VICTOR JOECKS: Las Vegas’ cool temperatures debunk global warming hysteria

If you want to know why you shouldn’t worry about a global warming apocalypse, look at Las Vegas.

On Monday, Las Vegas set a cool temperature record. It marked 291 consecutive days without reaching 100 degrees, according to the National Weather Service. The previous record of 290 days was set between September 1964 and June 1965. The sub-100 temperatures aren’t likely to last. The forecast calls for temperatures to approach 110 degrees this weekend.

This doesn’t fit the global warming narrative. The progressive left has spent decades hyperventilating that warming caused by excessive carbon emissions is going to kill us all. In 2021, President Joe Biden declared that the changing climate is “an existential threat to human existence as we know it.” Green activist Greta Thunberg once tweeted a quote from an article that read, “A top climate scientist is warning that climate change will wipe out all of humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years.”

Sounds scary. Only it didn’t happen. That tweet was from June 21, 2018. To paraphrase Monty Python, “We aren’t dead yet.” She has since deleted the tweet.

The alarmists have two go-to responses when it’s colder than they predicted. They either ignore it or claim it’s the result random weather patterns. After all, temperatures vary from year to year. Cool temperatures or heavy snowstorms are just abnormal weather events that can’t be used to disprove a broader trend.

That’s true. Yet global warming has become an unfalsifiable thesis. Data points that don’t fit the narrative are dismissed. Then Democrats and the national media, but I repeat myself, use high temperatures as indisputable evidence that we’re in the midst of a crisis. Just look at the national media’s coverage of Texas’s current heat wave.

“Climate change is causing heat waves to be more intense, longer-lasting and more likely to occur,” Axios wrote in its report on the Texas temperatures.

“Studies have shown that climate change is making heat waves both more frequent and more intense,” NBC News reported in its coverage of the Texas heat.

Sure was thoughtful of Mr. Climate Crisis to give Las Vegas a record-setting reprieve from those heat waves.

But if individual weather events can be used as evidence for global warming, then they can also be used to test the theory’s validity. You can’t have it both ways. At least if your goal is to use logic and evidence to defend your theory.

But global warming has long since gone from scientific inquiry to a vehicle useful for promoting leftist policy preferences. For instance, if fossil fuel usage is going to wipe out humanity, why do so many environmentalists oppose nuclear power? For that matter, why do they work so hard to stop lithium mining in Nevada? It’s so much easier to smear someone as a “denier” than to answer questions like that.

Most global warming alarmists aren’t interested in debating the merits of their doomsday claims or radical solutions. They wrap themselves in the veneer of scientific authority, but what they demand is blind faith. Who are you going to believe? The experts or your lying thermometer?

Victor Joecks’ column appears in the Opinion section each Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Contact him at vjoecks@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-4698. Follow @victorjoecks on Twitter.