A Record Worth Wilting For: Death Valley Is Hotter Than ...
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
Published: December 28, 2012
FURNACE CREEK, Calif. — For Death Valley, a place that embraces its extremes, this has long been an affront: As furnace-hot as it gets here, it could not lay claim to being the hottest place on earth. That honor, as it were, has gone since 1922 to a city on the northwestern tip of Libya.
Until now. After a yearlong investigation by a team of climate scientists, the World Meteorological Organization, the climate agency of the United Nations, announced this fall that it was throwing out a reading of 136.4 degrees claimed by the city of Al Aziziyah on Sept. 13, 1922. It made official what anyone who has soldiered through a Death Valley summer afternoon here could attest to. There is no place hotter in the world. A 134-degree reading registered on July 10, 1913, at Greenland Ranch here is now the official world record.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/29/science/earth/death-valley-temperature-record-is-restored.html?hp&gwh=4919E173F5C73D07F0080451C95B397A