By The Numbers: The U.S.'s Warmest Year Yet [Infographic]
A PopSci interactive of the 30,854 record-breaking highs recorded across the country in 2012 In the U.S., 2012 was the warmest year since national record keeping began in 1895. From January through December, the 4,451 U.S. weather stations that have been tracking temperatures for at least 30 years measured nearly 31,000 high-temperature records but only 5,900 lows. That's the largest ratio of high to low records ever. "There is a lot of natural variability in these numbers," says Claudia Tebaldi, a senior scientist at the independent research organization Climate Central. "But it's definitely behavior that has the imprint of a warming climate." Scientists say this trend will continue. A report published last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted that the lifespan of individual high-temperature records will continue to shorten: heat records that would likely have stood for twenty years in recent times will topple after an average of...