See this link for a detailed discussion of how the media is misrepresenting the statistics. I wrote in this blog of how the Atlanta Journal-Constitution printed an article claiming it was no hotter than "average" by ignoring more the first two months of the heat wave, and using invalid statistical arguments to try to "prove" this.
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/07/27/281085/record-heat-wave-conservative-media/
By Joe Romm on Jul 27, 2011 at 5:31 pm
One way to tell if a nationwide heat wave is truly record-breaking is, well, to look at the total number of records that it breaks. Even better is to compare the high records with the low records, since we have very good historical data and analysis on that — and it covers the whole nation.
Steve Scolnik at Capital Climate analyzed the data from NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and found, “U.S. Summer Heat Records Continue Overwhelming Cold Records By Over 8:1.” These large ratios for the summer and the first 23 days of July are a big deal compared to, for instance, the average over the last decade of about 2-to-1 (see “Mother Nature is Just Getting Warmed Up” and below).
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