By P Gosselin
Is a Warming of 1.1 Degrees C Unusual?
Symbol image, generated by Grok AI.
Commentary by Dr.-Ing. Bernd Fleischmann on the blog post “The Warmth of March 2026 in the USA”
The cause of the high temperatures around March 20, 2026, was a heat dome, the likes of which occur in the Midwestern United States every few decades. Looking at the temperatures in Phoenix, Arizona, one finds:
-
- The 105°F maximum temperature from March 19 to 21 is 5°F above previous maximums for this period, but only 1°F above the 104°F that occurred in early April 1989.
- The highest temperature ever recorded in Phoenix was 122°F during the heat dome of late June 1990.
- The warmest year in Phoenix was 1934, the first year of the Dust Bowl era. Some of the temperature records for several states that still stand today originate from this year and the following two.
- The change in measurement methods—from the previously common Stevenson screens with sluggish thermometers to today’s electronic thermometers in smaller housings—makes a difference of up to 1°C for daily maximum temperatures on sunny days with little wind.
- Finally, the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect: The population of Phoenix has increased nearly a hundredfold from the 1930s to today. This leads to a temperature increase of up to 5°C in the city center on low-wind days.
Conclusion
A heat dome is a weather phenomenon that has led to record temperatures in the Western USA multiple times before. Record temperatures in many U.S. states still date back to the period between 1934 and 1936, even though the urban heat island effect has increased significantly since then and amounts to up to 5°C for Phoenix, Arizona, for example. Media reporting on the heat in March 2026 is alarmist because it fails to mention these facts.
Dr.-Ing. Bernd Fleischmann
Klimanachrichten
Here in chilly Britain, a boost of 1.1 degrees would be welcome..!
Oh, no- the UK should spend trillions of pounds to prevent that! Even your King says that! /s
King Chucky is mentally challenged and was likely a special ed student.
What was it the poet Philip Larkin said?
“The f*ch you up, your Mum and Dad,
They don’t mean to but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had,
Plus some extra – just for you”.
Yeah, that sounds like the British royal family…
Charles is a worse eco-activist than his father was.
There was little air conditioning in Phoenix in 1934. ManBearPig says this proves it is hotter now.
Here in metro Denver we’re looking forward to brown lawns and smoky air. While the East Coast was enjoying all that snow, we had no more than two significant snowstorms from December through February, both of which left frozen stuff which barely lasted a week. I can’t remember such a winter. (The dustbowl was before my time.) Stories of such droughts in the West are not rare. (They precede the founding of the big oil companies by decades. My neighbors in Boulder are barking up the tree by suing them.)
I had to put this together theviews.org/Life%20at%20the%20Views/2026/april-11-2026-drought.html
There’s this:
Ouch!
PLEASE do not confuse the assertion with data!
Thank you for that chart.I have been waiting my whole life for some one to show 1936 temp records that my father told me about. He had never seen in his life any hot sumers like 34 and 36, and he saw a lot of hot summers. 1887 – 1975. My hottest summers were in the early 1950’s.
You should hang around WattsUpWithThat more often, That EPA chart has been slapped up here quite a few times. Here’s what Google AI Says:
Virtually all contiguous US states experienced temperatures of 100°F or higher
during the 1930s, particularly during the severe droughts and heatwaves of
1934 and 1936. By July 1934, at least 31 states recorded temperatures 100°F.
Nearly half of all US states (23 total) set their all-time record high temperatures
during that decade
Yabut, according to the Carbon Science, heat domes are worse now.
Alarmists can not admit that natural variation can be the cause of any change. Once that admission is made, CO2 driven change goes out the window without scientific evidence of CO2’s contribution. Anomalies lose their ability to predict CO2 warming. Ask yourself what would occur if the anomaly baseline was 1910 to 1940, i.e., prior to CO2 being effective.
Natural variation is an essential principle in all of reality. Without it, evolution couldn’t have happened and we wouldn’t be here.
“The cause of the high temperatures around March 20, 2026, was a heat dome”
hmmm… Isn’t that circular reasoning? To say there is/was a heat dome- what’s that mean other than it was hot? So, the hot weather caused the high temperatures? WTF?
Is there such a thing as a Cold Dome? I suppose it could cause very cold winter weather? 🙂
How about you google what a heat dome is. That way you don’t waste everyone’s time
“Is there such a thing as a Cold Dome?”
I guess you could call the cold patch over northern Canada at the same time, as a “cold dome”
Call these long-observed effects whatever we like.
Nature doesn’t give a fvck.
The jet stream will do what it has always done –
wave around from year to year.
no, no, no.. everyone knows that the wobbly jet stream never existed before mankind started using fossil fuels and enhancing the atmospheric CO2 content partly towards optimum level 😉
The more times the 30s and 40s temperatures are analyzed, the cooler that period becomes. It just won’t do to have that period warmer than today, so downward it goes.
The 30,000 wind turbines in Texas and an equivalent number strewn across the Great Plains do what?
They extract kinetic energy from the atmosphere.
What does that do?
It slows down the weather systems, and stalls high pressure systems.
This gets worse with more wind turbines. Wind energy is not free.
It is important to weather and climate which we can finally affect with wind ‘farms’.
What do they do? They are raptor and bat Cuisinart blenders.
Are people here finally realizing that the USA is not the world and that high American temperatures during the 30s does not mean the whole globe was that hot?
Actually the 30ies used to be hot everywhere.
Winter Olympics 1936 in Germany had little to no snow like Aspen 4 years before.
