I wrote a chapter of my PhD explaining why the linked PNAS paper is highly misleading (see the letter we published in PNAS in response for a summary: http://www

I wrote a chapter of my PhD explaining why the linked PNAS paper is highly misleading (see the letter we published in PNAS in response for a summary: http://www.pnas.org/content/110/7/E546.full http://www.pnas.org/content/110/7/E546.full and a somewhat extended comment including figures here: http://stochtastic.blogspot.com/2013/02/temperature-extremes-variance-or-mean.html http://stochtastic.blogspot.com/2013/02/temperature-extremes... ) TL;DR: While regional normalization makes sense in a stationary climate, the presence of trends tends to exaggerate extremes by increasing the apparent variance of the distribution. Eyeballing the data from the NYT article, it appears that the authors have continued to make the same statistical mistakes. It is unfortunate that NYT would publish this, as the field (climate science) is quite aware of the problem with the original 2012 paper.