August 9, 2012 - Johannesburg, South Africa - People slowly came outside despite the cold wind Tuesday across South Africa, pointed their mobile phone cameras to the sky and opened their mouths to taste a rare snowfall that fell on much of the country. The snow began Tuesday morning, part of an extreme cold snap now biting into a nation still in its winter months. By mid-afternoon, officials recorded snowfall across most of South Africa. However, forecasters acknowledged snow remains so unusual that they typically aren't prepared to provide details about snowfall in the nation. The snow closed some roads and at least one high-altitude pass. The snowfall also closed several border posts in the country. As the snow fell, workers at offices in Johannesburg rushed outside. Some twirled and danced as the flakes fell. One man rushed to the top of a snow-covered hill and slid down, using a cardboard box as an improvised toboggan. Despite the cold and the snow, beggars who line traffic lights in the city continued to ask passing motorists for cash. The snow grew heavier in the afternoon in Johannesburg, covering rooftops and slicking roads. Snowflakes are a rare commodity in Johannesburg, even during winter. South African Weather Service records show it has snowed in Johannesburg on only 22 other days in the last 103 years. The last snow fell there in June 2007. In Pretoria, the country's capital, flurries filled the sky during a visit by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton. It was the first snowfall there since 1968, the weather service said. The cold weather is expected to last a few days. - Huffington Post

Johannesburg - It is probably the first time ever that snow has fallen in all nine of South Africa's provinces on the same day.

Kenosi Machepa from the SA Weather Service said this when referring to the vast cold front that brought snow to Pretoria for the first time since the late 1960s, reported Beeld.

In the Western Cape, snow fell on mountains in the Boland as well as in towns like Richmond and Touws River while snow was lying thick on the Matroosberg in Ceres.

In Johannesburg, snow was lying up to 20cm deep in some areas while Golden Gate in the Free State got the most snow in six years.

In Bethlehem, snow was up to 70cm deep and schools were closed due to the weather. There was also snow in Mpumalanga and Limpopo while light snow fell in the North West.

The weather office said the cold would continue for another day or two.

Snow flurries blew through Johannesburg on Tuesday, dusting the city in white as residents poured into the streets to watch the snowflakes fall.

"It's amazing, Merry Christmas!" said Roger Gibbs, driving through a leafy suburb where the trees were frosted in white.

Snow falls annually in the mountains of South Africa and Lesotho, which even hosts a ski resort, but the high plains around Johannesburg haven't seen snow in five years.

The snowfall swept north across Johannesburg, coating southern neighbourhoods in the early morning and then moving toward the Sandton and Pretoria.

"Amazing! Never happened in my life," said Mizundile Eseu, 23, a security guard.

Authorities urged motorists to take care on the roads, with few drivers used to travelling on snowy streets, but no accidents had been reported by midday.

Ceramics found on the coast of the Adriatic attest to a previously unknown artistic culture which flourished during the last Ice Age, thousands of years before pottery was commonly used.

One of the better-preserved items among the 36 recovered fragments seems to be the torso and foreleg of a horse or deer. Its creator deliberately minimised the number of joins in the model, perhaps to give it structural strength.

The evidence unearthed in modern-day Croatia points to the existence of a community of prehistoric artists and craftspeople who made ceramics during the last Ice Age - thousands of years before pottery became commonplace.

The finds consist of 36 fragments, most of them apparently the broken-off remnants of modelled animals. They come from a site called Vela Spila on the Adriatic coast.

The Greenland ice sheet melted at a faster rate this month than at any other time in recorded history, with virtually the entire ice sheet showing signs of thaw.

The rapid melting over just four days was captured by three satellites. It has stunned and alarmed scientists, and deepened fears about the pace and future consequences of climate change.

In a statement posted on Nasa's website on Tuesday, scientists admitted the satellite data was so striking they thought at first there had to be a mistake.

"This was so extraordinary that at first I questioned the result: was this real or was it due to a data error?" Son Nghiem of Nasa's jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena said in the release.

He consulted with several colleagues, who confirmed his findings. Dorothy Hall, who studies the surface temperature of Greenland at Nasa's space flight centre in Greenbelt, Maryland, confirmed that the area experienced unusually high temperatures in mid-July, and that there was widespread melting over the surface of the ice sheet.

Climatologists Thomas Mote, at the University of Georgia, and Marco Tedesco, of the City University of New York, also confirmed the melt recorded by the satellites.

Training sessions for major sports events are gruelling. For mere mortals they can appear to be the pastime of superheroes.

Not only are there intense hours of high-performance exercises but some sportsmen like Britain's athlete Mo Farah adopt weird and inventive methods to increase their performance.

According to the Samsung Global Blogger, Farah uses an anti-gravity device and underwater treadmill to supplement his 195km-a-week running regime.

For many, cooling down after exercise involves a gentle stretch of the calf muscles and a bending over to the left and right of the abdomen - nothing too strenuous .

