NASA / NOAA

This file NOAA's GOES-13 weather satellite image shows the storm system associated with Superstorm Sandy covering the northeastern United States before landfall.

Six months after Superstorm Sandy killed dozens of people and caused an estimated $50 billion in damage on the East Coast, a majority — 58 percent — of Americans see a connection between recent changes in the weather and global climate change, according to a new report.

"People are beginning to recognize a pattern of extreme weather across the country and are themselves saying 'Aha, I wonder if climate change has something to do with that,'" Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which released the report today, told NBC News.

About half the country, he added, believes climate change is affecting specific extreme weather events. For example 50 percent linked climate change to the record warmth in 2012, 49 percent to the ongoing drought in the Midwest and Great Plains, 46 percent to Superstorm Sandy, and 42 percent to Superstorm Nemo.

Climate scientists are typically careful not to draw too close of an association between climate change and the day-to-day weather, notes Leiserowitz. The standard talking point is that no single weather event is caused by climate change. Still, climate change may be making the usual weather worse.

"The report provides good evidence for why it is we rely on science rather than public opinion on such matters," Roger Pielke Jr., from the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, said in an email to NBC News. Pielke was not involved with the Yale survey, but has written extensively on climate change policy.

"The attribution of changes in climate on extremes is a difficult and thorny scientific puzzle requiring long-term data," he added. "Unfortunately, the human experience — in one place at a time and over a generation — is not a solid basis for such attribution."

In recent years, however, climate science has evolved to the point where some researchers are beginning to see the fingerprint of climate change on individual heat waves, droughts, hurricanes, and other storms.

Read: Blame blistering heat waves on global warming, study says

These so-called attribution studies calculate the likelihood that events such as the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the drought in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 could have occurred in the absence of climate change. 

The answer is "very, very small ... so that basic line has begun to shift even among the climate science community," Leiserowitz said.

The American people, he added, "are not empty vessels waiting to be told to think about these issues by scientists or journalists, they are actively interpreting their own experience and what we are seeing in our data is that many Americans are now connecting the dots."

The connections the public is drawing between extreme weather events and climate change are consistent with the climate science, Leiserowitz said. While climate change doesn't necessarily cause the weather events, adding greenhouse gases to the Earth's weather system has an effect similar to giving steroids to a baseball player: Harder hits. It juices the system, he said.

And the picture the connected dots present shows climate change making life harder — about two out of three Americans said the weather has been "worse" over the past couple years, which is up 12 percentage points from 2012. Only 11 percent said the weather has gotten better, down 16 points.

In addition, just over half believe extreme weather will cause a natural disaster in their community in the next year.

That said, only one in three Americans are actually prepared for an extreme weather event, highlighting the need for people to develop an emergency plan and kit and get "ready for the unknown event that is going to happen in your lifetime at some point," Leiserowitz said.

The survey is based on interviews with 1,045 adults between April 8 and 15 with a margin of error of +/- 3 percentage points.

John Roach is a contributing writer for NBC News. To learn more about him, visit his website. 

If you found yourself bundling up in scarves, hats, and long underwear less than usual last year, you weren't alone: 2012 was the warmest year on record in the contiguous United States, according to scientists with The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The average temperature for 2012 was 55.3 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.2 degrees above normal and a full degree higher than the previous warmest year recorded -- 1998 -- NOAA said in its report Tuesday. All 48 states in the contiguous U.S. had above-average annual temperatures last year, including 19 that broke annual records, from Connecticut through Utah.

“We’re taking quite a large step,” said Jake Crouch, a climate scientist from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, which has recorded temperatures in the contiguous U.S. for the past 118 years.

It was also a historic year for "extreme" weather, scientists with the federal agency said. With 11 disasters that surpassed $1 billion in losses, including Superstorm Sandy, Hurricane Isaac, and tornadoes across the Great Plains, Texas, and the Southeast and Ohio Valley, NOAA said 2012 was second only to 1998 in the agency's "extreme" weather index.

A long-term warming trend for the U.S., combined with drought and a northerly jet stream, led to the record heat, explained Crouch. 

"During the winter season, the jet stream tended to stay further north of the U.S.-Canadian border, so that limited colder outbreaks in the country. It also limited precipitation. So that led to a warm and dry winter season, and that persisted through the spring," he said. 

Matt Rourke / AP file

People play in water from an open fire hydrant during the afternoon heat on July 18, 2012, in Philadelphia. July was the hottest month ever on record in the contiguous U.S.

"That warm and dry spring and winter laid the groundwork for the drought we had this summer... . When we have drought, it tends to drive daytime temperatures upward."

The unprecedented warm weather wasn't contained to the United States.

A corresponding rise in global temperatures prompted the World Meteorological Organization to call the rate at which the Arctic sea ice was melting "alarming" in its Nov. 28, 2012, report.

“The extent of Arctic sea ice reached a new record low. The alarming rate of its melt this year highlighted the far-reaching changes taking place on Earth’s oceans and biosphere. Climate change is taking place before our eyes and will continue to do so as a result of the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, which have risen constantly and again reached new records,” World Meteorological Organization Secretary-General Michel Jarraud said.

Each year since 2001 has been among the warmest on record worldwide, with 2012 likely to "be no exception despite the cooling influence of La Niña early in the year," the report added.

'Horrible' sea level rise of more than 3 feet plausible by 2100, experts say 

Watch NBC's special coverage of the 2012 drought 

'Wake-up call': Chicago set to break 73-year-old snowless record

NOAA expects to have global data for 2012 sometime in the coming weeks, but Crouch said scientists already know with certainty "it's going to be in the top ten" warmest years ever.

Adding to the extremes: 2012 was the driest year on record for the U.S., with 26.57 inches of average precipitation -- 2.57 inches below average. Those dry conditions created an ideal environment for wildfires in the West, which charred 9.2 million acres -- the third highest amount ever recorded, NOAA said Tuesday.

Other notable climate activity from 2012:

• Snowpack totals across the Central and Southern Rockies were less than half normal.
• July was the hottest month ever on record in the contiguous U.S.
• Tornado activity was concentrated toward the beginning of the season, with large outbreaks in March and April in the Ohio Valley and Central Plains, but the final 2012 tornado count will likely be less than 1,000 -- the least since 2002. "The factors behind that are kind of related to what was going on with the drought. We didn't have these large storm systems moving through the country, so that limited precipitation, and that also limited severe weather outbreaks," Crouch said. What made this year so high on the extreme weather index were cyclones, hurricanes, and the heat, he said.
• Alaska was cooler and slightly wetter than average, and had a record-cold January. "Their January temperatures were 14 degrees below average. Many locations in Alaska had temperatures 30 degrees below zero," Crouch said, adding that Anchorage, Alaska, set a new snow record.
• Hawaii experienced growing drought conditions, with 47.4 percent of the state experiencing moderate-to-exceptional drought at the beginning of 2012 and 63.3 percent at the end of the year. Alaska and Hawaii were not included in the bulk of NOAA's 2012 report because of terrain issues, and because scientists don't have records dating back as far as states in the contiguous U.S.

While NOAA made no meteorological forecasts for 2013, Crouch said the drought was going to continue to be an issue.

"The drought got a lot of attention this summer when it was having impacts on agriculture. More than 60 percent of the country is still in drought," he said. "And if things don't change, the drought is going to continue to be a big story in 2013."

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