VICTOR JOECKS: As temperatures increased, Las Vegas thrived

Human activity has caused Las Vegas to warm — but not in the way you may think.

Last week, Climate Central released a report on the country’s fastest-warming cities since 1970. Ignore the folly of using a single year as a baseline. Reno and Las Vegas topped the list. Reno’s average annual temperatures have increased by 7.9 degrees. In Las Vegas, the increase was 6 degrees. That’s significantly higher than nearby cities. Sacramento, California, is up 2 degrees. Los Angeles is only up 0.1 degrees.

Climate Central blames the higher temperatures on greenhouse gas emissions. Burning fossil fuels releases additional carbon into the atmosphere. That extra carbon, the theory goes, traps heat and increases the Earth’s temperatures.

For the sake of argument, leave aside any understandable skepticism you have about this contention. Assuming it’s true shows how mistaken global warming alarmists are.

Start with this. The climate Chicken Littles claim that rising temperatures are an “existential threat,” as former President Joe Biden said in a 2023 speech.

In 1970, all of Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, had fewer than 274,000 people. After 6 degrees of warming, Las Vegas must be an inhospitable hellscape. Surely, the economy has collapsed as the population plummeted. Uninhabited homes must fill once-bustling neighborhoods.

Or you could stop believing Al Gore and look around. Clark County’s population is 2.4 million — a nearly ninefold increase. Last year, 38.5 million tourists came to town. High demand for housing has inflated home prices. Oh, and Las Vegas just hosted WrestleMania — for consecutive years. It hosted the Super Bowl in 2024 and will do so again in 2029. The A’s are coming to town, likely followed by an NBA team.

Warming wasn’t a barrier to exponential growth, let alone an existential threat.

Now, this population boom did increase Las Vegas’ temperatures. “Heat islands” are urban areas that have higher temperatures than rural areas.

“Buildings, roads and other infrastructure absorb and re-emit the sun’s heat more than natural landscapes such as forests and water bodies,” the EPA says on its website. As a result, “Daytime temperatures in urban areas are about 1–7°F higher than temperatures in outlying areas.”

Boy, that range sounds familiar. The war on grass hasn’t helped matters either.

“Car dependence plus the concrete jungle that we have is turning us into an oven,” Ben Leffel, a UNLV professor, said. As the Review-Journal reported, he wants more public transportation, instead of excessive use of personal cars.

Think about the trade-off. In exchange for dramatically reducing your quality of life and mobility, you would gain nothing. Even if you buy all the alarmism, this idea wouldn’t lower the temperature.

Just look at the data. The alarmists claim the world needs to reduce carbon emissions to lower temperatures. What they don’t mention is that America has done this already. The United States produced fewer carbon emissions in 2024 than in 1990. If the United States stopped producing any carbon emissions, global emissions would still be more than 50 percent higher than in 1990.

Buses won’t stop higher temperatures in Las Vegas. But humans can and already have successfully adapted to an ever-changing climate.