Caretaker Education Minister Hassan Diab announced Tuesday the closure of public and private schools as municipalities across Lebanon began taking precautionary measures in anticipation of a brutal snowstorm.

"Because Lebanon is subject to the harsh snowstorm, 'Alexa,' which has already caused a sharp decline in temperatures, and rainwater is expected to increase and block traffic, to avoid the risks caused by the storm and its impact on school students ... public and private schools will be closed and classes will not be held Wednesday," the statement from the Education Ministry said.

The first snow of winter started to fall in Istanbul tonight as the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality took tight measures to prevent disruptions to traffic and public transport.

Snow began falling on Istanbul's outskirts in the afternoon and intensified in the late hours of the evening in the center of the city. The snowy weather is expected to affect Istanbul until Dec. 12, meteorological officials said.

Historic December cold descended upon parts of the Pacific Northwest early Sunday morning, as the mercury dipped to as low as -41 degrees below zero in Oregon. Under a thick blanket of snow, several locations set new records.

At Lakeview, Oregon the mercury dropped to -27 degrees below zero, setting a new all-time record for that location. The previous record was -22 degrees below zero set back in February of 1933 and again in January of 1937.

Perhaps even more impressive was on the west side of the Cascade mountains where Eugene, Oregon fell to -10 degrees below zero Sunday morning. Ironically, this is not an all-time record for Eugene. As luck would have it, Eugene's all-time record low is -12 degrees below zero was set on this very day back in 1972, making today the second coldest day in Eugene modern day history. Records date back more than 123 years (to 1890) in Eugene.

A bitterly cold air mass spread across the western states and into the Plains and Midwest during the first week of December. One of the coldest temperatures recorded happened the morning of Saturday, Dec. 7, when the temperature in Jordan, Montana dropped as low as -42!

In some cities, the frigid air mass has been the coldest seen in years or has broken daily record lows. Here's a few examples:

Feeling chilly? Here's cold comfort: You could be in East Antarctica which new data says set a record for "soul-crushing" cold.

Try 135.8 degrees Fahrenheit below zero; that's 93.2 degrees below zero Celsius, which sounds only slightly toastier. Better yet, don't try it. That's so cold scientists say it hurts to breathe.

A new look at NASA satellite data revealed that Earth set a new record for coldest temperature recorded. It happened in August 2010 when it hit -135.8 degrees. Then on July 31 of this year, it came close again: -135.3 degrees. The old record had been -128.6 degrees, which is -89.2 degrees Celsius.
Ice scientist Ted Scambos at the National Snow and Ice Data Center said the new record is "50 degrees colder than anything that has ever been seen in Alaska or Siberia or certainly North Dakota."

"It's more like you'd see on Mars on a nice summer day in the poles," Scambos said, from the American Geophysical Union scientific meeting in San Francisco Monday, where he announced the data. "I'm confident that these pockets are the coldest places on Earth."

In November 2013 the sun showed signs of more activity as sunspot number (SSN) was 77.6. This solar cycle month (the 60th of the current cycle) was therefore "only" 32% below the level of a normally active sun. Just as a reminder: February 2013 was 66% below the mean value of all the previous observed cycles 1-23! Compared to the mean (blue) the current cycle (red) appears as follows:

After cold rain and winds lashed the Southwest and other parts of the country Friday, millions of residents hunkered down for icy conditions expected to last through the weekend as the cold snap was forecast to continue causing problems and trekking northeast.

Face-stinging sleet, thick snow and blustery winds led to slick road conditions, school closures, power outages and event cancellations as the wintry blast dropped temperatures to freezing and below from Texas to Ohio to Tennessee on Friday.

In California, four people died of hypothermia in the San Francisco Bay Area while the region was gripped by freezing temperatures.

The weather created a strangely blank landscape out of normally sun-drenched North Texas: Mostly empty highways were covered in a sometimes impassable frost.

It forced the cancellation of Sunday's Dallas Marathon, which was expected to draw 25,000 runners, some of whom had trained for months. A quarter of a million customers in North Texas were left without power, and many businesses told employees to stay home to avoid the hazardous roads.

Meanwhile, around 7 inches of snow fell in northeast Arkansas and the Missouri boot heel, according to the National Weather Service in Memphis. Ice accumulated on trees and power lines in Memphis and the rest of West Tennessee after layers of sleet fell throughout the region Friday.

The storm dumped a foot of snow and more in some areas of Illinois, with police scrambling to respond to dozens of accidents and forced scores of schools to remain closed.

On Nov. 17, Cash Lambert filled this column with an alarming call to act now on global warming.

But Mr. Lambert fails to make his case. Why? Simply regurgitating "conventional wisdom" just doesn't suffice when that conventional wisdom is just plain wrong.

For example, did you know that ... 1) the earth hasn't warmed for 17 years? 2) the Pacific Ocean is cooling and Antarctic ice is at 30-year highs? 3) there's no conclusive evidence that man-made greenhouse gases cause warming? 4) higher CO2 levels and modest warming would be good for the planet? And 5) sea levels are extremely unlikely to rise materially in the intermediate term, if ever?

Why haven't you likely heard all this before? It's because of the conventional-wisdom sources - a powerfully vocal admixture of several interest groups: research scientists, thousands of whom would lose their livelihood if man-made global warming is invalidated; environmentalists trying to "save the planet"; and the mainstream media, which knows that crises, real or supposed, engage subscribers.

The alarmists' case rests on a three-legged stool: a strong, and accelerating, upward trend in temperatures; a rise in CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases; and the harmful net effects justifying international policies to limit greenhouse gases.

Clearly, the failure of any leg invalidates proposed action calls.

Turns out, the hard facts - from a bevy of credentialed scientists - undermine all three legs.

Rising-temperature trends have been exaggerated

The earth has not warmed over the past 17 years (period). A prior 20-plus-year warming interval incubated the man-made global warming hysteria. But it was preceded by a 30-year global-cooling period - so substantial that many of the same alarmists (including The New York Times, Time magazine and Science Digest) were calling for global actions to stem the "coming ice age."

Hard data show that any Arctic melting has been dwarfed by the 2013 30-year record-high Antarctic ice cover.

Freezing weather in the U.S. gripped parts of Texas and Arkansas on Saturday, with hundreds of thousands of people coping in the cold without power after a winter storm made roads impassable and caused severe flight delays.

More than 3,300 travelers were forced to sleep on cots overnight at Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, where workers had managed to thaw only two of its seven runways by Saturday morning.

Airlines canceled more than 350 flights from DFW that were scheduled for Saturday, the airport said in a statement.

At the height of the storm, some 267,000 electricity outages were reported in Texas, according to utility provider Oncor, but that number was down to about 130,000 early on Saturday. Oncor said it hoped to get power restored to "nearly all of its customers by Sunday night.

Forecasters predicted sub-zero temperatures and icy conditions in the region for the rest of the weekend, with layers of ice and sleet up to 3 inches thick around Dallas. The city has already canceled a marathon planned for Sunday.

Cold weather was due to roll into the Northeast on Sunday through Monday. Accuweather predicted a "wintry mess" of ice, freezing rain and some of the first snow accumulations of the season from Virginia to New England, which may cause further travel delays.

Source: Reuters

Data

They are doing great so far.