“The Exurbs

“Now we are out in the outer suburbs, the great sprawling expanse of subdevelopments, glass-cube office parks, big-box malls, and townhome communities. This new form of human habitation spreads out into the desert or the countryside, or it snakes between valleys, or it creeps up along highways and in between rail lines. This kind of development seems less like a product of human will than an organism. And you can’t really tell where one town ends and the other begins, except when, as Tom Wolfe observed, you begin to see a new round of 7-Elevens, CVS’s, Sheetzes, and Burger Kings.

“We don’t even have words to describe these places. Over the past few decades, dozens of scholars have studied places like Arapahoe County, Colorado; Gwinnett County, Georgia; Ocean County, New Jersey; Chester County, Pennsylvania; Anoka County, Minnesota; and Placer County, California. They’ve coined terms to capture the polymorphous living arrangements found in these fast growing regions: edgeless city, major diversified center, multicentered net, ruraburbia, boomburg, spread city, technoburb, suburban growth corridor, sprinkler cities. None of these names has caught on, in part because scholars are bad at coming up with catchy phrases, but in part because these new places are hard to define.

“You can’t even sensibly draw a map because you don’t know where to center it. Demographer Robert Lang tried to draw a map of a zone north of Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He located all the roads and office parks and arbitrarily drew the borders. If he’d slid his map north, south, east, or west, some roads and buildings would have disappeared, and others would have appeared. But there would have been no noticeable change in density, no new and definable feature, just another few miles of suburban continuum.

“And yet people flock here. Seventy-three million Americans moved across state lines in the 1990s, and these places ‘€” across Florida, north of Atlanta, shooting out beyond Las Vegas, Phoenix, Denver, and so on ‘€” drew them in. You fly over the desert in the Southwest or above some urban fringe, and you notice that the developers build the sewers, roads, and cul-de-sacs before they put up the houses, so naked cul-de-sacs to nowhere spread out beneath you. One day I stood and watched a crew carve a golf course out of the desert near Henderson, Nevada, one of the fastest-growing cities in America. A year later, and fifty thousand people are living where there was nothing.”

[emphasis added by me - S. Salov]

Isn’t this just a case of, if you do enough different tests sooner or later you are bound to find one that is (not)significant?

That does not surprise me at all – there seems to be a general inability to replicate much in climate studies.

If results cannot be replicated, ie here statistically which you have done, then their results are specious.

In this case the raw data has to be released for independent audit which so far has been next to impossible to achieve.

I down loaded Jone’s absolute temp values used to compute the reference global mean temp which on inspection showed to be grid cell aggregates, not what I had hoped were raw station monthly means. Warwick Hughes comments on his site the problems associated with these grid cells.

Thank you.