July is usually the warmest month of the year, and this July broke records dating back to 1850 by about 0.25°C. According to Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit group in California that is one of several organizations tracking global warming, the average global temperature in July was a total of 1.54 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average. It's a seemingly small increase, but what many people around the world actually experienced was a bout of long, frequent bouts  brutal heat waves . "We're in a particularly extreme period at the top of a long-term warming trend, and the view from above is a little scary," says Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. (Jeff Tollefson)