June was the Earth’s 13th consecutive month to break a global heat record. It beat the record set last year for the hottest June on record, according to data from the Copernicus Climate Change Service of the European Union.

“We should consider this the new normal,” said Katherine Idziorek, an assistant professor in geography and community planning at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. “We need to be preparing for more heat, more often. That’s the reality.”

More than half the U.S. population — almost 175 million people — faced extreme heat on July 4, and the impacts of this new normal continued to broil the country this week.

In the Western United States, a heat dome fed wildfires, and in Houston, the country’s fourth-largest city, excessive heat threatened lives. On Thursday, five days after Hurricane Beryl made landfall in Texas, more than a million people in Houston remained without power for their air-conditioning units and medical devices.

Heat waves are part of a natural weather pattern of high-pressure systems, which cause unusually high temperatures to stagnate for a minimum of three days to more than a month. But heat waves are growing stronger and more frequent under climate change, driven by the burning of fossil fuels.