"I'm genuinely interested in seeing evidence of a lack of a warming trend over the last 8 years. I'm sure others here are, too. So try linking. Just one will do. If it supports your claim."

Well, you can characterize 1998 as an unusually warm year, but if you taking 1998 as the starting point of your trend, then years following have been cooler or the same. If you smooth the trend over the decades you can basically wipe out the "unusually warm year due to El Nino" of 1998. So, if you talking about in last few decade there is a measurable upward trend in global temperature.

But if you were around in 1998-99, 1998 wasn't characterize as a blip due to El Nino. Nope, it was sold as the beginning of even steeper rises in global warming. And direct evidence that global temperature were drastically ever increasing. And this song and dance routine was so wildly successful that this act continue to this day.

After 2000, there were different song & dance routines. The explanation for the uncomfortable fact of global temperature not increasing dramatically, and that was the extra heat was hiding in the ocean.
Oh, it was a brilliant paper, and well received by the usual clowns. But, now the ocean temperatures are not cooperating with this idea, so that idea is shelved. But fear not it will be back, because it very good for laughs.

Of course, El Nino will eventually return and it may raise global temperatures noticeably , so that once again we can have the media headlines of, warmest temperature ___.

Now, whether it in 400, or 2000, or 10000 years will depend upon how stupid the media is, so naturally I will make a guess that the most common report will probably be "in millions years" or "it's ever been".

This is what NCDC [National Climatic Data Center] says
about global temperature measurement:

"NCDC's long-term mean temperatures for the Earth were calculated by processing data from thousands of world-wide observation sites on land and sea for the entire period of record of the data. Many parts of the globe are inaccessible and therefore have no data. The temperature anomaly time series presented here were calculated in a way that did not require knowing the actual mean temperature of the Earth in these inaccessible areas such as mountain tops and remote parts of the Sahara Desert where there are no regularly reporting weather stations. Using the collected data available, the whole Earth long-term mean temperatures were calculated by interpolating over uninhabited deserts, inaccessible Antarctic mountains, etc. in a manner that takes into account factors such as the decrease in temperature with elevation. By adding the long-term monthly mean temperature for the Earth to each anomaly value, one can create a time series that approximates the temperature of the Earth and how it has been changing through time."

So, it's a approximation. And there is no standardize way of measuring global temperature- though within NCDC we can hope they do have a standardize way of measuring global temperature.
And I will note that there is no specific mention in the above description of removing any warming due to Urban Heat Island affect. They may be [and if they anywhere close to sane- and I assume they are] *approximating it* to reduce this affect to the extent that it's distorting the results. But some affect from Urban Heat Island affect is [and properly should be] reflected in a correct measuring of global temperature. In other words, as rough guess, if Urban Heat Island affect is increasing say 10 C average warmer temperature on the urban area, and the Urban Heat Island affects from urban centers are warming entire state/province by say, 2 C average warmer temperature; this and the sum of entire world effects from Urban Heat Island affects could actually adding somewhere around a .1 or so C to global temperature. So, the ".1 or so C" should measured and reporting for global temperature. And if you addressing a particular countries' temperature you would have an higher over all actual temperature increase from the Urban Heat Island affect because you dealing with a smaller region [compared to the global area].

Here is NCDC's global temperature graph:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/anomalies.html