A recent paper discussing long term temperature trends in China presents a graphic of century long trends including the Jones data.
“ZHAO Zongci, DING Yihui, LUO Yong, and WANG Shaowu, “Recent Studies on Attributions of Climate Change in China” , Acta Meteorologica Sinica 2005, Vol 19, 389-400.”
The caption refers to four trends from various sources being coloured but my copy was B & W. Anyway, it is clear there is much agreement and what really tweaked my interest was the strong warming post 1970.
Using the gridded data downloadable from www.CO2science.org comparisons have been made between the Jones data and the UAH / NASA satellite MSU data for the period (1979-2005). Results in Table A for a block of eight grid cells covering much of Eastern China were quite stunning in revealing a difference of 0.96 degrees C for the 27 year period 1979-2005.
Can anyone have any doubt that the reason for this huge difference is in fact the influence of rapidly expanding UHI warming on China weather station data?
Similar experiments were repeated over Europe, Central Asia / Russia, Sahara to Iran(added 18 Aug) and New Zealand. Results are set out in Table A and reveal a stark contrast to the blizzard of pro-IPCC views in recent times that global temperature datasets from the surface and lower troposhere are now in substantial agreement following corrections by the UAH team.
Any agreement in global trends between the various datasets is probably due to the averaging of various errors from here and there to give an appearance of agreement.