Continental High Temperatures

A guest post by Steven Goddard called "Are Record Temperatures Abnormal?" at Watts Up With That has a very interesting table of the record high temperatures of the continents in it. The list is:

Africa, 136F in 1922
Antarctica, 59F in 1974
Asia, 129F in 1942
Australia, 128F in 1889
Europe, 122F in 1881
North America, 134F in 1913
South America, 120F in 1905

Not a single high temperature record was set in the recent warm spell from the late 1970s through 1998. This does make it rather hard to believe that this period was as unusually hot as has widely been claimed by the catastrophic man-made global warming enthusiasts. The highest temperatures for Australia and Europe were in the 1880s. The highest temperatures for South America, North America, and Africa were between 1905 and 1922. Asia's high temperature was set in the first half of the twentieth century also in 1942. Only Antarctica had a high temperature more recent than that and it was in 1974, well before the maximum in the late twentieth century warm spell. So, such a horrible warm spell was unable to set even one all-time record high temperature on even one continent!