Death Valley Dethrones Impostor As Hottest Place On Earth 175
Hugh Pickens writes "Adam Nagourney reports that after a yearlong investigation a team of climate scientists announced that it is throwing out a reading of 136.4 degrees claimed by the city of Al Aziziyah, Libya on Sept. 13, 1922 making the 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch in Death Valley the official world record as the hottest place on earth. 'It's about time for science, but I think we all knew it was coming,' says Randy Banis. 'You don't underestimate Death Valley. Most of us enthusiasts are proud that the extremes that we have known about at Death Valley are indeed the most harsh on earth.' The final report by 13 climatologists appointed by the World Meteorological Organization, the climate agency of the United Nations, found five reasons to disqualify the Libya claim, including questionable instruments, an inexperienced observer who made the reading, and the fact that the reading was anomalous for that region and in the context of other temperatures reported in Libya that day. 'The more we looked at it, the more obvious it appeared to be an error,' says Christopher C. Burt, a meteorologist with Weather Underground who started the debate in a blog post in 2010."
Conversion to Celsius (Score:5, Informative)
(courtesy of the program in my sig's link).
Re:Would it really kill the editors to put degrees (Score:5, Informative)
Or even degrees C, which is what scientists use...
Actually, the SI unit of temperature is the Kelvin.
Re:What if... (Score:5, Informative)
Why not switching to celcius? Except for the US and Jamaica, the whole world has... http://i.imgur.com/ucOQh.jpg [imgur.com]
Liberia, Myanmar, and the U.S. actually [wikipedia.org]. Jamaica uses Celcius for temperature (definitely when I was there in the 1980s and 1990s).
Re:What if... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What if... (Score:5, Informative)
Try reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
It goes over what how and why Fahrenheit set his temperature scale the way he did, and you know what, the human feelings had nothing to do with it, though the temperature of human blood was used for part of it. I find that kind of creepy, but a lot of people were obsessed about that kind of stuff in the early 1700s.
So again, Fahrenheit isn't based on what a human might think is hot or cold, it's based on some arbitrary points and scaling by it's creator. For that matter, so is the Celsius scale, but in a lesser extent because it based the whole thing on a consistent set of arbitrary stuff. (The Freezing and boiling of water broken into 100 degrees.)