A Closer Look at Climate Change Data

American author Mark Twain famously stated: “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

Likewise, former University of Alabama climatologist John Christy’s analysis challenges a commonly held belief that extreme high temperatures have become more prevalent.

According to his report, published this spring in the academic journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, the data don’t show an increase in extreme temperatures; rather, they indicate that temperatures have become more moderate over the past century.

“We have the systematic measurements in the United States that show the extremes of the [19]20s, 30s and 50s in terms of heat were much greater than the ones currently,” Christy told The Epoch Times.

“Even when you include the western parts of the country that are having their ‘1930s’ today, the rest of the country is not following the script.

“On balance, you don’t have a countrywide extreme event.”

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) stated that average temperatures have risen by 2 degrees Fahrenheit since 1850 and that this increase has accelerated in recent decades.

According to NOAA, 2024 was the warmest year since global records began in 1850, and the 10 warmest years during this period all occurred during the decade from 2015 to 2024.

Regarding the cause, NOAA said that “Earth’s average surface temperature has been rising because human-produced greenhouse gases are causing Earth to absorb more energy than it radiates back to space.”

Christy’s study, however, indicates that far from an increase in extreme weather, there has been an overall moderating of temperatures in the United States. In contrast to NOAA’s assessment, Christy’s analysis indicates fewer extreme high temperatures and extreme low temperatures since 1899.

Algorithms and Extremes

Given that Christy and NOAA are looking at the same data, how can there be such a large discrepancy?

The difference stems from two main factors, Christy says.

First, NOAA’s chart shows average annual temperatures, while Christy focused on the highest and lowest recorded temperatures during the warmest and coldest seasons.

The extremes, he said, are more relevant to climate science because they are setting the “environmental boundaries” in which plants and animals live.

The second reason for the different results, Christy said, is that NOAA employs algorithms that eliminate data points it believes could be errors or anomalies.

Christy’s research entailed going back through the original reports and collecting the extreme data points that NOAA had removed from its calculations.

NOAA’s figures raised questions and led to more research, Christy said, because some of what NOAA data showed as recent record highs didn’t match what he remembered from his own experience.

“When I was going through the federal data that’s digitized, I noticed that the government’s website says the hottest temperature in Newport, Oregon, in history was 94 degrees,” Christy said. “I knew a lot more about the West Coast because I grew up there.”

So he went back to the original handwritten temperature readings for that site and found not only a reading of 100 degrees in June 1925, but also 10 other days hotter than 94 degrees in Newport. He incorporated those missing numbers and then did the same for other reports from the more than 1,200 stations across the United States.

To confirm that these extreme temperatures were not an error, Christy cross-checked his findings with other nearby stations to confirm they were getting similar readings.

“My data set is far more complete than what the federal government provides to scientific researchers,” Christy said.

NOAA public affairs supervisor Monica Allen stated that “NOAA does not comment on the findings of external studies,” but stated that “NOAA uses scientifically vetted quality assurance algorithms to identify and flag potentially erroneous observations and to detect abrupt changes in a station’s historical data that might be driven by non-natural factors, such as a station move or instrumentation change.”

By reincorporating data that the algorithms removed, and by focusing on temperature extremes rather than averages, Christy’s analysis indicates that the period with the most extreme high temperatures was the 1930s, not recent decades as is often reported.

Instances of extreme heat have not increased significantly over the past century, Christy stated, and there are fewer cases of extreme cold. The moderation of extreme cold temperatures is the key factor in the increase in average temperatures.

—Kevin Stocklin; Stacy Robinson

BOOKMARKS

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—Stacy Robinson