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Our paper entitled Death Valley Illusion: Evidence Against the 134 Deg. F World Record has been published as an early online release in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. The authors are myself, Dr. John Christy, and climatologist and storm chaser Bill Reid.
Several meteorologists over the years have questioned the plausibility of the 134 deg. F world record hottest temperature recorded at Greenland Ranch, California, on July 10, 1913, but quantitative evidence has been lacking. We used 100 years of temperatures recorded at higher-elevation (and thus cooler) locations to find a range of temperatures that most likely occurred on that date.
The answer was 120 (+/-2) deg. F, typical for Death Valley in July, and well below the world record value of 134 deg. F. I have previously blogged on the evidence against this value and how and why it might have been recorded.
While I remain a skeptic of anthropogenic climate change being a net threat to human health and welfare, unlike some other skeptics I have never considered a temperature on a single day (especially over 100 years ago) as being any kind of evidence related to climate change. We follow the data, which is what we did in this new study.
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Dr Spencer.
“While I remain a skeptic of anthropogenic climate change being a net threat to human health and welfare, unlike some other skeptics I have never considered a temperature on a single day (especially over 100 years ago) as being any kind of evidence related to climate change. We follow the data…”
Climate is the statistical distribution of weather over time, characterized by its mean and variability. The linked image illustrates this principle: as the average temperature rises, the entire probability distribution of daily temperatures shifts toward higher values. This shift increases the likelihood of hot and extremely hot events while reducing the frequency of extreme cold events, even though occasional extreme cold days still occur.
The concern is not merely about warmer averages but about the increased probability of extremes (heat waves, droughts, heavy rainfall, and related impacts) that accompany this shift. These extremes are what drive most of the net risks to human health, infrastructure, and welfare. Thus, the changing distribution of weather statistics, not isolated daily records, constitutes clear and consequential evidence of climate change.
See the image here: https://ibb.co/B28PLBxj
Regards.