I saw one the other night. I didn’t know the association with the comet. The only reason I saw it was because I awoke early in the morning and turned on the History Channel to find something boring. Unfortunately, “Earth in Peril” or some such show was on and I had to go for a walk to cool off. I can’t recall what word set me off — “alarming” — “unprecedented” — “disturbing” — etc.

The latest flash across my screen was the statement, “Analyses by Nasa for example use only rural stations to calculate trends.” This was contained in the BBC article “Climate scepticism: The top 10″ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/629/629/7074601.stm

This comment was in the response to the urban heat island effect, which is “is real but small; and it has been studied and corrected for.” This brings me to the NASA GISS record of Guangzhou, China:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/gistemp_station.py?id=205592870002&data_set=1&num_neighbors=1

Compare the trend from 1980 onwards and the before and after Landsat images:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/NewImages/images.php3?img_id=17735

August 10th would make it a Perseid. Thanks for pointing this out.