Heat From Cities' Energy Use Having Major Climate Change Impact

Posted by Milton Recht:

From Yahoo!News, "Energy-Guzzling Cities Changing Weather 1,000 Miles Away" by Tanya Lewis | LiveScience.com:

The heat released by everyday activities in energy-guzzling cities is changing the weather in far-away places, scientists report today (Jan. 27).

The released heat is changing temperatures in areas more than 1,000 miles away (1609 kilometers). It is warming parts of North America by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius) and northern Asia by as much as 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius), while cooling areas of Europe by a similar amount, scientists report in the journal Nature Climate Change.***"There's a tendency in climate science to overlook the effects of cities," Brian Stone, a professor of city and regional planning at Georgia Tech, told LiveScience. "Cities occupy just a few percent of the global land surface, but the amount of energy released as waste heat is contributing downwind to pretty significant changes in climate. I hope this will encourage us to focus more on cities as important drivers of climate change," added Stone, who was not involved in the current study.***"The energy consumption in highly populated areas can cause changes in wind patterns, and that causes climate change far away from the heating source," said meteorologist and study author Ming Cai of Florida State University.