The AP calculates the fastest-warming places in the U.S. And the winner is:

The part of the United States that is warming the fastest…

The envelope, please:

…is the Northeast, writes Seth Borenstein of The Associated Press:

Northeastern states — led by Maine and Vermont — have gotten the hottest in the last 30 years in annual temperature, gaining 2.5 degrees on average. But Southwestern states have heated up the most in the hottest months: The average New Mexico summer is 3.4 degrees warmer now than in 1984; in Texas, the dog days are 2.8 degrees hotter.

All but one of the lower 48 states have become warner since 1984, Borenstein wrote. And the average annual temperature in the 48 states has risen by 1.2 degrees.

Borenstein worked with the National Climatic Data Center to calculate the trends for the 48 states, 192 cities, and 344 smaller regions within the states, Borenstein reported. The United States "isn't warming equally," a climatologist told him. "Be careful about extrapolating from your own backyard to the globe."

The regions that warmed the most were "New York's St. Lawrence Valley, northeastern Vermont, northern Maine, the northeastern plains of New Mexico and western Vermont, all of which have warmed by more than 2.5 degrees," the AP wrote.

Borenstein does not bury us in statistics, even though he surely had more than enough to do that. He cuts right the important material in a compact story that tells us what we need to know.

-Paul Raeburn