Government officials and the mainstream legacy media continuously claim that the U.S. is experiencing a "climate emergency" because temperatures are rising due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use.
But the actual climate data from NOAA tells a different story—an empirical story that CO2 has little if any impact on U.S. temperatures.
The adjacent table of data shows each state's warmest month ever, based on the actual NOAA's max monthly temperatures.
And note that the vast majority of these state maximum temperatures took place before 1955, while only 15 states have experienced a 'maximum' month record during the 21st century.
While "global" warming has taken place over the last 30 years, it does not yet rival the record-setting warming that occurred earlier in the 20th century across wide swaths of the U.S.
The table also includes a correlation measurement (R2) that measures the strength of the relationship between a state's monthly maximum temperature anomalies and the cumulative atmospheric CO2 increases.
The R2 measurements in the last column reveal an almost non-existent relationship between an increase of atmospheric CO2 and a state's maximum temperatures across 283 months (23 years + 7 months) of the 21st century.
If there was even a moderately positive relationship that suggests some causal effect between the two variables (CO2 increases and temperature anomaly increases), the R2 measurement would need to be above +0.30 and certainly not negative, as eight states have experienced.
At the bottom of the table, the same information is listed for the entire U.S. Again, one finds that over the last 23+ years, CO2's impact on our nation's maximum temperatures borders on being negligible.
And the last entry in the table is for North America (the geographical land areas of Canada, the United States and Mexico as determined by NOAA) and reveals a strong commonality with all the U.S. states—CO2 is not the strong influence on temperatures as suggested by those supporting a narrative of
In summary, there is not a single U.S. state that has a "climate emergency" or a "climate boiling" condition that is a direct result of CO2 atmospheric increases causing rising temperatures.
At least for the U.S., any warming experienced by states in the 21st century is much more likely associated with multiple well-known and powerful natural climate variations.
Additional regional and global temperature charts.
Notes: Excel used for all calculations. R2 calculation is based on calculated correlation of maximum temperatures (for each state) and atmospheric CO2 increase for all months of 21st century thru July 2023. Source for U.S. maximum monthly temperatures for each state; NOAA does not report state records for Hawaii - used the NOAA Honolulu's maximum temp records; source for Washington D.C. maximum temperatures; source for North America's monthly average temperature anomalies (no maximum temps available); and source for monthly CO2 atmospheric levels.