Many one-day high temperature records were set in the 1930s in the United States. There is no doubt that there was very hot weather during that time in the central US, and a lot of that can be linked to land use changes caused by misuse of farmland as well as some shifts in ocean currents that enhanced the warming during that time. Yale Climate Connections has an excellent discussion of the 1930s’ records and what contributed to them.
The damage to land caused by plowing up the entire prairie helped lead to the hot conditions and drying winds that helped create conditions for dust storms in the Dust Bowl era and certainly contributed to the unusually warm conditions in that decade. This is often used to claim that global warming is not occurring. But other parts of the continent and the world were not hotter during this time, so it is likely that human land use changed contributed to the records set during the Dust Bowl. Changes in how land is used for agriculture, cities, and tree production have all contributed to changes in temperature that we have seen over time in addition to natural variability in temperatures caused by internal variations in the earth’s climate like El Nino and La Nina.
