Urban Sprawl Saves City From Global Warming
 

This is a good one folks. It seems like Dublin's urban highway has saved it form global warming because due to the wonderful effects of sprawl. I guess the whole world will melt in one ball of flame but the people of Dublin will not be effected one bit because they drove out of our harsh and hot cities to live in the cool climate provided by the motorcar. Yes. All that green pasture will save them from total distruction.

It's just more nonsense. The motorcar is causing climate change and it will effect them sooner or later. If we all moved to Dublin with our motorcars by the millions, we'll see the terperature go up real fast. Some rocket scientist took the temperature in Dublin under a tree and see, "Gee, it's cooler here than in London" not taking into account all the other factors. There's no way we can have our our cities and towns converted into "Dublins" so we're stuck with what we have which is a society built around the motorcar. If I were the people of Dublin, I'd start to worry because now that the secret is out, expect the cars to come in droves!!!


Urban sprawl 'saving the city from global warming'
From:The Irish Independent
Friday, 12th August, 2005


DUBLIN's urban sprawl has saved it from the heatwaves which are affecting other European capitals, one of the country's leading climatologists said yesterday.

Instead of stewing in tropical temperatures Dubliners have been spared the worst effects of global warming by an accident of urban planning.

Figures released yesterday show that 13 out of 16 European cities studied have seen their average temperatures rise by at least one degree over the last 35 years. And although there has been a rise in Dublin's temperatures of 0.7 degrees since 1970, it have not been as extensive as those suffered by capitals like Madrid or London.

Research by the World Wildlife Fund International showed that the average temperatures in both Madrid and London have increased by 2.2 degrees celsius since the '70s.

Dublin, in contrast has only seen its average temperature rise by 0.7 degrees.

As global warming continues to impact, Dublin's relatively low building density has prevented a build up of heat which has afflicted most of the major European cities in the last 10 years.

Dr John Sweeney, a senior lecturer at NUI Maynooth and chairman of the Irish Committee on Climate change, said yesterday that Dublin was "an urban heat island" like any other city.

"Temperatures in Dublin will always be a couple of degrees warmer than in the surrounding countryside during the summer months, but the air quality is better in the city in August than in July," he said.

The improvement in the capital's air quality is due to the city being emptier than usual as more people take holidays in August, and the city also gets more sunshine in August than it does in July.

"Over the years we have seen more hours of sunshine recorded in the city in August than at one of the main measuring stations at Dublin airport. It is a direct reversal of the trend for July, when it is sunnier at the airport than in the city," Dr Sweeney added.

The World Wildlife Fund says that the world is now warming faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years, with the 1990s being the hottest decade in the last 1,000 years.

The WWF blames most of the warming on pollution from power stations and had called on the EU to set tougher targets for greenhouse gas emissions.

In the temperature league Madrid and London were top with average temperature increases of 2.2, followed by Luxembourg with an increase of two degrees.

Athens showed an increase of 1.9, Stockholm 1.5, Warsaw 1.3 while Berlin, Brussels, Rome and Vienna also showed increases of 1.2 degrees.

Although Stockholm showed an increase of 1.5 degrees, nearby Helsinki only showed an increase of 0.8 while Copenhagen showed the slowest increase of 0.2 degrees.

Um.. moving a few more km's out isn't going to help. It's called "global" warming. The concept that more driving is helping is pretty hilarious too.

Perhaps, but irregardless it will soon be outproduced by all the "clean" electricity plants burning gas/oil/coal.

Nuclear power and a great bike race were 2 things the French got right. It'll probably be like in WW2, an alternative to rubber was not developed until there was no rubber available.

You expected flawless logic? It is from an Irish newspaper, after all... ;)

I wouldn't worry too much. Dublin was founded by the Vikings and the streets here are certainly not designed for motor cars. Cycling and public transport are significantly faster than motor cars and that's not going to change any time soon.

I don't know much about Global Warming but our summers have been a lot nicer recently.

We had an idiot pseudo scientist running around our state (Florida) recently advocating urban sprawl. He had plenty of points (i.e. it kept house prices down, created jobs, etc.) Just about everything he said you could blow mile wide holes through (i.e. your long commute will eat up your extra money in gas, etc). You wonder how he could say some of junk he did with a straight face. Either he craved attention by saying something that is contrary to logic or he was a mouthpiece for developers.

Well, there's sprawl like suburban North American sprawl, and then there's sprawl like reasonable population density recommended by planners like Christopher Alexander (as a matter of fact I think he commended Dublin in several of the patterns in A Pattern Language, but that was written in the early 70s, things might have changed significantly since then - I don't know, never been there). Intelligent building practices like grass roofs, well-placed vegetation, and proper heat sink design when thinking about buildings and materials (you want them to store energy on the inside, not outside, generally) go a long way towards lowering temperature in the cities. Also note that the article only talks about average temperatures, which is only a measure of energy, so Dublin produces and traps less "excess" energy than other cities per square meter, but how much excess energy per capita is there compared to other cities? That's the real factor contributing to global warming.