Heat records tumbled across the country last spring and summer as heat waves and warmer-than-normal temperatures blistered much of the U.S. As scientist Deke Arndt and meteorologist Dan Satterfield explain in this edition of Extreme Weather 101, those heat spikes are likely to become more commonplace as greenhouse gases heat the planet.

If you were in Paris or Madrid as June transitioned to July, you could be forgiven for thinking you had been transported to the equator, as temperatures across Western Europe soared over 100°F, toppling records during major sporting events like the Tour de France. The unusually early surge of summer heat was almost certainly affected by the overall

Since the advent of modern recordkeeping in 1880, the global average temperature has risen 1.6°F. The trend is one of the hallmarks of global warming and tightly tied with the rise in human CO2 emissions. Warming has accelerated since the first Earth Day in 1970. The global average temperature has risen by about 0.3°F per decade since then.