Thanks, this is a well written and accessible article! To other commenters: Of course, there wouldn’t be a straight line but rather the curve would flatten out

Thanks, this is a well written and accessible article! To other commenters: Of course, there wouldn’t be a straight line but rather the curve would flatten out the longer the random sampling would take place. This is due to the fact that it gets increasingly unlikely that a random „temperature“ would be higher than any drawn before. As the paper explains the ratio between the number of maxima and the number of minima decays in a 1/n law if there is no underlying temperature trend and approach 1:1. What is observed is that the ratio between maximum and minimum temperatures indeed approached this limit until the 1970s but since then increased to almost 2:1 — at least for the US. Simulations suggest the number to increase up to 100:1 by the end of the 21st century. However, this would not so much be due to ever increasing extreme high temperatures but due to a decreasing number of extreme temperature lows.