We had a pretty cold winter but much of the U.S. broke heat records

I still had 16 inches of snow in my yard last week (it’s mostly gone now) so it seems like it was a cold, harsh winter. Not so, reports Scientific American in this story.

Nowhere in the U.S. had a record cold winter this year. Nowhere even came close.What did set records was heat. The western half of the country spent the winter baking—nine states had their hottest winter ever and five their second-hottest—which worsened drought conditions and has raised the risks of damaging wildfires come spring and summer. So much of the country was so warm that despite the cold in parts of the east, it was the second-warmest winter on record for the contiguous U.S. in the past 131 years.