How NASA’s ‘Hottest Evah’ Temperatures Are Arrived At
A central pillar of the climate-crisis narrative is simple enough to fit on a bumper sticker… today is the hottest in human history
That line only works if you accept, without question, that we had reliable, global temperature data before satellites. We did not.
What we have is a patchwork of land stations concentrated in a few developed regions, a lot of ocean guesses from ship tracks, and then, later, generous statistical infilling.
Everyone agrees the 1930s were brutally hot across the United States… the Dust Bowl was a humanitarian and ecological disaster. Crops failed, soils blew away, and heat waves killed thousands.
NOAA’s own retrospectives still call out 1936 as a benchmark summer, and July 1936 remains a singular month in the U.S. record.
Source: https://www.weather.gov/arx/heat_jul36
This backs up what Tony Heller has been saying for years, as seen in the graph below:
Atmospheric CO₂ at that time was roughly 310 PPM, a level derived from ice core records and widely used in NASA’s GISS datasets.
So the story we are told goes like this… yes, the U.S. was scorched in the 1930s, but the world was cooler, and only in the modern era did global temperatures rise everywhere
That story depends less on observations and more on algorithms.
Source: https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp
The global map we never measured
Before 1950, most thermometers were in the United States, Europe, and parts of the British Commonwealth. Large parts of Africa, South America, the Arctic, and the Southern Ocean had little to no routine coverage.
Even the NOAA-led overview of GHCN-Daily notes how the core database is a collage of many sources with varying periods of record… that is the raw material modern analyses inherit.
Now the uncomfortable part.
When there are no thermometers, you either leave grid boxes blank, or you paint numbers in from far away. HadCRUT historically left many boxes blank, explicitly avoiding interpolation, which means the “global” mean depends on where you have observations.
NASA’s GISTEMP goes the other direction and spreads anomalies up to twelve hundred kilometers from a station, filling the gaps with 1200 km smoothing. Those are deliberate choices.
If you overlay the 1930s anomaly map with the station density maps, you see something obvious… warm where the thermometers were numerous, cool or neutral where coverage was threadbare.
A compilation of historical station distribution between 1921 and 1950 makes the same basic point… the network was sparse and badly unbalanced.
Today’s ‘records’ and the jet-exhaust problem
Fast forward to the present day and we add a new contaminant… urban heat and airport placement. I have shown, with time-matched photos and flight logs, how Tampa’s much hyped 100°F “record” was a five-minute artifact of a Delta jet idling beside the sensor.
I walked through the same playbook in Phoenix when Sky Harbor trotted out an “August record” built on back-to-back departure plumes. If you missed those, read my recent two-parter, Jet-Fueled Lies: Tampa’s Fake Temperature Record and Jet-Fueled Lies, Phoenix Edition.
They are cautionary tales about how compromised data gets laundered into national datasets and weaponized into headlines.
See more here substack.com
Bold emphasis added
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Tom
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I look outdoors and see the earth melting more and more each summer. That darn sun is acting up again.
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Aaron
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Well if it’s nasa ya just know it is true
Not A Space Agency, the bottomless money pit
Gives us this garbage as well as cartoons of space stuff
guess doge missed these guys?
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Terry Shipman
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I have had several opportunities to remind several people here in Arkansas who bought into the lie that the last 20 years have been the hottest ever what history actually says.. I remind them that the record high temperature here in Arkansas was set on August 10, 1936 when Ozark Arkansas recorded 120F. It makes me glad I majored in history in college.
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D Boss
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Sorry to say but you are entirely incorrect about both Tampa and Pheonix airport weather station locations and data. And you have the wrong perspective of airport weather stations regards their purpose and what their data is not suited for.
First off Tampa, in your post about this, you incorrectly identified an ILS glideslope antenna as the weather station in your photo. The actual weather station at Tampa International is located adjacent to runway 1L as indicated by the station info here:
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets/GHCND/stations/GHCND:USW00012842/detail
Paste the lat/long into google earth and see for yourself. In fact the weather station is located 775 feet to the east of the threshold of runway 1L. It is 475 feet from the hold point for aircraft waiting for clearance to enter the runway.
I have already discredited your Pheonix rant in comments on this website because at the time you suggest, the wind was blowing the engine exhaust away from the weather station.
Your Tampa rant is also falsified because DL 1884 did not have a flight on July 27, it was on July 25 and then on Aug 8 according to Flight Aware ADS-B tracking data. And no taxiway passes by the weather station, it is 475 feet to the south east of the hold short position adjacent to the threshold of runway 1L. Wind was out of the North all day on the 27th of July, thus any jet exhaust was blown clear of the weather station as it is 775-475 feet to the east of the aircraft positions for holding or taking off.
But your rank amateurish mistaking air navigation antennae for weather stations and then mischaracterizing weather station readings is not the main issue. The main problem with your viewpoint is that aviation weather data’s purpose is aircraft safety and is of paramount importance to the safe operation for aircraft of any size. Airport data is not fit for general weather or climate analyses! Your ire should be directed at the buffoons using airport weather station data for climate or general weather purposes. The data for pilots is critical for knowing the condition of the primary medium providing lift, the air. And it is a well known fact that airport weather station data is always several degrees warmer than the surrounding terrain, due to having so much concrete and asphalt. But the purpose of these stations is properly situated for the safe operation of aircraft.
The problem is, these stations operate 24/7, and deliver readings every hour. So the data is tempting for idiots doing weather or climate prognostications. Rail against airport data being used for climate hysteria if you must, but they are properly suited for their primary purpose.
Finally, I admire many of your cogent posts on various topics, however here you are completely out of your depth and bordering on mistaken nonsense. Not only do you incorrectly locate the weather stations at both Tampa and Pheonix, but the winds at the time you claim to have analyzed would have blown engine exhaust away from the weather stations.
Furthermore, if you did some factual cross checking, airliner engine exhaust heat is completely diluted and dissipated in a short distance via two mechanisms:
1) modern turbofan engines have a huge fan in front of the engine core. This creates an annular air “bypass” of cool ambient air around the engine core exhaust, dramatically cooling it down and providing thrust. Bypass ratios are from 6 on small ones to 15 on big ones.
2) the ambient wind on an airport has a humongously larger volume of cool air diluting the engine core exhaust and when you do the numbers it comes down to ambient temps in short order. A cross check is the minimum safe distance to walk behind an idling jet engine is 200 feet. The argument that jet exhaust is causing spikes in airport weather station temps is erroneous – the data does not register spikes in temperature, at least for published METAR information.
The plane you claimed was idling was a 737, which uses the CFM56 engine and at idle each of these burns 600 lbs of jet fuel per hour. This means that the engine core is delivering 1.65 kg/second of hot exhaust gases (air, CO2 and H2O). The bypass ratio is 7 so core plus bypass exhaust is 11.55 kg/second of exhaust. With air at sea level being 1.2 kg per m³ that is 9.625 m³/second. Now the wind was blowing at 3.58 m/second, with a cross section of 1000 m² (100 meters wide by 10 meters high blowing across the idling engine exhaust in the case of a plane at the hold point of runway 1L) this yields an ambient wind flow rate of 3,580 m³/second. So roughly 372 times more ambient air is mixing with and diluting the engine exhaust per second as it stands idling adjacent to runway 1L. The weather station at 475 feet (145 meters) to the south east of this location is not going to see any substantial increase in temperature from the idling jet. (it will take 40 seconds for idling jet exhaust to reach the weather station if the wind were blowing in that direction which it was not, and in that time the exhaust has been diluting/dissipating it’s heat to the ambient wind/air)
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