Australia set a retroactive(the one from 1906 was recently cancelled )all time high in 1939
and China used to have a drought from 1928-1931 and India had a drought throughout the whole decade back then.
On the other hand the global MWP officially only happened in Europe though China had an identical population increase during,and decline after it ended (+ the Anasazi being on the receiving end of that warming and wiped out in America as result of drought – living in a desert is a bit risky) ,
therefore, using your logic , it was just a regional phenomenon I guess.
“Actually the 30ies used to be hot everywhere.”
They really were not.
“Winter Olympics 1936 in Germany had little to no snow like Aspen 4 years before.”
What has that got to do with extreme heat? The US had cold winters during the 30s, it was the summers that were hot. The Winter of 1936 was the second coldest in the US.
“Australia set a retroactive(the one from 1906 was recently cancelled )all time high in 1939”
And what was it like during the rest of the 30s?
“and China used to have a drought from 1928-1931”
What were their temperatures like over that period, and more importantly over the rest of the 1930s?
“and India had a drought throughout the whole decade back then.”
Do you have a reference to that? I found this paper
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2018GL081477
So 1937-45, not during the whole decade, and most severe in 1941.
By the way, do you have a reference for this:
“Winter Olympics 1936 in Germany had little to no snow”
I’ve looked through many accounts online, and none of them mention a lack of snow. This page has lots of photos from the games, and there seems to be quite a lot of snow.
https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/photos/1936-winter-olympics-garmisch-partenkirchen
Here’s a description from 2010.
And another reference
https://www.skateguardblog.com/2016/10/the-1936-winter-olympic-games.html
8″ of snow isn’t even enough to make rocks disappear
The whole of the Arctic , using unadjusted data shows a strong peak in the 1930s,40s
Even HadCrud4 shows much warmer temperatures in the Arctic region, as do most unadjusted or non-urban-tainted measurements from the NH. !
And here is another graph, unaffected by the climate “adjustments” clearly showing that the 1940’s were far warmer in Portugal than the first decade of this century..
Also warmer around 1860 !
Seem EVERY was warmer around that 1930s,40s period… which is what we are talking about.
The temperature series from Valentia Island, Southwest Ireland, also shows the 1930’s as hotter than today.(Sorry, I don’t know how to paste pictures into my posts).
Contrary to what Bellend thinks, the 1930’s were indeed very hot globally.
There are unadjusted temperature measurements from basically the whole world showing the 1930,40s warmer than the start of this century.
Here’s a set from South Africa.
And another from South America
That was the same argument presented 30 years ago regarding the Little Ice Age…which is now accepted as a more global event.
That’s also the same argument that could be a made regarding Arctic Warming. Its only the Arctic not the whole globe.
I’m skeptical that the LIA is “accepted” as being a more global event. But the big difference between the LIA and the dust bowl, is that we have lots of instrument records for the 1930s and global reconstructions based on those. whereas for the LIA all we have is anecdotal and proxy data.
There’s a lot of room for disagreement about the effect and extent of the LIA, not so much for global temperatutes during the 1930s.
Of course that won’t stop the so called sceptics simply dismissing all global temperatures as fraudulent. But it’s a bit of a stretch to claim that every one has managed to remove all the warming in the rest of the world, but left all the heat in the US.
Have a look at the weather stations which are running since 100 years. There are too few in the Pacific and other parts of the world for a trustworthy global reconstruction.
In the middle of the Pacific is Rarotonga (Cook Islands) which had higher average temperatures in the 1940s than in the last 10 years. Is this representative of the Pacific? Maybe, maybe not.
First you say there isn’t enough data to get a trustworthy global reconstruction, then you pick a single station to suggest it was warmer in the 1940s.
Regardless, I’m not sure about your graph. Here’s mine using the ghcn Monthly data, adjusted using the Pairwise Homogeneity Algorithm. The QCF file.
It’s similar to your graph, but recent years have been warmer than the 1940s.
Lots of drought and wildfires in Australia in the 1930s:
https://knowledge.aidr.org.au/resources/bushfire-black-friday-victoria-1939/
The Victorian bushfires of 13 January 1939, known as Black Friday, were the culmination of several years’ drought in the state, following by high temperatures and strong winds. These conditions fanned several fires – some of which had been burning since early December – into a massive fire front. Fire swept over the mountain country in north-east Victoria, and along the coast in the south-west.
Why should the US have been so much hotter than the rest of the World in the 1930’s?
I thought UHI had been banned as inconvenient and unacceptable denialist lingo that may cause confusion among the climate illiterate targets of climate crisis news. They successfully canceled the term climate cycles for news and among researchers.
On top of the drought, 1934 and 1936 had help from the Sun, they were the same type of events as the European heatwaves of 2003 and 2006.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQemMt_PNwwBKNOS7GSP7gbWDmcDBJ80UJzkqDIQ75_Sctjn89VoM5MIYHQWHkpn88cMQXkKjXznM-u/pub
From a meteorological perspective, excessive hea in the SW U.S. is ALWAYS caused by a “heat dome”, which just means a deep layer of unusually warm air that causes high pressure aloft.
Very nice.
If you averaged out the warm blob over the USA with the cold blob over northern Canada.. would be just about “normal”
WEATHER EVENT !
Wow, thankyou.
Meteorology Cliff Mass of UW explained the heat on midwet coast of NA in June 2021.
As for Phoenix, I was there once, the morning I left temperature was forecast to reach +120F. (I didn’t take the job because the company couldn’t be trusted.)
OTOH, the midwet coast of North America was at freezing level this morning – was that a ‘cold dome’?
:-o)