Wood Romances

A lot is being said about the fact that July 2026 eclipsed July 1936 as the warmest month on record for CONUS temperatures. Objections from contrarians are voluminous, but a post on X from Chris Martz seems to capture the gist of the objections I'm hearing. According to him, "That claim is misleading for two reasons:   This is due to minimum temperatures only, which skew the 'average.'   The real, measured thermometer data (area-weighted) don’t support this claim." Each of these objections are seriously uninformed and misleading, and it won't be hard to demonstrate why. After rebutting Martz's claims, though, I'll point out some ways that this record could be reported in misleading ways, and what I think might do a better job of showing what's happening in the US. Objection #1: The Record is Due to Minimum Temperatures Only This is objectively false. The record is for average temperature (Tavg), not minimum temperature (Tmin), and it should be pa...

Chris Martz decided to make a point about extreme temperatures by posting a map with the hottest August temperatures ever recorded in each state of the US. Martz asks : Did you know that 33 U.S. states set their “all-time” August high temperature records before 1955?  Of those, eight Midwestern states set their August records in 1936 alone while seven set theirs in 1918. Here's the map he shared. Chris Martz's Map on X This I suppose would be interesting if we were considering when outliers appear to clump up. There's probably something meaningful in the fact that 8 states had their warmest August record temperature in 1936 and 7 had their warmest August record in 1918. We all know about the Dust Bowl, during which human activity was responsible for causing extremely high daily maximum temperatures (Tmax) during the summer months, especially in the Midwest. GHG-induced warming causes Tmax to increase but it causes Tmin to warm even more rapidly. Human activity made the Dust...

Surface thermometers are old technology, and to be useful, they have to be extremely limited (more on this in a minute). Satellites, however, are the latest and greatest technology and are capable of measuring temperature (kind of) of different strata of the atmosphere. It can be tempting to think that we should trust satellite data over surface thermometers. But is that true? The tl;dr here is that surface thermometers are more accurate for Global Mean Surface Temperatures (GMST) while satellites make up for their lack of accuracy with some very helpful and useful information about how layers of the atmosphere are changing. In this post, I want to consider first how surface thermometers compare to satellites in general. In a second, follow up post , I will look more closely at individual satellite datasets and consider if one is more accurate than the others. The Instrumental Record Perhaps the biggest advantage of surface thermometers is that it's old technology. The instrumental...