Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – It is common knowledge that urban areas tend to be hotter than rural areas. Apart from the denser population activities, urban areas are also full of buildings and roads.
Infrastructure materials, such as concrete and iron, store heat from the Sun which contributes to increasing temperatures. The popular term is often referred to as ‘urban warming bias’ or ‘urban heat islands’.
Report Ceres-Science mentions that urban areas only take up 4% of all land on Earth. However, many weather and climate detectors calculate global temperature only in these urban areas.
That way, many scientists suspect that reports about global warming have been contaminated by the effects of urban heat islands. In a sense, the calculated temperature increase is more or less affected by the heat stored by buildings and asphalt in urban areas.
A recent study in the journal ‘Climate’ tries to examine this phenomenon, as well as the correlation of urban heat islands with global warming due to climate change. This research was compiled by 37 researchers in 18 countries.
Previously, the UN intergovernmental agency related to climate change (IPCC) said that urban warming could only contribute to less than 10% of global warming.
However, recent studies say that the contribution of urban warming to climate change could reach 40% since 1850, quoted from Ceres-Science, Monday (4/9/2023).
The study also found that the IPCC’s estimates of solar activity prematurely rule out the sun’s important role in global warming.
When researchers analyzed temperature data using only the IPCC version of the Sun data, they could not explain the warming phenomena that have occurred since the mid-20th century.
However, when researchers repeated the analysis using different estimates of solar activity often used by the scientific community, new findings emerged.
They detected that most of the warming and cooling trends from the rural data could actually be explained in terms of changes in solar activity.
“For years, the general public assumed that the causes of climate change were obvious. Our new study suggests that there are other factors that contribute to climate change,” said lead researcher Dr. Willie Soon.
“This analysis opens a new perspective to investigate the causes of climate change scientifically,” said the research team, Prof. Ana Elias.
In essence, this study states that there are many factors to climate change. Not only human activities, but also urban infrastructure materials (asphalt roads, building walls, glass, etc.), as well as different solar activities.
[Gambas:Video CNBC]
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