The hottest place I have ever been is Las Vegas in August 1993 when the electronic billboards were advertising 118ºF outside and an inviting 68ºF in the casinos. Over the previous week I had driven from New Mexico with temperatures that never failed to substantially exceed 100ºF. I had to fill my hat with ice to survive.
Now I see that the media is alarmed that temperatures in the southern US have exceeded 100ºF for several days and are predicted to reach an unprecedented 114 ºF in Las Vegas. The heat was so intense that the meteorologists ran out of fluorescent red colours for their forecasts and painted their maps with cataclysmic black.
Now what I couldn’t figure out was why a normal summer day in 1993 Las Vegas was an apocalyptic summer day in thirty years later in 2023?
So I looked up the highest yearly temperatures in Las Vegas over the last 13 years:
| Max °F | Date | Max °C |
|---|---|---|
| 112 | July 22, 2022 + | 44 |
| 117 | July 10, 2021 | 47 |
| 114 | September 06, 2020 + | 46 |
| 113 | August 05, 2019 | 45 |
| 115 | July 25, 2018 | 46 |
| 117 | June 20, 2017 | 47 |
| 115 | July 28, 2016 + | 46 |
| 113 | June 27, 2015 + | 45 |
| 112 | July 23, 2014 + | 44 |
| 117 | June 30, 2013 | 47 |
| 114 | July 11, 2012 + | 46 |
| 112 | August 24, 2011 | 44 |
| 113 | July 18, 2010 + | 45 |
And it seems that Las Vegas is hot – damned hot! And then I looked up the highest yearly temperatures since 1931 and drew this graph:
And it appears that summertime Las Vegas is hot and has been hot for a long time. It even seems that it was a bit hotter way back in the 1930s, you know, that decade when only a few people owned cars and there was much less anthropogenic CO2. Since 1940 there has been no distinctive upward trend in max temperature despite all that increase of warming greenhouse gas.
In a desert town where there is less water vapour in the atmosphere one might expect to see the effects of increasing CO2 more clearly. Water vapour at 0.2% to 4% of the atmosphere is a powerful broad spectrum greenhouse gas that usually obscures the reradiation of the mere 0.04% of CO2 in the atmosphere. And yet there seems to be no observable effect of increasing CO2 on the highest temperatures in Las Vegas over almost a century.
Unprecedented!
Crank Up the Gas Stoves: Lancet Study Finds Nine Times more Deaths Due to Freezing than Heat Deaths Every Year
by Jim Hoft Jul. 28, 2023 5:30 pm37 Comments
A Lancet study revealed that cold weather is responsible for approximately 90% of the 5.1 million annual excess deaths attributed to temperature.
We could use some more heat.
Via Kanekoa.
And less people are dying from naturaly disasters and climate today than at any time in history.
Scico 
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