Here’s a neat website that was linked on bookofjoe the other day: Hottest To Coldest.com ranks every capital city in the world according to its current temperature and updates the data in real time every minute or so.
As I am writing this post, just a few minutes shy of noon EDT, the hottest capital city is Kuwait City, which is presently at 111 degrees Fahrenheit at 6:55 PM local time (depending on what time you click that link, the temp will vary, obviously). The coldest capital city is presently Stanley, the capital city of the Falkland Islands (or the Malvinas, if you’re from Argentina). It’s 43 degrees Fahrenheit there right now, and their local time is the same as EDT. Of course, since it’s winter in the Southern Hemisphere, and the Falklands are pretty far south, that shouldn’t be too surprising. When I first looked at Hottest To Coldest the other day, Canberra, Australia was even colder than Stanley. Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia has also been down there at the bottom all week, which might seem odd given that it’s still summer there, but it’s 13 hours ahead of EDT, so it’s the wee hours of the morning, and I have to imagine the radiational cooling there is pretty pronounced. My friend Tony, who will be driving his daughter down to college in Washington, DC in a couple of days, can take a little comfort to learn that our nation’s capital is about 70th on the list, cooler than Caracas, but hotter than Hanoi.
The presentation of the list as a big block of text could use a little help, IMHO. And I would like to see the temperatures along with the city names, just to help put it into perspective. Altogether fascinating, though.
