On a related, but slightly different side of this topic, I was wondering if anyone knows if any studies have looked into the heat island effect. It is a well known phenomena that cities are warmer than the countryside. This is for many reasons, but a large one is that humans heat their environment by burning coal, natural gas, generating electricity, ect. As cities sprawl, this area of heat islands starts to become non-trivial in terms of areal extent. Has anyone been able to quantify this effect?
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