at times. This is why sometimes the surf is great, and sometimes it sucks.)

Cities change these patterns, adding extra heat to the system. How? Sunlight streams through the atmosphere and hits the Earth. Quite a bit bounces out. Some of it gets trapped by greenhouse gasses such as water vapor, methane, and CO2, water vapor being the strongest. Obviously, I am simplifying the process a bit. With cities, the sunlight streams in, and more gets trapped by the urbanization, which holds heat better then the naked ground.

And, yes, the sprawl of urbanization does damage wildlife habitat and species. Which political affiliation tends to dominate urban areas? That’s right, those on the Left!

In other global warming news, Watts Up With That? has a global warming cooling roundup.

Climate Skeptic wonders where the cirrus clouds have gone, and the effect they have on warming.