When the book closes on the year 2012, it will go down as the warmest year in the National Climatic Data Center’s (NCDC) history for the contiguous U.S.—a history that goes back to 1895.
And quite a warm year it was, topping the old record held by 1998 by about 1°F—a sizeable margin of victory. In the chart below (Figure 1), I have plotted the entire 118 year record, including the overall average (solid red line) and the 95% confidence range about that mean (+/- two times the detrended standard deviation; dotted red lines). I have also included the linear trend over the 118 years—a value of 0.13°F/decade.
Notice that the linear is not a great measure of what has been going on climatologically. There have been several multi-decadal periods when the average U.S. temperature has been generally above (1920s-1930s; mid-1990s-present) or below (1890s-1910s; 1960s-1970s) the linear trend term—an indication that larger-scale (quasi-cyclical?) variability plays a defining role in the character of the temperature history.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/warmest-year-record-us
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