With the start of the ski season in Southern Africa, ski areas are open on six continents simultaneously, as of this weekend.

This is partly thanks to the fact that resorts will open for their winter or summer ski seasons on five continents this weekend.

Fresh snow has also fallen or is reported to be due to fall over the weekend in the Alps, Western North America, Africa, Australia, New Zealand and south America, so it's a snowy June picture on ski slopes worldwide.

About half a dozen ski areas are still operating in each of Europe and North America (with Val d'Isere and Whistler Blackcomb due to re-open for summer glacier skiing this weekend and Mammoth pictured still open since last season) and the Gassan spring and summer ski area in Japan, Asia is also open in the northern hemisphere.

With the Southern Hemisphere winter getting underway we need to look back at trends to see the future of the coming year. David Archibald has today given the most up to date information on our Sun entering a grand solar minimum and the State of the Sun, now with the past 5 winters under our belts we can look for trends. I present to you the trend of a cooling Southern Hemisphere.

In fact it may be standing at its greatest extent in at least 97 years. Al Gore predicted that the Arctic ice cap could completely disappear by 2014.

However, new data released by NASA reveals that the Earth's polar ice caps have not receded at all since satellite measurements began in 1979.

Considering that the late 1970s marked the end of a 30-year cooling trend, the polar ice caps were quite likely more extensive at that time than they had been since at least the 1920s.

This indicates that not only is polar ice not receding, it is now quite possibly at its greatest extent in at least 97 years.

Thanks to Dale for this link

As of May 15, sea ice in the Barents Sea was growing like crazy. "Something surprising is happening with Arctic ice," wrote Ron Clutz. "It is May and ice should be melting, but instead it is growing and in the unlikely place of Barents Sea." "In recent days 2017 NH ice extents have grown way above average." The ice is refusing to leave Newfoundland, says Clutz. And instead of backing down in the Barents Sea, it is increasing. See map showing ice growth.

Did you think the first day of winter felt a little nippy? Well, if you were in Adelaide it wasn't all in your head because the city has shivered through its coldest start to the season with the temperature dropping to just 2.9 degrees Celsius.

Duty forecaster Paul Bierman confirmed the city had its equal coldest June 1 on record, a temperature not seen since 1943.

"The minimum temperature at Kent Town got down to 2.9 degrees at 6:44am this morning. It has already started to warm up slightly, we're up to 3.3 degrees," he said just before 8:00am.

He said a cold front that moved across the state earlier in the week combined with overnight light winds and clear skies to produce the chilly morning.

"[We're going to have] very cold mornings right through until at least next Sunday ... around 3 or 4C," Mr Bierman said.

There has been a steady progression of events with unusual rains or snows in record amounts which are out of season from Asia to North America. Now there is coldest start to winter in Adelaide Australia in the last 103 years , June skiing in Vermont and snow still falls in Idaho. The progression of unusual events is caused by increasing cosmic rays, which will continue to increase through solar cycle 25 and so shall our increasingly strange weather.

A cursory review of articles about the upper atmosphere reveals many theories about the role of CO2 on temperatures aloft. By "Upper Atmosphere" we mean the region above the surface and below 100,000 feet. Actually, in this article, we will only concern ourselves with the region from 850 millibars to 100 millibars, which is about 5,000 feet to 55,000 feet.

In the early days of Global Warming, the theories predicted that the upper atmosphere would heat due to increases in CO2. Well, that didn't happen. One recent article by NASA says that the Thermosphere (above 100,000 ft) has cooled in recent years due to decreased solar activity and a reduction in ultraviolet light. That certainly seems reasonable. Another article stated that if the lower atmosphere warms, the upper atmosphere must cool, which makes no sense to me.

Other articles posit that as CO2 increases the level at which radiation escapes to space also increases and the upper atmosphere warms. That also made no sense to me.

I decided to take a look at temperatures aloft and reasoned that the difference between day and night temperatures in the upper atmosphere might reveal whether the nighttime atmosphere is cooling faster or slower than in previous years. If cooling slower the temperature curves at 00z and 12z would tend to converge and if cooling faster the curves would diverge. Simple, right?

If the blathering blowhards of the dinosaur media and the Chicken Littles of the Twitterverse are to be believed, the world has officially come to an end. And in a way, maybe it has. Not "the" world, of course, but their world.


That's because, as you will no doubt have heard by now, Trump just announced that the US will be pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.

"I am fighting every day for the great people of this country," Trump boasted in his Rose Garden press conference announcing his decision on the agreement, adopted in Paris in December 2015. "Therefore, in order to fulfill my solemn duty to protect America and its citizens, the United States will withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord..."

...If only he had stopped there. However, after a brief applause break greeting the announcement of the withdrawal, the Dissembler-in-Chief completed the sentence thusly: "but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris Accord or a really entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States, its businesses, its workers, its people, its taxpayers." And then, just to make sure he added enough political hogwash to confuse everyone, he pressed on: "So we're getting out. But we will start to negotiate, and we will see if we can make a deal that's fair. And if we can, that's great. And if we can't, that's fine."

Ok, then. So the US is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement not because it is the leading edge of the $100 trillion carbon swindle wedge. Not because it is based on the fake science of fundamentally flawed models with fundamentally incorrect inputs. Not because it brings us one step closer to the Edmund Rothschild-articulated vision of a "global conservation bank" to steward over the world economy or the century-old technocratic dream of an energy-based economy where people will be assigned "carbon credits" and forced to ration their activities in response to the dictates of a de facto world government. No, not for these reasons, but because the "deal" wasn't "fair" for "American workers?" And the Trump Administration is going to immediately begin negotiations to re-enter the agreement?

Sigh.

Campers hoping to pitch a tent in Pinware River and Pistolet Bay provincial parks will have to wait a bit longer because the sites are inaccessible due to snow, with drifts as high as 20 feet in some places.

"It was impossible [to open this weekend] ... This is the first time I've ever seen this much snow," said Les Peddle, who has worked at the Pinware River site for 20 years.

"We have a building, an activity centre, in the day use area ... right now, the snow is still not down to the top of the door."

Pinware River Provincial Park is located in southern Labrador, while Pistolet Bay Provincial Park is on the tip of the Northern Peninsula.

Although Thursday is the first day of the summer month of June, there's no indication of balmy summer weather in sight. Daytime highs for the month are already unusually low, said Yle meteorologist Seija Paasonen.

"Between April and May we generally have the kinds of temperatures we are seeing now," Paasonen noted.

The weather forecast puts daytime highs Thursday and Friday at a chilly 10 to 11 degrees Celsius, while highs in central regions will runs from six to 7 degrees and from two to seven degrees Celsius up north.

According to Paasonen, at this time of year, average daytime highs in Helsinki should be around 17 degrees, and even up north, highs should be above 10 degrees.

Meanwhile new data from the Finnish Meteorological Institute indicate that across northern Finland - from Kainuu in the east to northern Ostrobothnia in the west - temperatures in May were nearly three degrees Celsius below the long term average.

The last time Finnish residents experienced a May as cold as this was in 1969 - nearly 50 years ago.