I know there's a thread for the extreme heat in the US, but I wanted to pull more attention towards Canada, the UK and other places that are experiencing odd climate, too.

People have been preaching 2012 for a while, and at this point I'm questioning why this year is so different it seems. Why have so many records been shattered since winter?

While temperatures throughout Canada and the US don't look too bad on this map, I'm looking more towards further up North on Tuesday. (Link to 5-day maps below)

If Alberta/Saskatchewan/NWT sees as much as a 5 degree increase from the map above then surely heaps of records will become broken further up North for the month of July.

I believe the next week or two will shatter many temperature records for Canada while the South gets somewhat of a break (and hopefully rain in places that need it.)

As of the past few weeks I cannot even rely on the weather forecast as it is shifting every few hours to something entirely different than the hours beforehand. It's a total mess.

US - 4500 record highs broken

It’s not that the Midwest hasn’t been extremely hot before, and it’s not that it hasn’t been incredibly dry. But it’s unusual for a vast swath of the Midwest to be so very hot and so very dry for so very long — particularly this early in the summer. The current heat wave — which is spurring comparisons to the catastrophic heat of 1936 — is “out of whack,” meteorologist Jim Keeney said Friday in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Even on the East Coast today, temperatures are 100 or above” — basically, Keeney said, the heat wave extends from Kansas all the way to the East Coast. “It’s a good chunk of the eastern half of the country, barring the far northern states, of course. So it’s pretty intense.”

Temperature records are being broken and residents are suffering in what Keeney called a “corridor of extreme heat,” generally through Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana and into western Kentucky. Heat records are being shattered as are records for the number of days in a row the temperature has hit 100 or higher, he said. Take St. Louis, for example. The last time the city was this hot for this long was in 1936, said Keeney, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service Central Region Headquarters in Kansas City, Mo. Then, the city recorded 13 days in a row of temperatures 100 degrees Fahrenheit or over. That devastating heat wave of the mid-’30s killed thousands of people and destroyed many crops.

The culprit in the current wave is a dome of high pressure that has been hovering over the eastern part of the U.S., said NWS spokesman Pat Slattery in an interview with The Times on Friday. “It’s kicked the jet stream way to north, in some places into Canada, so there’s no way for the normal rotation of weather systems to get here into the middle of the country, which would bring us some moisture. So drought becomes more and more a major factor.”

UK - It could rain until September

BRITAIN is facing its “worst ever” summer with cold wet weather ruining family holidays and blighting the Olympics, forecasters warned last night. August is set to be a washout following a miserable July and the wettest June since records began – meaning summer is effectively over.

Gloomy forecasts suggest dire weather will continue as officials last night put Britain on flood alert after torrential downpours yesterday wreaked havoc.

As the Environment Agency warned of a “potential danger to life” with rivers swelling to breaking point in the Midlands, Yorkshire and Wales, Government forecasters were on standby to brief the Cabinet if severe floods strike.

The agency last night issued 51 flood warnings – meaning flooding is expected – and 135 alerts. Monsoon-like downpours hit 85,000 music fans at the T In The Park festival in Kinross, Scotland, and 28,000 Formula 1 spectators camping for the British Grand Prix weekend at Silverstone. Race meetings today in Nottingham and Carlisle were cancelled while play was delayed on all courts at Wimbledon – other than Centre Court.