The Arctic is Warming or Where are the Weather Stations for Ellesmere Island?

According the prophets of doom, aka the global warming evangelists, the Arctic is warming.

Let’s look at 75,000 square miles of the Arctic which is known as Ellesmere Island.

First, once again, let’s make sure that Ellesmere Island is actually in the Arctic:

So we know it is above the Arctic Circle, good.

Let’s go the GISS site and pull up the weather stations used to measure the temperature in this neck of the woods:

Clicking in the middle of Ellesmere produces this list:

The first thing one should notice is all of the stations that have dropped out, especially at the end of 1989.

Then, let’s look at where the remaining 4 stations are located.

The Eureka station is actually in the middle of the island as located by Google:

The next active station is Nord Ads:

The purple marker is Ellesmere Island, the red marker is Nord Ads which is located 1043 km away, in Greenland.

On the next active station, Danmarkshavn:

Another station located in Greenland.

Finally, the last active station listed as measuring temperatures for Ellesmere Island, Egedesminde:

Egedesminde is 1444 km away from our one lone station on Ellesmere Island.

This raises some questions like, how stations does it take to have accurate temperature readings for the area?  At what point, if there are too few inputs, are the results invalid?  There used to be 31 stations in the vicinity of Ellesmere Island, but according to GISS, there are now only four.

Are stations hundreds of miles from Ellesmere accurate proxies for the local temperature?  Is the one station on the island, a true indicator of temperature for 75,000 square miles of land?

Or, are scientists making an educated guess as to what they think the temperature is in parts of the Arctic are, based on stations hundreds of miles apart?

If I was making a study of Arctic temperatures on Ellesmere Island, at the very least, I’d like to have 10 or 20 spread throughout the island, to ensure accurate measurements.

Apparently my idea of what is required for good research and what climate scientist think is required, are two different things.