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."

Over the past 18 months, we've been growing increasingly concerned for the future of all life on planet earth. Sure, the signs that things have been going 'south' have been there for some time, but our concern began in earnest at the very beginning of 2011, when masses of birds began to fall dead from the sky around the world. The phenomenon continued for several months, and birds around the world are still dying for officially unknown reasons. None of the dead birds showed any sign of disease, but in several incidents birds were found to have 'external injuries' like they had been "hit by some kind of blunt instrument". All sorts of explanations for the deaths were offered (like fireworks or birds colliding with each other) including the predictable attempts by 'science experts' to downplay any significance to the bizarre deaths. But among the flurry of speculation, one report stood out.

NewsChannel5 Chief Meteorologist Mark Johnson decided to take a look at the the Doppler radar images from Beebe, Arkansas from the night when many red-winged blackbirds had fallen dead to the ground, and he discovered something interesting.

"There it was. This huge plume of turbulence over the Beebe birds just as they began their frenzied flight," Johnson said.

The turbulence appears above the birds between about 7,000 and 12,000 feet. Johnson realized there are only a few possible explanations for this phenomena.

Having homed in on the probable cause, Johnson then introduced some nonsense:

"Birds don't fly that high, and he quickly ruled out military action, a sonic boom, meteor shower or alien invasion."

While we can understand why Johnson ruled out military action or a sonic boom (there were no flights over the area at the time), Johnson never explained why he ruled out a "meteor shower", although we can understand the inclusion of "alien invasion" - to ridicule by association the idea of a "meteor shower" or other meteorite-related phenomenon.

Johnson then went on to say:

"Something in the atmosphere, something mysterious, occurred over Beebe, Arkansas that night... And I believe it was part of what caused those birds to fly and then die."

Indeed, but with the answer staring him in the face, Johnson lost the plot completely:

Johnson's research captured an unseen temperature reversal just above the birds' roosting area at about 1,500 feet above the ground. This temperature "inversion" acted like a megaphone, amplifying all the noises that occurred in Beebe at that time. As the fireworks exploded, the sound was amplified by the inversion and became much louder than normal. This appears to have startled the birds so much that they burst into flight, running into each other, and nearby buildings. Thousands of the now-disoriented birds then crashed to the ground, dying from blunt force trauma.

Temperature reversal? At 1,500 feet? But previously Johnson stated that the 'turbulence' occurred between 7,000 and 12,000 feet. He even produced a graph of the Doppler radar images that shows this. While temperature inversion does occur and can amplify sound, when birds are startled by noise they don't generally fly into each other and buildings in large numbers. What's most likely, is that the bird deaths of January 2011 (and later) were caused by an overhead meteorite or comet fragment (MoCF) explosion, with either the actual shock wave killing the birds (through blunt force trauma) or associated electrical effects 'frying' their 'circuits'.

This electrical effect can also explain the massive fish die-offs around the same time. Consider this report, just in today, about two children being mysteriously electrocuted to death as they swam in a lake in Missouri on 4th July. The thousands of dead fish found upstream from Beebe on New Year's Eve 2010 could well have had their circuits fried because of significant electrical discharge that accompanied the overhead MoCF airburst. Now check out this Tunguska blast simulation by Sandia lab. An incoming bolide exploding overhead would knock the wind out of anything within a radius relative to the extent of its blast. It would probably knock airplanes out of the sky too - more on that below.

Climate change itself is already in the process of definitively rebutting climate alarmists who think human use of fossil fuels is causing ultimately catastrophic global warming. That is because natural climate cycles have already turned from warming to cooling, global temperatures have already been declining for more than 10 years, and global temperatures will continue to decline for another two decades or more.

That is one of the most interesting conclusions to come out of the seventh International Climate Change Conference sponsored by the Heartland Institute, held last week in Chicago. I attended, and served as one of the speakers, talking about The Economic Implications of High Cost Energy.

The conference featured serious natural science, contrary to the self-interested political science you hear from government financed global warming alarmists seeking to justify widely expanded regulatory and taxation powers for government bodies, or government body wannabees, such as the United Nations. See for yourself, as the conference speeches are online.

What you will see are calm, dispassionate presentations by serious, pedigreed scientists discussing and explaining reams of data. In sharp contrast to these climate realists, the climate alarmists have long admitted that they cannot defend their theory that humans are causing catastrophic global warming in public debate. With the conference presentations online, let's see if the alarmists really do have any response.

The Heartland Institute has effectively become the international headquarters of the climate realists, an analog to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It has achieved that status through these international climate conferences, and the publication of its Climate Change Reconsidered volumes, produced in conjunction with the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).

Those Climate Change Reconsidered volumes are an equivalently thorough scientific rebuttal to the irregular Assessment Reports of the UN's IPCC. You can ask any advocate of human caused catastrophic global warming what their response is to Climate Change Reconsidered. If they have none, they are not qualified to discuss the issue intelligently.