I didn’t say it was inconsequential, I said it wasn’t all that significant, and I stand by that statement.
The tire wearing from its own heating was not the subject of discussion and is irrelevant to the question asked. The tire is in constant contact with itself and therefore the heat generated by the tire is significant to the tire. Not so much the things the tire very briefly rolls over.
Even if the tire heats up to 120 degrees, which would be a pretty good trick for a normal street car in the winter on ice, you generally have less than 40 square inches worth of contact patch, which means, especially at the kinds of speeds required to heat the tire that much even in the summer, the heated tire is in contact with any given section of road for a small fraction of a second before it’s gone.
In the same vein as the fact that you can wave your fingers through a flame without setting yourself on fire, the heat transfer just isn’t going to be very high because of the very brief time span of contact between the “hot” tire and the road. It will still be there, but other factors will be far more significant.
I do realize that a a 3.2 degree increase in temperature is statistically significant, but I also realize that 3 of those 3.2 degrees are heating the tire track up to the temperature of the rest of the road because the tire tracks, according to your linked study, are colder than the surrounding road when cars aren’t passing over them. This means the tire tracks during times of heavy vehicle passage, are all of 0.2 degrees hotter than the surrounding pavement. While that is definitely non-zero and may even be considered significant for the purposes of the study, as far as it being enough to melt snow? Only if the rest of the road is already within less than 1 degree of being able to melt the snow un-aided by tires.