But Farah spends time in ice chambers that use liquid nitrogen. This might seem weird, but taking an ice bath after training has become standard practice.

Cooling or recovery techniques used usually include more traditional methods such as massage, stretching sessions, steam baths, yoga and swimming. But many athletes now claim that plunging into a tub of ice water (about 6C) after exercise increases their rate of recovery and helps reduce muscle pain.

Rocco Meiring, a swimming coach at Pretoria University's High Performance Centre, says: "This method is used for leg-intensive sports like rugby, soccer, cricket and athletics. Ice baths are often used in combination with hot baths or saunas after an intense training session or conditioning work."

So, how does an ice bath, and the combination of cold and hot, improve the speed and quality of recovery? Is there evidence that it works?

Looking for relief from the heat over much of the Lower 48 states? Head to coastal Alaska where they are experiencing the coldest first half of July on record!

Through the first 14 days of July, the average temperature in Anchorage was 53.1 degrees factoring in daily highs and lows, which makes it the coldest first half of the month on record according to the National Weather Service in Anchorage.

Should this temperature trend continue, it could threaten the record for the coldest July ever, which occurred in 1920 and had an average temperature of 54.4 degrees.

Typically this stretch of time is the warmest of the year. Instead, temperatures in the city of Anchorage are running 5.3 degrees below average.

Somedays have even turned out colder than cities on the Arctic Coast such as Barrow. On July 12th, the high temperature topped out at 54 degrees in Anchorage, while temperatures soared to 62 in Barrow (a whooping 15 degrees above average.)

Not only has it been cool, but residents of the Alaska city haven't seen much sunlight due to overcast skies and a persistent flow off the ocean. Rainfall through the first 14 days is running slightly above normal at 120 percent. But the clouds and cool temperatures have been the bigger story.

Brutal sea ice conditions that northwest Alaska battled all winter haven't receded in parts of northern Canada. Two resupply ships are stuck waiting at the mouth of Frobisher Bay in Iqaluit because of tough ice conditions. Frobisher Bay is an inlet of the Labrador Sea.

In June, winds and currents pushed heavy ice in to the area, CBC News reported on Wednesday.

Now, two Canadian Coast Guard icebreakers are trying to punch a path through for the resupply vessels. However, the ice is so thick that it's closing in around the icebreakers before the other ships can follow.

"Thirty miles of heavy ice to get to Pike Risser channel. And from Iqaluit you can see out your window ... basically open water, but it's ice out of Pike Risser channel. Outside of that, that is where the heavy ice is," said Andy Maillet of the Coast Guard's Arctic Operations Centre.

Maillet doesn't expect the ice conditions to improve until mid-July. Rain and drizzle have made navigation even harder, cutting visibility.

Melting Leftovers of Record Winter Requires Extra Work

Anchorage, Alaska - Bulldozer crews are on the clock this Independence Day, trying to break down mountains of snow, which still tower over some parts of Anchorage after a winter of record snowfall.

At American Landscaping, along C st. in South Anchorage, crews "roll" the surface of their pile every day or so, scraping off a top layer of gravel, which can insulate the snow, slowing its melt.

"I don't know how high it is now, looks like about 80 feet," said Glenn Ball, owner of American Landscaping, as he looked up at what he estimated to be about 280,000 cubic yards of leftovers.

Ball made good money off the snow dump after Anchorage broke its annual snowfall record of 132.6 inches. Now that it's summer, he could use some extra space on his property for the soil and landscaping side of his business.

Unless you live in Seattle, you likely did not know that the National Weather Service just announced that the city endured its third coolest June on record. As much of America swelters through a heat wave, it's not surprising that the usual suspects are telling everyone that it's because of "global warming."

I have a longtime friend, Ron Marr who has a Jack Russell Terrier and in a recent commentary for Missouri Life magazine, he wrote that, "Jack doesn't believe in global warming in the least; he does not believe the recent atmospheric hellfire results from ozone holes or aerosol cans or giant leprechauns with a big magnifying glass. We share the same views on the topic and have discussed them often. Our considered opinion is that this streak of blazing nonsense stems from the fact that - to put it in scientific terms - it's summer and the sun is hot."

On July 3rd Seth Borenstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, a newswire service that has been reporting global warming lies for decades, wrote that "If you want a glimpse of some of the worst of global warming, scientists suggest taking a look at U.S. weather in recent weeks."

It's summertime, Seth! It gets hot in the summer!

It did not take long for the high priests of global warming to proclaim the current WEATHER to be CLIMATE. There's a very big difference. Weather is what is occurring now while climate is measured in terms of centuries. It's about trends and cycles.

It surely has been a hot summer thus far. Reuters reported that "more than 2,000 temperature records have been matched or broken in the past week as a brutal heat wave baked much of the United States." The announcement was made by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on July 2nd.

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi took another reporter to task for coupling the heat wave with global warming, pointing out that "The US is less than 10% of the globe" while ignoring that "Scandinavia had coldest June on record and that Australia is having a bad winter."