Let me say two things up front. 1. The first 10 weeks of the summer of 2012 were brutally hot in some parts of the US. For these areas it was hotter than seen in many decades. 2. Extra greenhouse gases should warm the climate. We really don’t know how much, but the magnitude is more than zero, and likely well below the average climate model estimate.
Now to the issue at hand. The recent claims that July 2012 and Jan-Jul 2012 were the hottest ever in the conterminous US (USA48) are based on one specific way to look at the US temperature data. NOAA, who made the announcement, utilized the mean temperature or TMean (i.e. (TMax + TMin)/2) taken from station records after adjustments for a variety of discontinuities were applied. In other words, the average of the daily high and daily low temperatures is the metric of choice for these kinds of announcements.
Unfortunately, TMean is akin to averaging apples and oranges to come up with a rather uninformative fruit. TMax represents the temperature of a well-mixed lower tropospheric layer, especially in summer. TMin, on the other hand, is mostly a measurement in a shallow layer that is easily subjected to deceptive warming as humans develop the surface around the stations.
