Anthony Watts' Russian steampipes move around the world - amazing!

Every three or four years Anthony Watts (who owns a conspiracy blog called Watts Up with That, or WUWT) claims steam pipes in vast empty spaces in remote and largely unpopulated areas of Russia are what's causing global warming. This year he's at it again (archived here).

I don't need to write much about this, you can see it in pictures. In fact, Anthony himself put up a photo of steam pipes in a small town called Omyakon (population ~500), one of the coldest permanently inhabited places on earth.

The map below shows where the tiny settlement of Omyakon is located on the GISTEMP January temperature map . It's not in the middle of where the highest temperature anomalies were recorded.

Figure 1 | Temperature anomalies for January 2020 from the 1951-1980 mean, showing the location of Omyakon and its steampipes that conspiracy nutters blame for global warming. Data source: NASA GISTEMP

Those Russian steampipes are back at WUWT

Remember when Anthony Watts blamed global warming on Russian steampipes? Well, he's back with it all over again (archived here). Anthony posted a chart of global temperature anomalies from October 2008 and wrote:

From the “we told you so years ago” department comes this interesting study that might explain the 8 °C red spot in the Russian Arctic that NASA GISS always seems to have: [replaced link with archived version]

The study was about how some cities in Murmansk Oblast were warmer than their surrounds, which was attributed to the Urban Heat Island effect. That's mildly interesting but not unexpected. Thing is, Anthony referred back to his article about Russian steam pipes, and the map he showed above had the hottest areas in quite a different area.