Climate Alarmists in Meltdown: Peer-Reviewed Study Proves US Temperature Extremes Have Been DECLINING for 127 Years

In a bombshell finding that unravels decades of climate alarmism, a major new peer-reviewed study has exposed the inconvenient truth: extreme hot and cold temperatures across the United States have been declining for 127 years — even as atmospheric CO2 levels skyrocketed.

Published on April 18, 2026, in the journal Theoretical and Applied Climatology, the paper titled “Declines in hot and cold daily temperature extremes in the conterminous US, 1899–2025” delivers a devastating blow to the official narrative pushed by the National Climate Assessment and global warming evangelists.

The study’s authors dug deep into the raw, unadjusted daily temperature records from NOAA’s own elite United States Historical Climate Network (USHCN) — the very stations hand-picked in the 1980s for their quality and stability.

They extended the dataset back to the brutal 1899 Arctic outbreak and forward through the summer of 2025, completing records for 1,211 of the original 1,218 stations with at least 92% data completeness. No fancy homogenization tricks, no government-mandated “adjustments,” no spatial interpolation games. Just real observations from real thermometers.

The results? A clear, modest negative trend in extreme summer heat metrics — hottest daily highs, number of heatwave days, you name it — since 1899. Extreme cold events, especially since the 1990s, have also plummeted. When you add it all up, both hot and cold temperature extremes have declined across the CONUS. The climate isn’t getting more extreme. It’s getting milder.

As the abstract states plainly: “The general result is that metrics for extreme summer heat… show modest negative trends since 1899. Extreme cold temperature metrics also indicate a decline in their occurrences especially since the 1990s. In sum, instances of both hot and cold extreme metrics have declined since 1899.”

This directly contradicts the fear-mongering in the latest National Climate Assessment 5 (NCA5), which boldly claims “Climate change is increasing the frequency and severity of many extreme weather and climate events, including heatwaves.” The study takes NCA5’s own claims to task and finds them wanting — especially the assertion that heatwaves have “steadily increased” since the 1960s in “certain areas.”

The new data shows an insignificant uptick in some western regions since 1960, but overall CONUS trends are flat or negative when you look back further than the cherry-picked start date.

Dig into the details and the 1930s emerge as the real monster for heat extremes — not the 21st century. The single hottest years, the most daily record highs, the longest heatwaves — all cluster in the Dust Bowl era. The infamous 1936 heat wave alone dominated more of the country than any recent year. Meanwhile, the February 1899 cold outbreak still holds the crown for the most widespread extreme cold event in the entire record.

Even the 15-year running totals tell the story: heat records peaked in the 1925–1939 window and have never recovered to those levels. Recent 15-year periods show some western warming, sure — but nothing like the eastern and central U.S. declines that dominate the national picture. Cold extremes? They’ve been in free-fall, dropping by more than half in recent decades.

The authors don’t shy away from possible explanations. Natural variability — those chaotic atmosphere-ocean interactions — still dwarfs any greenhouse gas signal at the regional level. Urbanization around weather stations warms nighttime lows (TMin) more than daytime highs (TMax), which helps explain part of the cold decline. But the raw data, stripped of the usual bureaucratic “corrections,” shows the extremes are simply not behaving the way the climate cult demands.

One of the study’s most damning sections examines NCA5’s own appendix claims about the western U.S. seeing more 95°F days since the 1980s. The new analysis confirms some regional increases — but across the entire CONUS, days above 95°F have declined by 8.3% since 1899. Using percentile thresholds that treat every station fairly, the 1930s heat still towers over today’s “record-shattering” events.

This isn’t some fringe blog post. It’s rigorous, open-access science using the government’s own flagship climate stations — the ones NOAA selected precisely because they were supposed to be the gold standard for detecting long-term change. The stations that have been quietly neglected, with nearly half shuttered since 2000, yet the researchers painstakingly filled the gaps with nearby high-quality data.

So why does this matter? Because the entire trillion-dollar climate industrial complex — carbon taxes, green subsidies, net-zero mandates, “climate emergency” declarations — rests on the premise that extreme weather is getting worse because of you and your evil fossil fuels. This study says the data says otherwise.

The climate narrative isn’t just wrong. It’s being propped up by selective start dates, adjusted datasets, and headline-grabbing claims that crumble under scrutiny from honest, long-term observations. As the paper concludes, the magnitude of natural variability in the U.S. still swamps any detectable greenhouse gas fingerprint in these critical extreme temperature metrics.

The elites won’t like this one. Expect the usual suspects to attack the messenger rather than address the data. But the thermometers don’t lie — and for once, someone actually let them speak. 

The full study is available open access. Read it before the censors memory-hole it. The climate isn’t in crisis. The “official” narrative is.