Weakly nonlinear propagation of pressure waves in initially quiescent compressible liquids uniformly containing many spherical microbubbles is theoretically studied based on the derivation of the Korteweg–de Vries–Burgers (KdVB) equation. In particular, the energy equation at the bubble–liquid interface [Prosperetti, J. Fluid Mech. 222, 587 (1991)] and the effective polytropic exponent are introduced into our model [Kanagawa et al., J. Fluid Sci. Technol. 6, 838 (2011)] to clarify the influence of thermal effect inside the bubbles on wave dissipation. Thermal conduction is investigated in detail using some temperature-gradient models. The main results are summarized as follows: (i) Two types of dissipation terms appeared; one was a well-known second-order derivative comprising the effect of viscosity and liquid compressibility (acoustic radiation) and the other was a newly discovered term without differentiation comprising the effect of thermal conduction. (ii) The coefficients of the KdVB equation depended more on the initial bubble radius rather than on the initial void fraction. (iii) The thermal effect contributed to not only the dissipation effect but also to the nonlinear effect, and nonlinearity increased compared with that observed by Kanagawa et al. (2011). (iv) There were no significant differences among the four temperature-gradient models for milliscale bubbles. However, thermal dissipation increased in the four models for microscale bubbles. (v) The thermal dissipation effect observed in this study was comparable with that in a KdVB equation derived by Prosperetti (1991), although the forms of dissipation terms describing the effect of thermal conduction differed. (vi) The thermal dissipation effect was significantly larger than the dissipation effect due to viscosity and compressibility.