http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2014/08/04/death-valley-was-cooler-than-missoula-mont-on-sunday/

It doesn't really prove anything one way or the other.

But the temperature record DOES --- and the fact is --- the world is NOT warming and hasn't been for well over a decade. http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut...

And this is with the highest CO2 levels in thousands of years according to Warmists (that is not true, but that is what they say). So obviously CO2 is NOT the driving influence for global temperature and the man-made Global Warming theory is just plain WRONG.

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Oh, when I saw that I Watts blog site I was wondering how long it would take for one of you deniers to ask why it was "cold" in Death Valley.

Was it because of an intrusion of Arctic air due to the polar vortex? No.

Was it because temperatures have generally been going down in the world because the sun is dimming? No

Was it because carbon dioxide really isn't a greenhouse gas and heat has been escaping into space? No

Why was it "cold"? Because there was a flood of moist tropical air northward, and it rained! When it's cloudy and raining, it's really hard to have a 130 degree temperature. Such extensive rain events are very unusual in California in August, and particularly in Death Valley. Many other desert sites in Southern California had record cool high temperatures, also--at the same time that nearby coastal sites had record high low temperatures. That's not surprising since there was so much water vapor in the air (an important greenhouse gas), and so cloudy, that temperatures did not fall much at night. Many sites had record rainfalls, and flash flooding killed at least one person in the mountains.

The interesting question is why was the air so moist? Some coastal and inland Southern California sites had dew points as high as 75 F, more typical of south Florida than Southern California. One of the reasons is the unusually high sea surface temperatures (SSTs), which have ranged as high as 76 F off of San Diego. The unusually warm ocean is occurring off of the Baja peninsula, too, and SSTs supportive of hurricanes extend at least halfway up.

Later in the summer or early fall it would certainly be possible for Southern California to have a strong tropical storm or weak hurricane if these conditions persist. Three major hurricanes have ALREADY occurred in the Eastern Pacific this season--highly unusual for this time of year.

So in answer to your question, of course the low high temperature in Death Valley does not "prove" global warming, it certainly provides no evidence against it, either.

EDIT: By the way, this question reminds of the lyric from the beautiful Dar Williams song "February":

"February was so long, that it lasted into March"

Time to turn your calendar page!

Maybe you could explain the significance of one cold weather event, in one single location, at one specific point in time; please try to rationalise it and put it in context.

What happens when we really do put things in context? Instead of cherry-picking Death Valley we look at the entire world, and not just a single month but something like ten years?

For the ten year period from 2004 to 2013 (both years included) there were 236 low temperature records around the world, during the same period there were 2002 high temperature records.

http://www.mherrera.org/records.htm

So far this year there have been 13 low temperature records, 149 high ones.

http://www.mherrera.org/temp.htm

If global warming doesn’t exist, can you explain why there are eight times the number of high temperature records being broken as there are low temperature ones?

Should we put Death Valley in context? Not just last month but for the last 100 years: