The Hunt for Global Warming

It’s summer, which means it’s once again time to talk about global warming. It’s a heat wave in the SouthWest. I decided to take a look at historical climate data in Boulder City, NV (in the vicinity of Las Vegas):

Monthly Temperature:

Monthly Precip Totals:

It looks like the max temperature was higher 15 years ago then settled down before coming up again recently but there’s not consistent trend and there’s clearly no consistent upward trend in the graph. The precip graph shows some reduction in precipitation over the last quarter century but it’s not severe (this area is already a desert).

I’ll leave the conclusions to the reader. Above are the numbers and graphs. Did we find proof of global warming?

For those of you unfamiliar with this series of posts:

I use data from The United States Historical Climatology Network. Since there is a strong case to be made that trying to find a single, average temperature for an entire continent is a statistically impossible task I’m going to go on a bit of a trek on this blog over the next few months as I try to find some global warming. I’m looking for localized effects. Is the warming the IPCC is talking about a danger to where people actually live? Are we actually going to notice the effects locally? Those are the questions I’m trying to answer through this series.

Here are the ground rules: 1) I pick the locations pretty much at random. I’m going to try to pick more rural locations to reduce the urban heat island effect. 2) The graphs I create using the website will begin the year I was born and end the last year they have available data. I’m not interested in looking at a century of data. I’m interested to see if there is a case to be made for catastrophic warming now. Recently. Soon. In my lifetime. 3) I’m worried about being fried by the sun. So, I’m going to use the average high temperatures for the graphs. I don’t care about the lows or the means. I care about scorching hot death. 4) Even though I’m trying to avoid heavily populated locations to reduce the urban heat island effect I’m going to use the Urban Heat Adjusted data to further reduce the chance of getting a false positive. 5) Since I’m also worried about flooding/desertification I will look at the raw precipitation data as well.