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by Kevin Stocklin
August 24, 2026
American author Mark Twain famously stated: âIt ainât what you donât know that gets you into trouble. Itâs what you know for sure that just ainât so.â
Likewise, digging deeper into data sometimes reveals a different picture from what you saw at first glance. Combing through reports from more than 1,200 weather stations across the United States, former University of Alabama climatologist John Christyâs 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 donât show an increase in extreme temperatures; rather, they indicate that temperatures have become more moderate over the past century.
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âWe 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,â Christy said.
âEven when you include the western parts of the country that are having their â1930sâ today, the rest of the country is not following the script.
âOn balance, you donât have a countrywide extreme event.â
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, the year 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 âEarthâs average surface temperature has been rising because human-produced greenhouse gases are causing Earth to absorb more energy than it radiates back to space.â
Christyâs 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 NOAAâs assessment, Christyâs 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, NOAAâs 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 âenvironmental boundariesâ 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. This means that they simply do not consider data that contradicts their presuppositions.
Christyâs research entailed going back through the original reports and collecting the extreme data points that NOAA had removed from its calculations.
It includes more than a century of weather station reports, from early handwritten notations by the Army Signal Corps and the Weather Bureau to measurements taken by the military and federal agencies today, all of which are collected in a central network managed by NOAA.
NOAAâs figures raised questions and led to more research, Christy said, because some of what NOAA data showed as recent record highs didnât match what he remembered from his own experience.
âWhen I was going through the federal data thatâs digitized, I noticed that the governmentâs website says the hottest temperature in Newport, Oregon, in history was 94 degrees,â Christy said. âI knew a lot more about the West Coast because I grew up there.â
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.
âThis takes a tremendous amount of manual intervention, and that is something we just donât have today because everythingâs done with AI or a computer algorithm,â he said. But without the original data, âyou canât quite get the true nature of climate and the type of rapid extremes that truly occur.â
âMy data set is far more complete than what the federal government provides to scientific researchers,â Christy said.
NOAA public affairs supervisor Monica Allen stated that âNOAA does not comment on the findings of external studies,â but stated that âNOAA uses scientifically vetted quality assurance algorithms to identify and flag potentially erroneous observations and to detect abrupt changes in a stationâs historical data that might be driven by non-natural factors, such as a station move or instrumentation change.â
âNOAA also receives input from our users to identify, review, and document erroneous observations in historical datasets,â she said.
However, by reincorporating data that the algorithms removed, and by focusing on temperature extremes rather than averages, Christyâs 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.
Urbanization and Nighttime Heat Release
In addition, the majority of the temperature increases Christy found occurred at night, with daytime temperatures largely remaining flat. He hypothesized that this indicated an influence other than just CO2 emissions.
âNighttime temperatures have soared in the past 120 years,â Christy said.
âThat is due to human development around the weather stations because nighttime temperatures are far more sensitive to urbanization â parking lots, buildings, removal of forests and so on â than daytime temperatures.â
Over the past century, many locations where temperature readings were taken have been touched by urbanization and suburban sprawl, with the construction of asphalt and concrete structures in formerly rural areas, he said.
These structures absorb heat during the day and release it at night, in addition to the removal of trees that once provided shade.
âYou canât pin it on greenhouse gases alone because the urban effect is so obvious in these stations,â he said. âIt doesnât take much to make an urban heat island â you can just build a parking lot next to a rural station, and youâve got an urban heat island started.â
Temperature patterns are uneven across the United States, with heat waves currently more prevalent in western states but less so in eastern states than in the 20th century, Christy said.
But media reports focus on areas with the highest temperatures, reinforcing the public perception that extremes are increasing across the entire country.
Discerning weather patterns has been an obsession for Christy since his teen years growing up in Fresno, California, and continued through his college years studying mathematics.
After graduation, Christy worked on setting up weather stations in Africa, then earned a doctorate in climate dynamics from the University of Illinois, and later spent decades teaching college students atmospheric science at the University of Alabama.
Together with co-author Roy W. Spencer, Christy was awarded NASAâs Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991, as well as a special award by the American Meteorological Society in 1996 âfor developing a global, precise record of Earthâs temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate.â
He was also a contributor to reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in the 1990s.
âI can go back to records I recorded 60 years ago,â Christy said, âso in a sense, Iâve experienced a whole lot of climate in my life firsthand.â
Overcoming Objections
Getting his most recent findings published in an academic journal was no easy task.
âThe reviewers tried to find anything they could to reject it, and fighting that takes a long time and a lot of effort,â Christy said.
âI had to overcome many objections, and I had to do some convincing by repeatedly going through a process of showing, âThis is your objection, I have tested your objection, itâs incorrect.â
âThere have been other papers we just never could get published. âThatâs unfortunate because that means the world does not have a chance to see the results of this kind of research.â
Whether his findings will affect Americansâ views on climate change is uncertain.
âIf your political view is that extremes are getting worse and worse, thatâs almost a religion, so you canât really change minds on that,â Christy said.
âBut if youâre someone whoâs just dispassionately looking at information, my role in the past 50 years has been to build data sets the best I can so that we can ask questions of the data sets about these very kinds of issues.â
NOAA makes a wealth of data available to scientists for analysis using their own methods.
It uses the nClimGrid-Daily program to analyze data derived from the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily dataset, Allen said.
âThis data set uses a broad set of daily stations in its analysis of US temperatures, and allows NOAA, the user community, and the science community to examine the full breadth of our data,â she added.
Average temperatures and extreme temperatures âprovide complementary scientific insights,â Allen said.
âAverage temperatures establish the historical baselines used to identify extreme conditions; extreme temperatures help address risks resulting from events such as heat and cold waves,â she said.â
Despite the abundant data NOAA provides, Christy believes itâs difficult for academics who question the prevailing narratives on climate to secure grants or be published.
âOn an issue like climate change, itâs about as intolerant as they come,â he said.
âBut Iâm grateful to be here in Alabama where you still have the ability to ask questions and to examine the real data and not be fired for it.â
â This article is published in cooperation with The Epoch Times.
Roy W. Spencer, who was mentioned as a co-author with Mr. Christy, also was a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and was Rush Limbaughâs go to expert to refute climate change hysteria on the EIB Radio Network.