The University of Washington Climate Impacts Group has built a new visualization tool for the state climatologist, which makes it easier than before to explore the whole climate record for Washington and some data for neighboring US states. The data itself is nothing new, but being able to explore it can help to get a handle on what’s going on. I rather arbitrarily picked my life to date as the range to compare, and got the sobering result that every single monitoring station has registered an increase in temperature since I was born; most statistically significant.
Of course, there’s no scientific basis for picking that particular range, but I wasn’t cherry-picking either (I’d have picked 1985-2015 if that were my goal). I just wanted dates that felt personally meaningful, and even as someone who considers myself relatively well-informed about climate change the sheer scale of the trend was breathtaking.