Well, looking at the map, the red dot isn't big.
It's not easy to evaluate average temperature. I went here:
and here:
Southern Regional Climate Center -- Texas Summary January 2008
According to the latter, for Houston-Bush airport the average high was 62, the average low was 42, so the average temperature was 52 -- which is exactly normal. Dividing the averages from the other site gives an average temperature of 51.75 (this is all Fahrenheit, of course).
But that's not the way that the climate monitors do it. They quality control the data and then average it over an entire area (5x5 degrees, maybe?), so hopefully they combine several averages to get a better picture of the region. From the looks of it, the region was just barely above normal -- see the tiny blue dot corresponding to Alabama, and just to the west the small red dot corresponding to Arkansas/far eastern Texas? Those are both smaller than the 1 C dot size. So, given what the report says and what the dots seem to indicate, it looks like roughly general agreement at the precision possible from these representations.
By doing that, you get get any result you want, why are so determined to shoot down every thread out of hand?
If I told you it was raining would you just sit there under your umbrella and complain how hot and dry it was?