I do understand what standard deviation is, and I do understand that it is possible that a 8.6 degrees difference would be significant. What I meant was that NOAA wouldn't be highlighting this unless it was.

Anyway, it's public data, and we can settle this pretty easily, right?

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/temp-and-precip/time-series/index.p... has the raw data in CSV form going back to 1895.

The standard deviation is 2.89 (assuming my calculations are correct)