OTOH there was no obligation to stick to all that “noisy data”. And given what is known about the well-known places (such as Tokyo) one would have expected a little more humility and questioning of their own methodology, in the discussion. If they could speculate about asphalt, why couldn’t they speculate about the apparent counterintuitiveness of their results?
Urban areas comprise more than a quarter of the measurement sites. Don’t forget that. As far as uncertainties go, a great deal of the measured warming could still be due to UHI.