Las Vegas temperatures are in the news around the country, although I don’t know why. Those of us who live here in the summer know that it’s hot, and what’s more, we expect it to be so. The funny thing for us while most of you make a mountain out of this molehill is the realization that we get that hot every year. What’s abnormal in my experience is that it’s three weeks earlier than previously, and while annoying, it’s not necessarily odd. I have no idea why it’s newsworthy that the desert is hot.
Mostly, I think this is media hype, potentially driven towards assisting the tripe known as “global warming”. The fact that we didn’t break the record for Saturday means that this has happened before. This means it will happen again. In fact, rather than thinking about breaking records, we should think about the notion that fewer annual records are broken now than in say 1890 when, after only a decade or so of records, an off year could easily skew things. Add to that recent articles about solar activity being different than expected or how the sun is responsible for warming the earth, and you enter the realm of Captain Obvious. Thank you for that duh moment.
The summer temperatures really revolve around water. Take Europe for example. Parts of Europe are so wet that they are still cold, and some of them may not even have a summer due to the extended winter precipitation. Contrarily, Las Vegas is running behind on its annual meager precipitation, and so we have higher temperatures earlier. In fact, I would like to see if the hottest years and if the earliest onset of high temperatures correlates with drought years, because I have a theory.
Most of the temperature changes on earth are modulated by water vapor. Water molecules absorb 4.184 calories/g, and you get more molecules per gram than many other more massive substances, and so it means that most of the heat absorbed on earth is absorbed and released by water. In other parts of the country, when the temperatures rise, water evaporates and raises the humidity. The water vapor modulates the temperatures and keeps them from reaching 117F like they predicted in Las Vegas or 129F like predicted in Death Valley, which has 1% of our total rainfall annually. Since the desert southwest saw very little precipitation this year, there is very little to modulate the heat, and our temperatures may be hotter longer than normal.
On the other hand, it’s possible that this is a shift in when the high temperatures occur. If the desert cools down three weeks earlier than normal, will the news register and realize that? If we manage to get a significant amount of regular albeit small thunderstorms, it could drop the temperatures and keep us in the mid to high 90s, which is where most of the rest of the nation sits in July. Besides, tomorrow is the first of July, which is typically our hottest month. So, is this really newsworthy, or is it only news in the moment of the heat?
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