That's a bit of a false comparison. Most of the "coldest ever" headlines that you'll see are talking about particular locations or regions, which have extremely

That's a bit of a false comparison. Most of the "coldest ever" headlines that you'll see are talking about particular locations or regions, which have extremely high variance. If you look at enough different subsets of your data, you're bound to find both high and low extremes somewhere. But this article is talking about a global average, which is much less noisy. When you look at global average temperatures over a comparable span of time (since ~1880), every year in the last couple of decades has been pretty close to a record high. The last record low was more than a century ago. http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/ http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/