New York Times: The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a huge 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 years 55.3 degree average demolished the previous record, set in 1998, by a full degree Fahrenheit. If that does not sound...