July is the hottest month in history.

On July 31, the heat index (a measure combining temperature and relative humidity) in Bandar Mahshahr, Iran, reaches 165°F. 

A Minnesota dentist pays $55,000 to kill one of Zimbabwe’s most famous lions.

Police confirm that a "lionlike animal” is roaming Milwaukee, Wisconsin. 

Air pollution in China from burning coal kills 4,400 people a day.   

Thousands of little blue herons, roseate spoonbills, snowy egrets, and brown pelicans abandon their nests on Florida’s Seahorse Key. No one knows why.  

The World Wildlife Fund estimates that humans have wiped out half of the earth’s wild animals since 1970. 

NASA launches a six-year project to study the melting of Greenland’s ice sheets. It’s called Oceans Melting Greenland—or OMG.  

A white whale is spotted off the coast of Australia. Unlike Moby Dick, the albino is a humpback, not a sperm whale.  

Construction starts on the first U.S. offshore wind farm, near Block Island, Rhode Island.  

An enormous bloom of toxic algae stretches from Alaska to Southern California, closing fisheries and poisoning seabirds, sea lions, and other marine animals.  

Astronauts on the International Space Station eat a salad of lettuce grown entirely in space.

An EPA crew cleaning up the abandoned Red and Bonita Mine near Silverton, Colorado, inadvertently breaches an impoundment dam, unleashing 3 million gallons of toxic water into the Animas River. 

Aircraft fighting wildfires in California are hampered by civilian drones. 

Scientists find that the earth has 3.04 trillion trees, far more than the previous estimate of 400 billion. The bad news: There are 46 percent fewer trees now than at the start of human civilization.

President Barack Obama gives Shell the final go-ahead to drill for oil in Arctic waters off Alaska.  

Obama declares three new national monuments across more than 1 million acres of public land: Berryessa Snow Mountain in California, Waco Mammoth in Texas, and Basin and Range in Nevada. 

Japan’s Sendai #1 nuclear reactor is restarted, the first since all the country’s reactors were shuttered after the Fukushima Daiichi plant’s meltdowns in 2011.