This article linked at the bottom of this addresses climate and misleading data (whether intentional or not). The motivation for this article is a tweet/graph put out by Chris Martz, who I consider to be very smart but also outspoken/arrogant and who I’ve found to be 100% wrong at times as I’ve pointed out.
Chris’ graph tries to downplay GW by saying that the frequency of US 95F+ highs has decreased 1961-2020 vs 1901-1960. He tweeted on 7/18/26:
“Thankfully I have numbers rather than opinions. The average number of days per year in the U.S. reaching 95°F was ~18% lower during the 60-year period 1961 to 2020 compared to 1901 to 1960.The number of days reaching 100°F and 105°F have also declined since 1895.”
https://x.com/ChrisMartzWX/status/2078566117711196362
The following article is a response to this tweet.
JUL 22, 2026
“First, the Dust Bowl was real, and it remains the benchmark for multi-year extreme daytime heat in the central US, in adjusted and unadjusted data alike.”
“Second, it was a regional phenomenon”
“Third, raw daily data is the wrong tool for this question. Time of observation changes and the 1980s switch to MMTS sensors both suppress modern hot day counts relative to the past, and the raw and homogenized series diverge almost exactly when the instrument transition happened. In homogenized data, recent decades rival the 1930s even averaged nationally.”
“Fourth, hot days above a fixed threshold are a narrow and noisy way to look at the data. The overall US warming trend (around 0.5F per decade since 1970 in max, min, and mean temperatures) is robust in every dataset, raw or adjusted, satellite or surface. And globally, days above 95F have been climbing steadily for a century, with no Dust Bowl bump at all: the central US is one of the few spots on the planet where the mid-20th century still holds the record for extreme daytime heat.”
“The viral chart is built from real measurements, and the heat it shows was real too. But it takes a regional catastrophe, fails to account for changes in instruments and observation times, and presents the result as a national climate verdict. Accounting for the thermometers and the geography, and the US looks a lot like the rest of the planet: the hottest days on record are increasingly the ones we are living through now.”
https://www.theclimatebrink.com/p/hot-days-cold-thermometers