According to the article, over the last 12 months, the average USA temperature has risen 2.8d F over the 20th century average. I do not believe this is a representative result (at least I hope not!) and hopefully may be just a local outlier due to local N American conditions

If it had been rising uniformly at that rate due to natural processes from 1350 to 1850 at 2.8 dF/yr, that means that from the 14th century to the start of the Industrial Revolution the temperature would have gone up 1400 degrees F, clearly an unrealistic figure.

What this does suggest is that what we are seeing here is a rapid pulse in temperature, superimposed on whatever the temperature has been doing due to normal and natural long-term cycles. I personally suspect it is rougly correlated with human industrial, agricultural, and land use activity since the start of the Industrial Revolution, perhaps modified by a time lag due to buffering processes in the global climate moderation feedback system.

Perhaps this graphic from the NOAA website, concentrating on temperature anomalies relative to an arbitrary 20th century average, might give us a better look at what is happening now. You will note it suggests a roughly 1 degree CELSIUS rise in temperature over a century, a figure which greatly exceeds the normal year to year fluctuation due to "noise" in the system.

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php

You do realize, TB, that your rigid hostility to these results, and many others like them proposed by competent and sober authorities, far exceeds normal, healthy scientific skepticism on your part. The only reasonable explanation for it is that it is of purely ideological origin. I think the burden of proof is on the denialists, their political sponsors and their corporate patrons.

The satellite polar ice cover stats I frequently post here from NSIDC only corroborate these figures, in a part of the world where they are magnified.