The latest temperature numbers from NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say the first six months of 2016 were the hottest on record around the planet. Let's look at June. Scientists took temperatures from around the world and got a June average. What they found was a world that was 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the average June in the 20th Century. How about January? Hottest ever. Same with February, March, April and May. Every month in 2016 has been warmer than ever, at least since people started keeping reliable records — that was 1880. How much warmer is 2016 so far? Overall, this year has been almost two degrees warmer than what people experienced in the 20th Century. Now, you may remember, last year broke the record for the hottest year ever globally. But Gavin Schmidt, climate scientist and director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says that "2016 has really has blown that out of the water." Schmidt has calculated the chance that the rest of this year will continue on its record pace, based on the first six months. "It indicates that we have roughly a 99 percent chance of a new record in 2016," he says. About 70 percent of Earth is covered by clouds at any given moment. Their interaction with climate isn't easy to study, scientists say; these shape-shifters move quickly. A Warming World Means Less Water, With Economic Consequences. Now, a couple of degrees warmer overall may not sound like much; it changes more than that in a day.

At the Planet Under Pressure conference in London, Diana Liverman and Will Steffen present something of a contrasting couple.

The two professors have been working together on a State of the Planet report, which has involved trawling through numerous reports and scientific papers. At the end of it all, the message of one appears somewhat optimistic, the other fundamentally pessimistic. They agree that changes to the world since about 1950 have been startling - rapid spread of the human population, accelerating exploitation of forests and marine resources, surging economic growth in successive waves across the world, and so on. This radical reshaping of the natural world by a single species is certainly unprecedented in Earth history, which a few years back led to scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer coining a special name for our epoch - the Anthropocene.