Essentially "it couldn't have been that hot, because that's too hot." Meanwhile they're fine with taking readings at airports as jets are flying past, or comparing cities to rural areas.

Here's the thing: Even if that reading was wrong, the people going after it are wrong too, because they're doing it for political reasons, not scientific ones.

Now, as the world warms, more experts are beginning to look critically at the record — including UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain, whose Twitter and YouTube coverage of California’s weather have made him a minor celebrity.

Kill me now.

Denton was the caretaker and foreman at the ranch between 1912 and 1920...He was also tasked with running the Weather Bureau’s station, including taking daily temperature readings.

Now, I'm certainly not going to appeal to authority, but the intro made it sound like this was some nobody, when he was literally in charge of taking official readings.

On the day Denton logged the 134-degree record, he was still relatively new to the job.

I wish they'd define "relatively." The record was in July, he'd been working at the very least (if he'd starting on December 31st, 1912) seven and a half months. And who knows what his experience was before he started working at that one station? Even if it was his first job like that, you'd think that would be enough time to learn to read a thermometer, but what do I know...?

And according to California climatologist and storm chaser William T. Reid, who has taken a decadeslong deep dive into Denton’s logs, there’s evidence in the erratically kept records that Denton may have ignored standard procedures.

Just show how his readings were wrong, please. And, again, I'm not even discounting that they might have been. But the way they're going about this is super slimy. Zero evidence, basically. Just 'he was sorta new, and the numbers were high.'

Reid explained in an email, "In the warm months leading up to July, 1913, there are a handful of instances in which the daily maximum temperature at Greenland Ranch appears too warm, by 5 to 10 degrees perhaps, compared to the maximums at the closest surrounding stations."

Was that generally the hottest station in the area generally, or no?

The anomalous maximums culminated in early July, Reid said, when Denton logged an improbable five consecutive readings of 129 or above the week he recorded the record-setting high, including 130 degrees on July 12 and 131 on July 13, as well as 134 degrees on July 10.

Not an expert, but that just seems to make his readings more believable, not less. It was hot there that week, I guess...

Christopher Burt, an Oakland-based weather historian who has worked with Reid to analyze the data, has looked at the temperatures recorded at nearby locations on July 10, 1913. Based on historical correlations, Burt believes the temperature in Death Valley on July 10 likely could not have been higher than 125 degrees.

What happened to trusting the experts? These people are second guessing the person who was alive and there at the time, and had the equipment and data in front of him. And these losers are, after the fact, just saying 'nah, don't make sense.'

The hottest place on Earth couldn't be that hot! That's an anomaly, unlike, you know, the whole hottest place on Earth thing...

“It’s virtually impossible that Death Valley hit 134” that day, said Burt, who was part of the team that decertified the 1922 Libya record. "134 is way out there, it’s way offline."

So it's the same group of people that went after other historical records...

Swain agrees. “The large-scale meteorological pattern and the overall heat of the air mass in the Southwest when the 1913 record purportedly occurred does not appear to be capable of generating such extreme temperatures in Death Valley short of a truly exceptional and highly localized event,” he wrote in an email.

Exceptional and highly localized event...such as, for example, the hottest place on Earth being extremely hot that week?