Was that beach near a pine tree biome a.k.a. a taiga? If so, then snow there has been reimplemented. The only way to "fix" it is to downgrade and destroy the ice or to move your home if the ice really bugs you that much. Sorry.
EDIT: I believe that water blocks don't freeze when there are blocks above them. You could try building a giant glass roof/platform over the water.
One of the changes in snapshots between 1.0 and now has been tweaking to the biome code, and so some biomes have moved or changed. It's a minor map change, the seeds still produce largely the same map. But there are differences.
I don't think you can "change" it short of editing your world in some manner.
There is a Bukkit server mod called BioMed that supposedly lets you change the biome of the chunk you're in. I installed it last night to pre-emptively change the tiaga in half of my town to a regular oak tree forest so it wouldn't snow, but haven't had a chance to try it out yet.
This change happened when they re-wrote the biome code again from 1.8.1 to 1.0.0. I also used to have a great beach-home that I spawned in 1.7, but now its completely frozen. So, essentially, if you spawned a world in 1.7, its biomes got ****ed in the update.
EDIT: I believe that water blocks don't freeze when there are blocks above them. You could try building a giant glass roof/platform over the water.
I don't think you can "change" it short of editing your world in some manner.
Portal In Minecraft!