cleaner air has effectively boosted the total warming from carbon dioxide emitted over the same time by anywhere from 15% to 50%

Of course, China and India and Africa are simultaneously ramping up both polluting and making gobs of CO2. Australia sells them the coal.

As Germany ramps up their coal power plants, maybe they should remove the stack scrubbers.

They're going to do this once the political instability hits;

It's science fiction, but more realistic than most of the genre, though the Dutch Royal family might not recognise themselves in the characters depicted.

Just paint all the airport runways white and move the sensors farther from the planes and the record temps will go away. Most of the records are at airports.

The sensed temperatures accurately record climate changes that affect crops and forests. It certainly isn't an artifact of runway proximity.

White paint isn't a fix.

Yeah, mainly 'the records' reported in news accounts are from well-understood weather monitoring available to the public, often sited at airports. A neighbor posts his weather station results, too (but I'm guessing the local newspaper doesn't consult that record).

Just move John Larkin away from stuff he doesn't understand. It would save him from making an ass of himself quite so often.

[about climate change]

False assumption here is that the 'cooling effect' (really reduction of heating) during daytime is the whole story. During nighttime, albedo inhibits the shedding of heat by radiation into the black night sky, which makes a net effect of... zero, until you do a LOT more analysis and have some special paint that does anti-greenhouse things.

White surfaces don't get that hot that they need to shed any heat at night...white surfaces work. You don't think so? Paint your vinyl siding black and see how long it lasts.

The error here, is you assume it was heat stored in the object, not in the ambient air bathing all the objects in the vicinity, that was to be 'shed' at night. The effect of an albedo enhancement is to reduce BOTH the emission and absorption of heat by radiation; that's why thermos flasks are silvered.

Air doesn't have much thermal capacity and doesn't have much heat to exchange with much more thermally massive materials like water and masonry.

Urban Heat: Can White Roofs Help Cool World’s Warming Cities? You are right about radiation, air isn't a very good conductor either, especially when it's not moving.

But a whole diurnal cycle (day) without breeze isn't normal. Air, 15 lbs per square inch, and soil, and other objects, have significant heat capacity, and readily exchange heat; it isn't surface wind that radiates to the sky, but objects. The breeze in my window does get cooler at night; there's plenty of movement of heat (by convection) and fresh bits of air adjacent to objects do pick up heat, by conduction, over very small distances (conductivity of air-to-air doesn't dominate the effect).

Radiation of heat into the sky is exactly equal to insolation heat inflow, at the steady-state temperature we deem 'temperate'. One cannot ignore either of the two equal effects. The 'albedo-works' argument has that flaw.

Of course, quite a bit of the heat being radiated into the sky is being radiated from a layer of gas fairly high in the sky - the effective ration altitude for a given wavelength - where photons of that particular wavelength finally have an even chance to make it out into the universe, rather than being absorbed by some greenhouse gas or other and getting re-radiated in some arbitrary direction. This is how greenhouse gases warm the surface of the planet.

Albedo is frequently wavelength dependent, which further complicates the argument. Snow and ice are very reflective at visible wavelengths, less so in the near infra-red.