The Max Temp Quiz

Test your climate literacy

Before you look down this page, answer this: Of the 50 US states and 2 territories (Puerto Rico and US Virgin Islands), how many state record maximum high temperatures out of 52 occurred:

  1. Before 1960

  2. From 1960 to 1999

  3. Since 2000

Do you have your answers? Let’s find out.

The data

Here are the historical maximum max temperatures for every state in the US, from the NOAA State Climate Extremes database. There are double entries when the max temp is a tie in different years, so there are actually 57 record-breaking-or-equalling years. Because Medium auto-sizes this image, you’ll have to double-click to see it properly. This chart is up to date as of September 2023. Note the years (red column):

The totals

I counted:

  • Number of max temps that occurred before 1960: 39

  • Number of max temps that occurred 1960–1999: 12

  • Number of max temps that occurred since 2000: 6

  • Number of max temps since 2021: 0

Did you get it right? Were you close? If you were close, congratulations. If not, you may want to explore other blog posts to learn more about our fascinating world and its climate. Reality is often better than fantasy.

Discussion

Some people have said this is “a single data point, which can’t be used to show a trend,” but that’s not correct. This is actually longitudinal data. Every state has many weather stations, each of which records every day. If a station’s highest recorded temperature occurred in 1934, say, that doesn’t mean they stopped recording. They kept recording until at least the 1980s but didn’t see a higher number. This is a lot of data.

So if there were a trend toward higher temperatures as a result of rising CO2, it would be very unlikely that most of the highest temperatures would occur before 1960, when CO2 started to rise. Extremely unlikely. If you claim there is a trend, you would not expect this result. This is very good evidence that there is no trend.

Peak temperatures don’t tell you everything, but they tell a lot. If you keep hearing “hottest year on record,” ask questions about how they came up with that claim, because most states’ hottest years on record occurred a hundred years ago.