Climate Central just ran this piece, which the Washington Post picked up on. They claimed the US was “overwhelmingly hot” in 2016, and temperatures have risen 1,5°F since the 19th century.

The first problem with their analysis is that the US had very little hot weather in 2016. The percentage of hot days was below average, and ranked 80th since 1895. Only 4.4% of days were over 95°F, compared with the long term average of 4.9%. Climate Central is conflating mild temperatures with hot ones.

Time of Observation Bias (TOBS) is a real problem, but is very small. TOBS is based on the idea that if you reset a min/max thermometer too close to the afternoon maximum, you will double count warm temperatures (and vice-versa if thermometer is reset in the morning.) Their claim is that during the hot 1930’s most stations reset their thermometers in the afternoon.

This is easy to test by using only the stations which did not reset their thermometers in the afternoon during the 1930’s. The pattern is almost identical to that of all stations. No warming over the past century. Note that the graph below tends to show too much warming due to morning TOBS.

http://realclimatescience.com/2016/1...ata-tampering/