Australia's Year in Review: Hottest, Hottest, Hottest...

2013 has been a year filled with temperature extremes in Australia.

2013 has been a year filled with temperature extremes in Australia.

"We're smashing the records," Andy Pitman, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science at the University of NSW, told the Sydney Morning Herald. "We're not tinkering away at them, they're being absolutely blitzed."

Following the release of data showing that summer 2013 was the country's hottest on record, Pitman said that "the evidence is definitive that extremes are changing over Australia as a consequence of global warming."

With continued global warming, the kind of records Australia experienced in 2013 are likely to be the new normal.

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