https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/global-surfac...
You link to BEST, but BEST is a good example of their strategy. BEST's list of "very rural" weather stations include weather stations in the middle of international airports and cities. Climatologists don't collect their own data, they just scrape stuff from the internet and whatever other random datasets they can OCR so their data is often GIGO.
Obviously if you classify weather stations as rural when they're not, you will conclude UHI isn't important, but this just means you're bad at science, not that the effect doesn't exist. Anyone who has ever driven through a city into the countryside knows that UHI exists and has a significant effect.
https://climateaudit.org/2011/12/20/berkeley-very-rural-data...
The Berkeley classification in Thailand also looks very suspect. As in Peru, many of the “very rural” sites are small cities. Some locations look suspicious. “Bangkok Pilot” is shown as “very rural”, but when googled is associated with Suvarnabhumi, the name of the very urban Bangkok airport (data is sparse, so it may be something else, but anything associated in any way with Bangkok can hardly be “very rural”)
This isn't the only example either. They loooooove to pretend that weather stations sited right next to jet aircraft engines reflect the temperature in the nearest tiny village.
As with anything if there’s enough evidence it’s a working theory that has to be disproved
Moreover statements “like a lot of stuff…, totally corrupted” makes me suspect you have a bias.
I used to follow watts blog and esp curry at georgia tech when I was briefly a student there (not in climate). It’s a lot of cherry picking. Overall I’m glad they exist of course, but they didn’t convince me.
My favorite was aa doctor in his 50s who had an engineering degree from rice claim that it’s all bogus because Ice cores in the arctic are managed by Russians and he didn’t trust Russians
Although we keep hearing of the unimportance of UHI, Bangkok has increased 0.24 deg C/decade relative to Mae Hong Son.
The US CRN which is sited away from any potential UHI corruption shows no warming across the entire USA since it opened in 2005. Implication: UHI corruption is significant.
"Count the white pixels". Very simple, very direct, no room for doubt. But I expect the ice is melting because it's embarassed or something.
Look, climate fanatics are constantly latching onto random natural events and claiming it proves the world is doomed. They're always wrong and when they get proven wrong they just ignore it and pretend it never happened. Or they change the historical record to make it look like they were correct all along.
On the polar theme, look at all the stupid claims about polar bears from some years back. Polar bears became the face of climate change where I live, they appeared on adverts by the electricity company. Polar bears turn out to be doing fine and the self-proclaimed academic "experts" who claimed they were in mortal danger were all proven wrong, yet again, just like they always are, and yet again there were no consequences for their failure, just like there never are.
And how many times have they claimed all the ice would be gone at the poles by now? They claim this so often it's a meme. Search this page for "ice":
If these guys were doing science in the private sector they'd all have gone bankrupt/to prison a long time ago. Only very naive people keep believing claims from a culture so thoroughly discredited as them.