American Northeasterners, as you hunker down to weather winter storm Nemo, know that you are not alone.

Record-setting snowfall has been hitting many parts of the world, from China to the United Kingdom.

Snow even fell in unusual places like Turkey and Israel, paralyzing daily life, but also turning those countries into special-edition winter wonderlands.

Winter is here: The worst winter storms and blizzards around the world

Photos by AFP/Getty Images

A huge dust storm collided with the coast of Australia Wednesday, leaving a massive trail of orange sand in its wake.

The rolling storm, known as a haboob, was captured in amazing photographs (see slideshow) showing the cloud of whirling sand swallowing everything in its path.

[credit]

PHOTOS: Australia dust storm smashes into small town near coast

Last year was the hottest on record in the United States according to data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration yesterday, and 2013 has already shown itself to be another year of extreme weather worldwide.

Just in the past ten days, Australia has seen record temperatures sparking wildfires (that can be seen from space), Turkey has been blanketed in snow, and Israel and the Palestinian territories have waded through major flooding.

PHOTOS: Extreme weather strikes worldwide, bringing floods, fire and ice

theatlantic:

As Seen From Space: Photos of the Australian Wildfires

[Images: Chris Hadfield/NASA]

The wildfires are being fed by a “dome of heat” of record-breaking temperatures.

The temperatures are so high, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology had to add new colors to its interactive weather forecasting chart.

Read more: Dome of heat: Australian weather bureau adds new colors to its map

usatoday:

China is having it’s coldest winter in 28 years. Images: http://usat.ly/XJ9dOv

(Photos: AP and Getty)

Climate Pains

From the Rio Grande to Patagonia, climate change has begun to grip Latin America. Some of the damage, such as melting glaciers and rising sea level, can already be seen — but scientists warn there’s worse to come. The toll could be devastating for countries struggling to lift their populations out of poverty. In this series, GlobalPost’s Simeon Tegel reports from the climate frontlines.

Read it here. 

Many may have guessed this already, but the first half of 2012 was the warmest six months in a calendar year on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s data, released on Monday.

The NOAA reported that the average temperature for 2012, through June, was 52.9 degrees Fahrenheit, about 4.5 degrees higher than the long-term average for the same period.

The New York Times noted that that is “1.5 degrees warmer on average than the second hottest temperatures recorded, in 2006.”

The Guardian published highlights from the report:

- Most of the contiguous United States was record or near-record warm for the six-month period, except the Pacific Northwest.

- 28 states east of the Rockies hit record warm temperatures.

- 15 other states were top ten warm.

- The period was also drier than average with precipitation at 1.62 inches bellow the national average.

The BBC said the last year was the hottest since record-keeping began in 1985, according to government scientists.

More on GlobalPost: Heat wave spreads across US

The percentage of the contiguous US experiencing drought went up from 37 percent to 56 percent in the first six months of 2012, according to The Times. Colorado, which has been ravaged by wildfires, experienced a June that was 6.4 degrees higher than its historical average.

According to the NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center’s climate scientist Jake Crouch, the jet stream has remained far north of its usual location since December, contributing to the warmest winter and spring on record,USA Today reported.

More on GlobalPost: Power outages leave 2.1M without power in heat wave

More than 170 all-time heat records were broken or tied during the latter half of June, said the BBC. Forecasters now predict that hot weather could plague the Western US and Canada.

Crouch told Reuters, “It’s hard to pinpoint climate change as the driving factor, but it appears that it is playing a role.” He added, “What’s going on for 2012 is exactly what we would expect from climate change.”

Your morning news roundup:

Need to know:
He’s young, he’s telegenic, and he’s president-to-be: Enrique Pena Nieto has wonMexico’s presidential election.

With 38 percent of the vote, the candidate of the center-left Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, finished several points ahead of his rivals from the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party and the National Action Party of sitting President Felipe Calderon.

It marks a return to power for the PRI, which ruled Mexico with an iron fist for most of the 20th century and subsequently became a symbol for corruption, repression, economic mismanagement and electoral fraud. It hasn’t been the ruling party since 2000.

“We will launch a new era for the country,” Pena Nieto pledged in his victory speech. But if some things change, others look set to stay the same – notably Mexico’s trade with the US, and its war on drugs.

Want to know:
Millions in the eastern US begin their week without electricity, after a weekend of sudden, violent storms that toppled trees and downed power lines.

Nearly 2.7 million people from Virginia to New Jersey, DC to Ohio, remained without power last night, in the midst of sweltering summer temperatures. The outages are expected to cause new problems this morning when commuters take to the roads, many of which are closed and others whose signals are blacked out.

The National Weather Service is warning of more “strong to severe thunderstorms” in the mid-Atlantic and north-central US, while the heat wave will continue and even intensify into next week.

Dull but important:
The chairman of Barclays has resigned after the firm was fined for attempting to fix inter-bank lending rates.

Barclays was ordered to pay $450 million by US and UK regulators after its traders were found to have lied about the interest rate other banks in London were charging Barclays for loans – thus making the firm look like a better lending prospect than it really was. 

Chairman Marcus Agius says the buck stops with him. He has apologized, quit, and announced an audit into Barclays’ business practices. Will it be enough to stop others calling for the head of chief executive Bob Diamond?

Just because:
Timbuktu is a real place – but for how much longer? Islamist militants this morning destroyed the entrance to one of its three sacred mosques, part of a rampage that has already wrecked several ancient Muslim shrines.

The Ansar Dine Salafist group spent the weekend attacking the unique, centuries-old monuments with pick axes, hoes and chisels, claiming the shrines to be idolatrous. Today, they tore off the door to theSidi Yahya mosque, which has been kept closed for centuries in the belief that to open it would bring misfortune.

UN cultural agency UNESCO warned last week that the survival of Timbuktu’s treasures was threatened by the armed conflict in the region between Islamist forces and secular Tuareg rebels. The International Criminal Court has called the destruction a “war crime.” Ansar Dine, meanwhile, says it hopes to “destroy every masoleum in the city – all of them, without exception.”

Strange but true:
It was a modern-day Pied Piper story… except it wasn’t. 

Hamelin, the German town made famous by the story of the roving pipe player who rid the locals of their rodents and then their children, hit the headlines last month with the news that a town fountain had been put out of action by – of all things – rats.

The reality turned out to be much more mundane. It was just some fountain on the edge of the city, a bemused Hamelin spokesman tells GlobalPost, and a few rats attracted by crumbs left by people sitting on a nearby bench.

It’s not the first time the media has exaggerated rumors of a “rodent plague” hitting the town at the first sign of a twitching nose and pair of whiskers. On behalf of the good people of Hamelin, we say: the rats are not coming.

This year, the United States has witnessed twelve weather disasters causing $1 billion or more in damage.  

This makes 2011’s weather the most extreme on record. This means the US had more billion-dollar catastrophes in 2011 than in the entire decade of the 1980s even after adjusted for inflation.

(Read more—2011 breaks US record for billion-dollar weather disasters)