Oddly, the IPCC forgot to mention this in their report.

With the early arrival of freezing conditions this month, it should be no surprise that the length of the continuous summer thaw season was the shortest on record in Fairbanks

Deep Cold: Interior and Northern Alaska Weather & Climate: Short Summer Thaw Season

Moscow was hit with the first snow of the year on Wednesday, eyewitnesses in a southern district said, with forecasters predicting the current cold spell isn't going away any time soon.

"The snow was falling for five-seven minutes, it started at about 3:07 p.m.," a resident who lives close to the Yugо-Zapadnaya subway station, the southernmost stop on the Red line, told RIA Novosti. "Now the sun is out again."

Temperatures are expected to drop below freezing on Wednesday night, forecasters from the Fobos weather center told RIA Novosti. Wet snow and rain is in the forecast for Thursday.

Many cultures recalled a period of unbearable cold, which they associated with a distant mythical age of 'creation', when the sun did not yet shine or fire had not yet been obtained.

Such tales are hardly surprising for higher latitudes, such as the Viking sagas of Iceland, but present a palaeoclimatological puzzle elsewhere.

For example, the Cherokee (originally along the Tennessee), who should be quite accustomed to climatic extremes, claimed that the first fire was confined to a special tree - arguably an axis mundi - at a time of lasting cold:

'In the beginning there was no fire, and the world was cold, until the Thunders (Ani´-Hyûñ´tikwalâ´ski), who lived up in Galûn´lati, sent their lightning and put fire into the bottom of a hollow sycamore tree which grew on an island. ... This was a long time ago. ... still there was no fire, and the world was cold ...'

Eventually, mythical beings succeeded in acquiring the fire. At tropical latitudes meanwhile, the Quiché Maya (Guatemala) related that their first ancestors were overcome by circumstances most peculiar for central America:

'After that a great downpour began, which cut short the fire of the tribes. And hail fell thickly on all the tribes, and their fires were put out by the hail. Their fires didn't start up again. ... And so again the tribes arrived, again done in by the cold. Thick were the white hail, the blackening storm, and the white crystals. The cold was incalculable. They were simply overwhelmed. Because of the cold all the tribes were going along doubled over, groping along ...'

And the Bibbulmun nation (southwestern tip of Australia) referred to the 'Dreamtime' or the 'ancestral' time (Demma Goomber) as the 'Nyitting times, the cold, cold times of long ago'. As the name says, the Bibbulmun qualified this past era as one dominated by unprecedented cold - and, consequently, by a savage mode of living:

'In that far-off time Australia was not so warm and congenial as it is to-day. It was cold and bleak, and great glaciers of ice covered many of its hills and valleys. ... "the icy cold (nyitting) times of long, long ago". Now, in an icy cold country one must have fires, but there was a time when the Bibbulmun people had no fires, and they had to eat their meat raw and drink the blood of the animals they killed to warm their bodies.

The theme of a cold epoch meshes with the notion of 'primordial darkness' reported universally to have preceded the formation of the present natural environment. Another associated motif is that the embryonic earth was excessively muddy and wet, a necessary consequence of the earth's putative original submersion in primeval waters. In addition, the moist earth is often linked with the aftermath of the deluge and the first appearance of humans and the sun. Though scholars never seem to have compiled the material, let alone considered it, the literature is awash with examples. A selection follows.

193 inches ! (490 cm !) - In late September !

Mt Rainier WA

7 Day Forecast

Tonight Snow. Could be heavy at times. Low around 18. South southwest wind 11 to 13 mph. Chance of precipitation 100%. New snow accumulation of 17 to 23 inches possible.

Saturday Snow. Could be heavy at times. High near 24. Windy, with a southwest wind 16 to 26 mph increasing to 26 to 36 mph in the afternoon. Winds could gust as high as 46 mph. Chance of precipitation 100%. New snow accumulation of 37 to 43 inches possible.

Saturday Night Snow. Could be heavy at times. Low around 15. Windy, with a southwest wind around 37 mph, with gusts as high as 48 mph. Chance of precipitation 100%. New snow accumulation of 25 to 31 inches possible.

Crater Lake - Crater Lake received a record-smashing 8 inches of snow in 24 hours Tuesday into Wednesday, the National Weather Service reported.

More than one month ahead of schedule, the frosty blanket made its earliest appearance since 1986, when snow fell a week earlier on Sept. 18. Before that, the earliest appearance of a winter wonderland at Crater Lake was Sept. 24, 1948.

"It looks like there were sharply higher values of snowfall above 6,000 feet," said meteorologist Shad Keene. "Crater Lake tends to get the brunt of all the precipitation, so the chance of them exceeding a forecast is higher than in most places. It'll really come down."

At elevations 6,000 feet and below, there was anywhere from 1 to 3 inches. "The higher elevations definitely got more than we expected," Keene said.

The snowfall resulted in the closures of Crater Lake's West Rim Drive, East Rim Drive, North Entrance and Pinnacles Road Wednesday, according to the park's website. The West Entrance and South Entrance off Highway 62, Highway 62's access to the park's headquarters, and park headquarters to the Rim Village remained open.

A prominent climate scientist says the earth actually faces a global cooling crisis on the eve of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) release of its latest climate change report.

David Archibald, an Australian scientist and visiting fellow at the The Institute of World Politics (IWP) in Washington, D.C., said during an IWP presentation Wednesday that contrary to a perceived consensus among the scientific community, the planet's climate is not warming. Global temperatures have essentially remained flat in the last thirty years, he said.

While temperatures have increased by a modest 0.8 degrees Celsius in the last 150 years, that rise is unremarkable compared to previous increases in earth's history, he said. Temperature spikes have occurred for hundreds of thousands of years and were slightly higher in the Roman Empire and Medieval periods, he added, according to a Swedish study and data from ice cores in Vostok, Antarctica.

Additionally, about 80 percent of the warming that has occurred can be attributed to water vapor compared to about 10 percent for carbon dioxide, said Archibald. The IPCC's report, scheduled for release Friday, is expected to state with 95 percent certainty that greenhouse-gas emissions generated by humans are responsible for 20th century warming.

Rapid Ice Growth Over The Past Six Days, says Steven Goddard website.

Green shows ice gain since September 18. Red shows ice loss.

Also, see map showing the huge increase in western Arctic ice since this date last year.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/09/25/rapid-ice-growth-over-the-past-six-days/#comment-275941

Thanks to Ron de Haan for this link

The first day of fall looked more like the first day of winter in parts of California!

The area around the Sierra Nevada Mountains hit with snow and heavy rains.

The wet weather even causing slick road conditions and caught residents by surprise - who said they were just in t-shirts a few days ago!

Note that this super cold period from 1975 is now understood by climatologists to have been a super hot period, thanks to pioneering work done at Penn State University.

Sea ice surrounding Antarctica hit a record high in August and is on track for another record-breaking month in September. Clocking in at a stunning 7.2 million square miles (18.7 million square kilometers), last month's sea ice extent was 4.5 percent above the 1981 to 2010 average and the largest extent since record-keeping started in 1979, according to data released today from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in its monthly State of the Climate Report.

September marks the end of Antarctica's winter, and daily sea ice reports posted online at the National Snow & Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colo., suggest the growing ice pack has already smashed the all-time record ice extent set in September 2012. This year's massive sea ice reached 7.53 million square miles (19.51 million square km) on Sept. 14, 2013, the NSIDC reports.

The old record was 7.51 million square miles (19.44) million square km. The data is preliminary and the NSIDC website came back online yesterday (Sept. 16) after a three-day shutdown due to the Colorado flooding disaster.