Sounds like everything is back to square-one.

Meteorology - 101 states that metropolitan areas are generally warmer than rural areas, but this has been known for decades.

I notice that DeGaetano does not state conclusively:
"This means that cities and suburbs may be contributing greatly to their own heat problems."
...which seems to imply that he is merely stating a much-overlooked, and generally obvious, possibility.

I did find this to be a little funny:
But the most startling finding of his study, which will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Climate, is the vast difference between higher temperatures at urban and rural weather stations. "I expected maybe a 25% increase for the urban areas compared to the rural ones," DeGaetano said. "I didn't expect a 300% increase."
...Local weather authorities in the Columbus, Ohio, region have been telling us for over a decade now that cities are generally warmer (by as much as a degree or two) than the surrounding farmlands. For educational purposes, they were clever enough to place weather stations close to, and often inside, surrounding schools, some of which are farm-community schools.

"Natural climate variability," the kind that has always existed -- industrialization or no industrialization -- is, according to DeGaetano, more likely a cause.

Thanx for the post -- but I think a better subject line would have bee something like:
BLAME CITY-GROWTH FOR TODAY'S GLOBAL WARMING READINGS
...but you probably knew that.
;^)

Dan