A map of significant climate events for the United States in June looks almost apocalyptic: hellish heat, ferocious fires and severe storms leaving people injured, homeless and even dead.

That followed a warm winter and early season droughts. News came Monday that the mainland United States experienced its warmest 12 months since the dawn of record-keeping in 1895.

And on Tuesday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) released a report calling 2011 a year of extreme weather.

Remember Hurricane Irene? Or the floods in Thailand and southern China and the deadly drought in the Horn of Africa? Heavy rains in Brazil caused massive landslides and much of Europe suffered through a sweltering heatwave.

It's tempting to simplify things and blame it all on global warming.

After all, nine of the top 10 warmest years globally have occurred since 2000, according to NOAA.

But weather can be complicated.

The real challenge is figuring out whether a particular storm or flood was due to climate change or natural variables, said Chris Field, founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology.

The NOAA report, for instance, noted some events that were exacerbated by other factors. However, climate change increases global risks, Field said.

"As we change the climate, we're shifting the odds for extreme weather," he said.

It's sort of like upping your chances of a car accident if you're speeding.

The four classes of extremes -- high heat, heavy precipitation and floods, duration and intensity of droughts and extremes related to higher sea levels -- have changed in the last 50 years, Field said.

"Increasingly, we are loading the dice towards these very damaging kinds of extremes," he said.

But that's not to say every weather event is related to warming temperatures.

Southern Greenland, northern Russia, and the eastern two-thirds of North America have felt the greatest warmth in 2012, but many places -- Alaska, Mongolia and most of Australia -- have been cool anomalies.

The men's final at the Wimbledon tennis tournament Sunday was stopped briefly for rain. Rain, in Britain? Although it has a reputation for sogginess, it's been cooler and wetter than normal for the last few months in the British isles.

America's northwest has also escaped the heat. The state of Washington just marked its seventh coolest June ever.

"When you've got a planet that's nearest warmest levels on record, that doesn't mean every part of the world is going to be the warmest ever," said Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground.

"The U.S. has been unlucky enough to be in that sort of pattern," he said.

Jake Crouch, a climate scientist at the National Climatic Data Center, said weather patterns -- including the jet stream or the ocean-atmosphere systems in the Pacific known as El Niño and La Niña -- have a great effect on weather.