California had its hottest month on record. Death Valley had world's hottest month ever

Doyle Rice | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Carr Fire chars neighborhood Drone video shows a garage door among the few things left standing in a northern California neighborhood ravaged by the Carr wildfire.

California just sweltered through its hottest month ever recorded.

Out of the 1,483 months since records began in 1895, when Grover Cleveland was president, July 2018 was the hottest of all, with an average statewide temperature of 79.7 degrees, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration said Wednesday.

This means no lifelong Californian alive has lived through a hotter month.

And notorious hot spot Death Valley led the way, with an average July temperature of 108.1 degrees. This is an all-time high temperature record for any weather station in the world, NOAA said.

The heat was a major player in the deadly fires that have had the state under siege the past few weeks. Monster fires such as the Mendocino Complex Fire, the state's biggest on record, have scorched some 1,171 square miles this year, according to Cal Fire.

UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said that much of the ferocity of the fires can be blamed on the extreme warmth fueled by climate change.

More: Battling wildfires year-round is now the norm. How did we get here?

More: Global heat, fires and floods: How much did climate change fuel that hellish July?

Another expert, Michael Wehner, a scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, told Bloomberg News that "climate change simply makes these heat waves hotter than they would have been otherwise.”

Nationally, July wasn't record hot, as it was only the 11th-hottest July on record. This was due to near- to below-average temperatures that stretched from the Great Plains into parts of the Midwest and Southeast.

Rain – and lots of it – was the big story in the East in July, leading to widespread flooding. Pennsylvania had its wettest July on record, and Maryland slogged through its second-wettest July.

For the year-to-date, both Arizona and New Mexico are seeing their warmest years on record.

Global temperature data for July will be released later this month.