I compared this high monthly average to the previous high average, a small difference as you said, because the headline sounded like extreme heat at Barrow over

I compared this high monthly average to the previous high average, a small difference as you said, because the headline sounded like extreme heat at Barrow overwhelmed measuring hardware, in contrast to the actual article that tells us that the breakage was in the data import code for a report - stemming from a programmer's two incorrect assumptions about the world. (These two being that nearby stations' temperatures would rise and fall together, and that all stations would have nearby stations.) From the article, the only change they are making to fix this breakage is to reduce the strength of these two assumptions for far north stations. - The popular perception is that the currently measured global warming means that every part of the globe is getting warmer at the same rate, all year long. The reality is that Barrow is getting a tiny bit warmer in the summer, a lot warmer than it used to be in the winter, and the rest of Alaska that we are measuring isn't seeing the same scale of changes. That's totally cool - it's just not the popular perception on either side of the debate. Here's a relevant XKCD for real life science https://xkcd.com/683/ https://xkcd.com/683/