Background
According to nearly all climate models, earth's polar regions should be the most sensitive and vulnerable areas of the planet to climate change; and, in the words of the author of this treatise, "warming and cooling epochs should be seen most clearly here and should also occur earlier than in other parts of the world."  Hence, as he continues, earth's polar regions "should play a very important role in the detection of global changes," and we assume that it was that rational that led him to conduct this comprehensive study of temporal and spatial variations in Arctic surface air temperature over the period of instrumental observations.

What was done
Mean monthly temperatures of 37 Arctic and 7 sub-Arctic stations, as well as temperature anomalies of 30 grid-boxes from the updated data set of Jones were used to derive a number of different spatial and temporal histories of Arctic near-surface air temperature.

What was learned
In the words of the author:
1. "In the Arctic, the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s."
2. "Even in the 1950s the temperature was higher than in the last 10 years."
3. "Since the mid-1970s, the annual temperature shows no clear trend."
4. "The level of temperature in Greenland in the last 10-20 years is similar to that observed in the 19th century."

What it means
Again in the words of the author, the meteorological record "shows that the observed variations in air temperature in the real Arctic are in many aspects not consistent with the projected climatic changes computed by climatic models for the enhanced greenhouse effect," because, of course, "the temperature predictions produced by numerical climate models significantly differ from those actually observed."

Put more simply, it is abundantly clear that the Arctic - where the world's best climate models predict that greenhouse warming should be most evident and earliest observed - has not warmed over the last seventy years, in harmony with the contention of our editorial of 1 July 2000: There Has Been No Global Warming for the Past 70 Years.  What more is there to say?  The data have spoken.