"WASHINGTON — Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country. American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal, announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that was mined locally."

"SALT LAKE CITY  — A new report says the effects of climate change are already being felt in bug-infested forests of the Intermountain West, in reduced flows of the Colorado River basin and in the amount of snow that falls in the Rocky Mountains."

"For those who might be keeping score, we just passed the 333rd consecutive month of global temperatures above the 20th-century average."

"Over the weekend, various news outlets reported that President Obama is going to tap Sen. John Kerry to serve as the next Secretary of State. This is not much of a surprise, since the other reported leading candidate for the post, UN ambassador Susan Rice, withdrew herself from consideration last Thursday. For climate hawks, having Kerry at the helm at State would be very good news."

"As economic activity and populations continue to expand in coastal urban areas, particularly in Asia, hundreds of trillions of dollars of infrastructure, industrial and office buildings, and homes are increasingly at risk from intensifying storms and rising sea levels."

"The Mississippi as seen from Ed Drager's tug boat is a river in retreat: a giant beached barge is stranded where the water dropped, with sand bars springing into view. The floating barge office where the tugboat captain reports for duty is tilted like a funhouse. One side now rests on the exposed shore. 'I've never seen the river this low,' Drager said. 'It's weird.'"

"As one of the Marx brothers famously said: who do you believe, me or your own eyes?  Climate sceptics, it turns out, are much more likely to believe direct evidence of a changing climate in the form of extreme weather events than they do scientists, when it comes to global warming."

"Drought continued to expand through many key farming states within the central United States in the past week, as scattered rainfall failed to replenish parched soils, according to a report issued Thursday by state and federal climatology experts."

"SEATTLE -- More than 2,000 opponents and supporters of a plan to ship coal through a northwest Washington terminal turned out Thursday for a final public meeting on the controversial proposal."

"A WikiLeaks-style Web dump of drafts of the 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides fresh evidence that the organization’s policies and procedures are a terrible fit for an era in which transparency will increasingly be enforced on organizations working on consequential energy and environmental issues."

"The federal report predicts a drier future for the seven states that rely on the Colorado for water. A range of solutions, some impractical, are proposed."

"Jerry Mahlman, a leading climatologist who for many years headed the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dyamics Lab, died on November 28. In the 1990s I saw him play a pioneering role in interpreting the science of global warming to policymakers and the public. In 2006, in comments we posted, he called out NOAA Administrator Lautenbacher for political interference with science communication at his agency. A sad loss of a terrific guy and a great asset to the community."

"Superstorm Sandy killed 80 people on the U.S. East Coast while entire neighbourhoods, including Lower Manhattan, were flooded. Power failures affected 4.6 million homes and there was an estimated $50 billion in damage. While B.C. is not prone to hurricanes, climate change experts say the province will likely see similar violent weather, including more frequent, more intense storms as the planet gets warmer."

"It will take tens of billions of dollars to repair the damage wrought by Superstorm Sandy. But scientists who study climate change say repair is not enough. As the climate warms, ice sheets and glaciers will melt, raising the sea level. That means coastal storms will more likely cause flooding."

"A coalition of seven eastern states led by New York plans to sue the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for failing to issue new guidelines to curb methane emissions, a greenhouse gas that may be linked to climate change."