“In a quirk of surface heating, the suburban areas around desert cities are actually cooler than both the city center and the outer rural areas because the irrigation of lawns and small farms leads to more moisture in the air from plants that would not naturally grow in the region.

“If you build a city in an area that is naturally forested — such as Atlanta or Baltimore — you are making a much deeper alteration of the ecosystem,” said Imhoff. “In semi-arid areas with less vegetation — like Las Vegas or Phoenix — you are making less of a change in the energy balance of the landscape.”"

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/terra/news/heat-islands.html

No, but they do appear over time where they didn’t exist before.

see here:
http://climateandstuff.blogspot.com/

I have recorded rge data before NOAA-15 started failing, and have compared this data with the now used AQUA.

Despite an overlap of 7+ years the two data streams have not been “homogenised”

In consequence the absolute temperatures have differences of up to 2K and the slopes of the data vary all over the place.

Why is the latest values from these proxy temperatures considered a golden standard when the whims of the convertor can simply change the data??!!!

Listen carefully. When you select very rural with no built pixels within 11km you get areas where the population is 0 to 5 people per sq km

And you can also look at land use.

And when you look at stations with zero population and no land use issues..

Guess what?

they are not on average much different from all the rest. Less than .1C per decade.

The world is warming.