damianslaw
You bring this argument about the past up time and time again, I'll explain why it's not a valid one and why that statement is so poorly thought out.
First of all, I don't think anyone has ever once suggested the early days of the industrial revolution didn't contain periods of warm months or a consecutive run of warm months such as February's. Since the last ice age this was typical British climate stuff. Cold months and warm months were fairly well balanced, even during the little ice age where the balance was thrown to more colder months but the period 1730 - 1739 was exceptionally warm. This shows natural variation within the local climate. In a world that was 1.0 - 2.5 Celsius colder it would have still been plenty possible to record notable warm periods, even compared to the post 1940's average where there is clear undeniable warming. Without the warm blips those averages would be too low and would pour even more hot water on to the current christmas pudding.
The 19th Century recorded a February average of 4.0 C which is equal to the 20th century (also 4.0) but this was more than compensated for by the very chilly Autumn's and December's. Only April and June shows little difference between the 19th and 20th century's. This wasn't really the case for the other months of the 20th century and certainly not this one.
What we have now is the 30 year period for every single month is well in excess of anything in the dataset going back to 1659 and this has been the case since the late 1980's (but warming was taking place much earlier with plenty of evidence going back to the 1930's). The current warmth is unprecedented in the Earth's recent history and the gradient of warming is absolutely remarkable if not gobsmacking.
For the current warming to be happening by chance we are talking 6 sigma which is something like 0.00009 % .