Correcting Trump

Photo from Death Valley National Park, 2013.

"You know the hottest day ever was in 1890-something, '98," Donald Trump said yesterday in a meeting with the New York Times. He seemed to have in mind the official world-record temperature that was noted at Furnace Creek, Death Valley, on July 10, 1913: 134 degrees Fahrenheit. However, as I noted in my Death Valley article, many meteorologists are inclined to doubt that measurement; no other weather station in the area recorded a temperature above 120, never mind 130, in the same period. A recent post on the Weather Underground blog, by Christopher Burt, makes a persuasive case against the 1913 report. If it were struck down — and no official decision has been made to do so — the highest temperature ever recorded would be 129.2 F, which was observed in Death Valley on June 30, 2013. The same number was recorded in Mitribah, Kuwait in July of last year. In other words, the preponderance of evidence suggests that the "hottest days ever" have occurred in the past few years, and not at the end of the nineteenth century, as Trump erroneously believes.