Phoenix has heat island. The Arizona Republic’s cover article on Sunday, September 21, 2009, was entitled, ‘Study: Wealth buys rescue from urban heat island’. The article documents that the effects of heat island are greater in the center of Phoenix. The article also indicates that the effects of heat island and the average temperatures are lower away from the City.

They are on to something. Heat island is caused by the sun’s radiant energy creating a ‘thermal mass’ in cities. Temperatures in cities are higher because they are affected more by the sun’s radiant energy than the surrounding countryside.

Expand that notion and it is easy to imagine that global warming measurements inside of cities are actually measuring heat island, the effect of the sun’s radiation. It follows that the more radiation, the higher the temperatures.

The challenge is that increasing greenhouse gas reduces the sun’s radiation. If the global warming readings from cities are actually increasing, does that mean greenhouse gasses are decreasing? Do new record highs actually indicate decreasing greenhouse gas?

The 2007 U.N. IPCC Report, Report 2, documents that the rate of growth of the Kyoto Protocol greenhouse gasses peaked between 1998 and 2003. Page 140 states that Methane has had a ‘negative growth rate’ for most of this decade. The report admits that they don’t know why.

Luckily for Phoenix, there is an Atlas Testing center 30 miles north of Phoenix. Atlas Testing is a global leader in weathering testing and weathering test equipment. If you want to know how long the paint on you car is going to last in the desert, take it to the Phoenix Atlas Testing Center.

The importance of Atlas to this discussion is that Atlas records daily temperatures and posts them on their web site. They have records for the last decade. If you want to know the temperature on September 22, 2002, you can look it up.

That also means that anyone can analyze the records and discover for themselves that there hasn’t been any warming in Phoenix for the last decade.

If there is equally scientific documentation that indicates warming in downtown Phoenix, then an analysis might show that greenhouse gasses are diminishing. That’s a study worth conducting.

What is known is that there has been no warming in Phoenix for the last decade. If there is no warming in Phoenix, then can there be global warming or is there something else going on?