"Global Warming," Close to Home (II)

UPDATED (02/17/08)

I wrote here about the temperature records at the weather station nearest my home. (The station is about two miles from my home -- as the crow flies.) The average temperature for 2007 has just been posted, leading me to make some further observations:

• It remains the case (as I reported before) that half of the eighteen warmest years on record (years with an average temperature more than one standard deviation above the mean for 1854-2007) occurred before 1980.

• Every year from 2000 through 2007 (but one) has been cooler than the two very hot years of 1998-99. Moreover, the trend is downward.
  

• The cumulative, five-year-average temperature peaked in 2002. That peak was only 0.54 degree higher than the previous peak, which occurred in 1935.
  

In the interval from 1935 to 2002, my city's population grew ten-fold; twenty-fold when you include the city's sprawling suburbs, of which there were none in 1935. What was in 1935 a mid-sized city had become by 2002 a top-40 metropolitan area and, thus, an urban heat island.

UPDATE: See this teaser about the UHI effect in Phoenix.