Global Warming: Los Angeles Never Reached 70º in February for First Time

Downtown Los Angeles, California, failed to reach 70º Fahrenheit (21º Celsius) once in the entire month of February, the first time that has happened since temperature records began, 132 years ago.

The Los Angeles Times reports (original links):

For the first time since forecasters began recording data — at least 132 years — the mercury did not reach 70 degrees in downtown Los Angeles for the entire month of February.

The average high for the month was 61 degrees, significantly lower than the historical average of 68 for February.That makes it the eighth-coldest February on record, said Ryan Kittell, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard.

…

It’s a big change for Southern California, where temperatures having been rising to record levels in recent years along with a prolonged drought. Weather experts said the chilly February doesn’t signal a larger change in some of those trends.

The cold month — the city’s coldest in nearly 60 years — also brought snow to urban Los Angeles for the first time in several years, though it failed to accumulate.

Though the cold month runs against a warming trend, the Times cites experts who say it is the result, broadly, of climate change driven by a rise in average global surface temperatures, which is changing weather patterns.

Other regions of the country also experienced extreme cold earlier this year, with a polar vortex bringing temperatures so cold to Chicago that boiling water froze immediately on contact with the outside air, and clouds of steam rose off Lake Michigan because the lake was so much warmer than the ambient air temperature.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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