This is the face of rapid global cooling, which will change life on our planet more quickly than anyone is yet prepared to acknowledge. All 50 states will see freezing temperatures on Tuesday and Wednesday with millions of Americans facing another bitter blast of unseasonably cold air.

A ferocious storm dumped massive piles of snow on parts of upstate New York, trapping residents in their homes and stranding motorists on roadways, as temperatures in all 50 states fell to freezing or below. Even hardened Buffalo residents were caught off-guard Tuesday as more than 4 feet fell in parts of the city. Authorities said snow totals by Wednesday afternoon could top 6 feet in the hardest-hit areas south of Buffalo, with another storm expected Thursday. The snow has gotten so bad in Western New York that Gov. Cuomo has called out the troops.

Bone-chilling nights will be followed by frosty cold days with highs struggling to reach the 20-degree mark over the regions on Monday and Tuesday. Some locations in the Central states are forecast to stay below 20 F until Wednesday afternoon.

With nasty cold fronts thrusting an icy and early winter across the continental U.S. - along with last winter described by USA Today as "one of the snowiest, coldest, most miserable on record" - climatologist John L. Casey thinks the weather pattern is here to stay for decades to come.

In fact, Casey, a former space shuttle engineer and NASA consultant, is out with the provocative book Dark Winter: How the Sun Is Causing a 30-Year Cold Spell, which warns that a radical shift in global climate is underway, and that Al Gore and other environmentalists have it completely wrong. The earth, he says, is cooling, and cooling fast.

And unless the scientific community and political leaders act soon, cold, dark days are ahead. Casey says the evidence is clear that the earth is rapidly growing colder because of diminished solar activity. He says trends indicate we could be headed for colder temperatures similar to those seen in the late 1700s and early 1800s when the sun went into a "solar minimum" - a phenomenon with significantly reduced solar activity, including solar flares and sunspots.

If he's right, that would be very bad news. Dark Winter posits that a 30-year period of cold has already begun. Frigid temperatures and the food shortages that inevitably result could lead to riots and chaos.

Looks like something out of a horror movie. Up to 5000 bats drop from trees during heatwave. http://t.co/JOGW3sQcQ3 pic.twitter.com/8RpTCIIBD7
- lorraine (@lorrainewhat) November 18, 2014

Soaring temperatures sent more than 5,000 dead bats falling to the ground in New South Wales, Australia.

Flying fox bat carcasses littered streets in the town of Casino after the temperature hit 44 degrees Celsius.

Some residents mounted a last-ditch effort to save the remaining bats by hosing them down with water.

A clear-up operation has been launched to remove the decomposing remains by the local council before the stench becomes over-powering.

Photographer Dee Hartin captured the mass deaths. She told Huffington Post UK: "What I saw when I got there was beyond belief. There were hundreds of them all over the ground everywhere I looked.

Cold temperatures and snow across the Great Lakes in November is certainly nothing out of the ordinary, but this morning, a layer of ice was visible on parts of Lake Superior in Ashland, Wis.
While this may not seem unusual given the current stretch of unseasonably cold temperatures, it is actually several weeks earlier than normal.

The first sightings of ice on Lake Superior and the Great Lakes overall usually occur during the beginning to middle of December. However, a perfect combination of last season's record ice coverage, cooler summer temperatures, and an early blast of arctic air this fall has allowed for areas of ice to form earlier than normal for the second year in a row.
Last winter featured relentless, record breaking cold leading to the second highest ice coverage on record for the Great Lakes as a whole.

Lake Superior also set a record for the longest length of time that ice was observed on the lake. In 2013, ice was first observed on Nov. 25, and it did not all melt until early June 2014.

The coldest air since last winter is set to move over the Plains and the East during the first half of the new week.
The core of the cold air will focus over the northern Plains and the Great Lakes through at least Wednesday with overnight lows dipping down into the teens, and even the single digits in some normally colder spots.

Bone-chilling nights will be followed up by frigid days with highs struggling to reach the 20-degree mark over the regions on Monday and Tuesday. Some locations are forecast to stay below 20 F until Wednesday afternoon, including Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Temperatures this low can make it dangerous for outdoors activities if you are not wearing the proper clothing.

While much of the Northeast will escape the cold on Monday, the arctic air is expected to move into the region by Tuesday.

Highs temperatures from Washington, D.C., through New York City are forecast to stay near or below freezing on Tuesday, levels that would be considered below normal even during the heart of winter.

