It’s 118 Degrees in This Town Today, and It’s Not Getting Any Cooler

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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It’s 118 Degrees in This Town Today, and It’s Not Getting Any Cooler

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It’s 118° Fahrenheit in Birdsville, which is located in the desert in the state of Queensland, Australia. Wildfires have been burning hundreds of miles away near Sydney. The temperature in the huge Australian city has topped 100° F, but it won’t even approach the Birdsville figure. It is routinely one of the hottest places in the world. As a matter of fact, today, it is the hottest place on earth.

The official Birdsville temperature is taken at Birdsville Airport, where there is a weather center. The airport does not get used much. The town has a population of under 150. It was established in 1882 and has never had a population of more than a few hundred people.

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It is hot, and often very hot, in Birdsville through most of the year. The average high in January and February is over 100° F. And the town gets almost no rain. In a typical month, it is less than a quarter of an inch. It usually rains fewer than two days a month. Based on climate history in Birdsville, the temperature may well creep higher in the next few days.

One reason for the high temperatures is that Birdsville is in the Simpson Desert in central Australia. Much of the region has no population at all. Scattered along its fringes, however, lie small cattle-raising settlements, many of which are supplied with water from the Great Artesian Basin.

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The high temperature in Birdsville is notable for another reason. On most days throughout the year, the hottest place on earth is Kuwait City or in parts of Iran or India. These are the hottest inhabited places on earth. Today, all 15 of the hottest places in the world are in Australia. As much of the desert heat has traveled to Sydney, among the questions is whether temperatures around the entire nation will drop. For now, the answer appears to be no.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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