“I think he read on the wrong side of the [thermometer] scale, and so was off by five degrees of Celsius. If you adjust for that, there was no 136-degree Fahrenheit temperature at El Azizia, Libya, in September 1922. Based on some really involved detective work, [a committee of experts] decided that this reading simply is not valid. It’s not the world’s hottest temperature.”
–Randall Cerveny, Arizona State University, one of the co-authors of the BAMS article published on-line today, speaking in this video available on Vimeo.