Extremely high temperatures have not become more common in the United States in recent decades, says the well-known American climate scientist John Christy.

The long-serving professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) reached this conclusion after examining raw data from more than 1,200 weather stations in the country’s 48 contiguous states.

Christy published the result in the scientific journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology in April this year, and spoke about it with the Epoch Times last weekend.

“We have systematic measurements in the United States showing that the extreme heat of the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s was much greater than what we see today,” says Christy.

The finding is sensational, but is not reported by the 99.9 per cent of the media that are politically correct on climate. So how can it be that masses of people go around believing something that is quite simply untrue?

The explanation is almost unbelievable to laypeople: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States operates with datasets in which the highest temperatures appearing in the raw data have been removed.

For anyone who has worked scientifically with large datasets of physical measurement results, this is not equally incredible. Because of technical faults, errors in data processing, faults with measuring equipment, etc., one will from time to time find “wild” data, that is, data that are either physically impossible or extremely unlikely. To avoid the risk that data guaranteed to be false corrupt the data analysis, the datasets are cleaned of the “wild” figures.

But what if authentic observations also disappear in this filtering process?

That was what Christy wanted to find out:

Christy’s research involved going back through the original reports and collecting the extreme data points that NOAA had removed from its calculations.

This encompasses more than a century of weather-station reports, from early handwritten notes from the Army Signal Corps and Weather Bureau to measurements carried out by the military and federal agencies today, all of which are collected in a central network administered by NOAA.

The highly regarded climatologist was puzzled by what he saw:

NOAA’s figures raised questions and led to further investigations, says Christy, because some of what the NOAA data showed as recent record-high temperatures did not accord with what he remembered from his own experience.

“When I went through the digitised federal data, I noticed that the government’s website states that the highest temperature ever in Newport, Oregon, was 94 ºF,” says Christy.

94 ºF is equivalent to just over 34 ºC. But Christy himself had grown up on the West Coast, and it did not make sense to him that this was a record-high temperature.

And sure enough:

He then went back to the original handwritten temperature measurements for this location and found not only a reading of 100 ºF in June 1925, but also ten other days with temperatures above 94 ºF in Newport.

Christy embarked upon a monumental reconstruction effort:

He incorporated these missing figures 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 see whether they had similar readings.

“This requires an enormous amount of manual work, and it is something we simply do not have today, because everything is done with AI or a computer algorithm,” he says. But without the original data, “you cannot fully understand the true nature of the climate and the kind of rapid extreme events that actually occur”.

“My dataset is far more complete than what the federal government makes available to scientific researchers,” says Christy.

The analysis of the complete dataset paints an entirely different picture from the one we see in the media day in and day out:

Christy’s analysis suggests that the period with the most extreme maximum temperatures was the 1930s, and not recent decades, as is often reported.

Occurrences of extreme heat have not increased appreciably over the past century, says Christy, and there are fewer instances of extreme cold.
The decline in extreme cold is the decisive factor behind the increase in average temperatures.

Christy believes that urbanisation goes a long way towards explaining the observed increases:

In addition, most of the temperature increases Christy found occurred at night, while daytime temperatures largely remained stable. He hypothesised that this indicated an influence other than CO2 emissions alone.

“Night-time temperatures have risen sharply over the past 120 years,” says Christy.

“That is due to human development around the weather stations, because night-time temperatures are far more sensitive to urbanisation – car parks, buildings, deforestation and so on – than daytime temperatures.”

Over the past century, many locations where temperature measurements were taken have been affected by urbanisation and suburban development, with the construction of asphalt and concrete structures in previously rural areas, he says. These structures absorb heat during the day and release it at night.

“You cannot blame greenhouse gases alone, because the urban effect is so obvious at these stations,” he says. “It does not take much to create an urban heat island – you can simply build a car park next to a station in the countryside, and then you have an urban heat island under way.”

Once the analysis was completed, the battle to get it published remained, which for once was won:

Getting his latest findings published in an academic journal was no easy task.

“The peer reviewers tried to find everything they could to reject it, and fighting that takes a long time and requires a great deal of effort,” says Christy.

“I had to overcome many objections, and I had to convince them by repeatedly going through a process in which I showed: ‘This is your objection, I have tested it, and it is wrong.’”

“There have been other papers that we simply have never managed to get published. That is unfortunate, because it means that the world does not get the chance to see the results of this kind of research.”

Christy recently retired, but continues his work at the university as emeritus. Even in Trump’s America, where Christy has been engaged by the federal government, that was no matter of course.

Christy believes that it is difficult for academics who question the prevailing narratives about the climate to obtain research funding or get published.

“When it comes to a subject like climate change, it is as intolerant as it can get,” he says.

“But I am grateful to be here in Alabama, where you still have the opportunity to ask questions and examine the actual data without being fired for it.”

A spokeswoman for NOAA bullshits when the Epoch Times contacts the institution for a comment on the dataset. What else can she do?

The fact that realistic temperatures have been removed from the official dataset poses a colossal problem of explanation. Surely it could not be due to corruption? Good excuses are then as costly as they were after “Climategate” in 2009.

Nor can Christy’s scientific credentials be called into question.

Together with Roy W. Spencer, Christy was awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement in 1991, as well as a special award from the American Meteorological Society in 1996 “for developing a global, precise record of Earth’s temperature from operational polar-orbiting satellites, fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate”.

And at the University of Alabama he was a “distinguished professor” and director of the institution’s Earth System Science Center.

In short, Christy is a giant among dwarfs, and his demonstration of NOAA’s data censorship should have been on the front page of every major newspaper in the world.

Instead, the world continues to allow itself to be deceived, probably because it wants to be deceived – God knows why.