[AmericaUnited]

Surface thermometer measurements indicate that the temperature of the Earth is warming, while the satellite data show long-term cooling trends.

"Question: How many fools, dupes, idiots and supposedly learned idiots does it take to understand that thermometers placed near/in cities will record slightly warmer temps?"

Answer: It looks like none of them.

[dufekin]

Well, those urbanizing stations aren't the worst of the problem. Liberals repeatedly use the intense warmth in Alaska to cry insidiously about global warming. Alaska is very mush warmer than it was in the 1960s, but that warmth has nothing to do with "global warming." The Pacific Decadal Oscillation flipped in 1977; the temperatures in Alaska from 1948-1977 show no real trend. The temperature trend since 1978 likewise shows no particular trend. But the average temperature jumped--in some places close to 10 F°--between 1977 and 1978.

Unfortunately, most Alaska stations do not have data that predates World War II, but paleoclimatic data suggest that we saw the exact opposite discontinuity in mean temperature sometime around 1946 and 1900 and the same discontinuity circa 1922. Well, not exactly; for some reason that we don't fully understand, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation appeared significantly damped during the nineteenth century.