Yesterday, Australia experienced its hottest nationwide average temperature ever — 40.33 degrees C (104.6 degrees F). Today, the country's national weather bureau added a new color to official weather forecast maps, reflecting a need to predict temperatures higher than 52 C (125.6 F). Insert your Spinal Tap jokes and terrified flailing here.

  • Boundegar

    See, that pink on the map represents the pinkos who are trying to destroy American manufacturing with their global warming hoax.  That’s it.

    • Historybuff

      If it had been American meteorology that might have been a funny joke. Being Australian weather and maps makes me question your sense of geography.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1385382093 Brendan Byron

    The heatwave wasn’t the ONLY thing to go in the pink yesterday.

    Eyyyyy.

  • http://profiles.google.com/churba Churba S

    Oh, you Americans think warmth is your ally, but you merely adopted the heat. I was born in it, melted by it. I didn’t feel the cold until I was already a man. By then, it was nothing to me but freezing! The heat makes you sweaty, because it belongs to me.

  • weissbar

    The average maximum temperature was 40.33, not the average temperature. If it was the average temperature I suspect I would have melted in a puddle of red ooze and wobbly bits by now.

  • http://www.portadisk.com/openid/www/ident.html LeonY

    It was a toasty 40.9 at 9pm in Melbourne last week. No aircon made me very unhappy! We sat around and stared at each other waiting for the cool change

    • http://glitch.tl/ Michael Smith

      My son has a cello and we know not to leave it in the car on days like that but on the day you mention the cello was in the house and all the strings went out of calibration (completely loose) and one of them broke. I am in Inverloch now. Its nice and cool here close to the water.