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Comment by busymom0 | Hacker News Reader

They are using a 30 year range only which is meaningless.

The raw data ALWAYS speaks for itself — out of the 50 U.S. state record high temperatures, 23 were set during the 1930s, while 36 occurred prior to 1960. There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmax

Edit: I am getting quite a few downvotes even though I linked to scientific data. Please let me know what the downvote is for, otherwise it’s disappointing a scientific community doesn’t want to engage in poking holes in the data.

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> Please let me know what the downvote is for

It's for not knowing what the word "globally" means. That is a pretty big hole in your own data.

Look at the equivalent data where it exists for South America, Europe, Africa or Asia. The majority have records set in the last 30 years.

Of course, none of the Northern hemisphere countries set their all-time record temperature in January so all-time records in the US are pretty irrelevant to the article.

My point is that a 30 year period is meaningless when majority of records we see were broken much before that and the number of records being broken has gone down significantly as per NOAA data.

The number of records being broken has not gone down if you include parts of the world that are not the USA (they exist!)

The record was broken in 20 of the 50 countries in Europe in the last 10 years alone. Only 12 still have records standing from more than 30 years ago.

About half of records in Africa were broken in the last 20 years.

The majority of records in Asia and South America were broken in the last 20 years.

Anyway, this article is about temperatures in January, which means that all-time high temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere are irrelevant. Would it be meaningless if California hit 130°F in January just because it was once slightly hotter in July?

> They are using a 30 year range only which is meaningless.

> There’s barely been a handful of record high temperatures broken in the last 3 decades out of 50 states

If they were talking about maximum recorded temperatures, your argument would've made sense.

However, they're talking about average temperatures, for which a 30 year range is certainly not meaningless.

Here’s the same data for the minimum temperature records broken:

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/scec/records/all/tmin

Around 10 were broken in the last 3 decades which is more than the around 7 broken for the max temperatures. If more min records are broken, then I would expect the average to be going down not up.

> If more min records are broken, then I would expect the average to be going down not up.

You would expect so but the data about temperature anomalies suggests the opposite:

Annual 2019 Average Temperature Anomalies in USA: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/201913/supplemental/...

Global Temperature Anomaly Mapping at a glance: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/

Global Climate Summary in 2019 https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/global-climate-201912

Minimum records being broken can mean more variance causing outliers more frequently, wouldn't necessarily mean that they push the average down as they might be short events followed by a different weather pattern.

The disruption of the polar vortex drops temperature significantly across Northern Europe but it can be caused by the warming of the atmosphere so even though it can cause record lows it is a short lasted event and on average the temperature is still going up.

That is also a side-effect of climate change, more powerful bursts of extreme weather.

Interesting. It's definitely not the case in Europe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records#Europe

30 records in the last 15 years vs 18 in the previous 100+

FYI the HN guidelines say:

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put asterisks around it and it will get italicized.

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

Possibly some of the downvotes are simply for not following the guidelines.

It's an interesting dataset, but I feel that it lacks one relevant metric, which in our case is Temperature Anomaly.

I long for the day when I can sort datatables on such central websites.

At least the link I provided, the data should already be sorted and only listing the date when each date broke the max temperature record. Their FTP however does provide more detailed data from 1200 stations across US.

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