A biting wind from the northwest will make it feel even colder with AccuWeather.com RealFeel® staying in the teens throughout the day along the I-95 corridor.
A significant lake-effect snow event will set up downwind of the Great Lakes as the arctic air blows over the comparatively warm waters of the lakes.

The liberal media machine has spent decades bulldozing anyone who tells you global warming is a sham.

They even came up with a clever little title - "deniers."

Every time a heat wave hits, every time a picture of a lone polar bear gets taken . . . the left pounds the table for environmental reform, more policy, more money to combat climate change. But how much has the world really warmed?

Their message is simple: Get on the man-made global warming bandwagon . . . or you're just ignorant.But how much has the world really warmed?

It's an important question, considering the U.S. government spends $22 billion a year to fight the global warming crisis (twice as much as it spends protecting our border).

To put that in perspective, that is $41,856 every minute going to global warming initiatives.

When alarmist climate institutes roll out papers claiming global warming is going to cause severely cold winters, then you have to wonder if they know something is up and are acting preemptively to salvage their crumbling climate science, which not long ago predicted with high confidence balmy snowless winters.

A few reports have already come out indicating this winter could be a real doozy - at least for wide parts of North America. But now we are starting to see such reports popping up for Europe as well.

Arctic air is now firmly entrenched over much of the nation's mid-section, Northwest and, finally Northeast, sending temperatures crashing to values you might expect in mid-winter in some areas.

Here are some cold notables so far:

- Burlington, Colorado, on the eastern Plains near the Kansas border, dipped to -10 Thursday, setting a new record low for the month of November.

- Casper, Wyoming, dipped to -27 at 11:59 p.m. Wednesday night, shattering their all-time November record low of -21 on Nov. 23, 1985 (records date to 1939). The temperature stayed at -27 at midnight Thursday, making it the new record low for Nov. 13 as well. Previously, the soonest Casper plunged to -27 was on Dec. 5, 1972. Casper's high of 6 on Nov. 11 was the record earliest single-digit or colder high temperature there. (On Nov. 15, 1955, the high was only -3 degrees). Wednesday, Casper only managed a high of 3 degrees!

- Denver's high of 6 on Nov. 12 was the coldest daily high so early in the season. Only three other November days had daily high temperatures colder in Denver, dating to 1872. Early Thursday morning, Denver chalked up a bone-chilling -14 degrees, easily the coldest temperature so early in the season. (Nov. 17, 1880 was the previous earliest such cold reading in Denver.)

- Livingston, Montana, dipped to -21 Wednesday, their coldest so early in the season. That said, they once dipped to -31 degrees just one day later in the calendar, on November 13, 1959.

- Riverton, Wyoming had a daytime high of 0 degrees Thursday.

- In the Southern Plains, Amarillo (21), Lubbock (27), Childress (29) and Goodland (14) all set their coldest daily high temperatures on record for so early in the season on Wednesday.

Next, we'll hit some cold highlights in both forecast highs and lows, then ask how long this will last.

Winter's first blast of snow is one thing. But 4 feet?

A neighborhood in northern Wisconsin near the Michigan state line has been hit with more than four feet of snow since Monday.

According to the National Weather Service in Duluth, Minn., as of 11:30 p.m. Thursday, 50.1 inches of snow had been dumped on Gile, which is part of Montreal, Wis., in Iron County, but has its own ZIP code and post office. It's about two hours east of Duluth.

First, Gile was hit with the Arctic blast and snowstorm that moved across much of northern Wisconsin Monday. Later, lake effect snow kept piling it on.

Jay Hengtgen, owner of Burgers Bar & Grill, the only restaurant in Gile, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Friday that his driveway has needed plowing three times a day for the past three days.

"Looking outside right now, the snow on the one side of my building is already covering half of the bottom windows. We're going up to four feet," he said. "The initial report was 12 to 18 (inches). Then it went to 18 and 24... Then it turned into lake effect and it never quit."

More than 400 protesters stuck their heads in the sand on Australia's Bondi Beach on Thursday, mocking the government's reluctance to put climate change on the agenda of a G20 summit this weekend.

Prime minister Tony Abbott's perceived failure to address climate change is all the more galling in the wake of an agreement between the United States and China on Wednesday to limit their carbon emissions, they said.

"Obama's on board, Xi Jinping's on board, everyone's on board except one man," activist Pat Norman, 28, bellowed into a megaphone on the Sydney beach.

"Tony Abbott!" the protesters shouted back.

Parents with babies, school children and working people in business suits dug holes on the beach and stuck their heads in them. The ostrich is said to stick its head in the sand in futile bid to avoid danger.

Ornithologists say the African bird does no such thing but that didn't spoil the protest.