It’s Official: 2012 Was Hottest Year Ever in U.S.

[spanone]

The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States.

How hot was it? The temperature differences between years are usually measured in fractions of a degree, but last year blew away the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit.

If that does not sound sufficiently impressive, consider that 34,008 new daily high records were set at weather stations across the country, compared with only 6,664 new record lows, according to a count maintained by the Weather Channel meteorologist Guy Walton, using federal temperature records.

That ratio, which was roughly in balance as recently as the 1970s, has been out of whack for decades as the country has warmed, but never by as much as it was last year.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/09/science/earth/2012-was-hottest-year-ever-in-us.html?ref=global-home&_r=0&pagewanted=print

[Champion Jack]

1. Yeeee Hawww!!!!! We're Number One! We're Number One! We're Number One!

[JaneyVee]

2. This winter sucks. I'm a fan of occasional snow days. ZERO here in NYC so far. Tomorrow 52 degrees.

[malaise]

3. Jeff Masters has been documenting this

Frightening

[longship]

4. Forecasted high for Sat 1/12/2013 is 50F

That's in rural west Michigan, 50 miles N of Grand Rapids. I don't know if that would set a record, but it is certainly extraordinarily warm for January, a month usually with substantial number of days of sub-zero temperatures (Fahrenheit). So far... None.

Last year, IIRC, it was not this warm.

We've had a few snow days of an inch or so, but no lake effect events or anything remotely resembling normal snow accumulations.

Amazing!