"WASHINGTON -- It was just Wednesday morning that lawmakers were lining up on the House floor to slam House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) for delaying a vote on a relief package for Hurricane Sandy victims until the next Congress, with some Republicans even vowing to vote against Boehner for House speaker over the matter."

"In a year of strange weather worldwide, climate change reporting by the world's journalists fell another 2 percent, according to DailyClimate.org's archive of media coverage. But there were some surprises."

"Real estate agent Mark Faulkner recalls a day in early November when he was putting up a sign near Ulysses, Kansas, in 60-miles-per-hour winds that blew up blinding dust clouds."

"PARIS, France -- From rising shorelines to devastating hurricanes, the visible effects scientists say climate change is wreaking on daily life no longer surprise many people around the world. The French have their own take on just how radically life may change."

"EL VALLE, Panama — In moist, mossy rooms, rows of glass aquariums bathed in eerie light shelter the last of the last of the frogs. It is a secure facility, for here reside the sole survivors of their species, rescued from the wild before a modern plague swept through their forests and streams in a ferocious doomsday event that threatens the planet’s amphibians with extinction."

"LIBERAL, Ks. -- Real estate agent Mark Faulkner recalls a day in early November when he was putting up a sign near Ulysses, Kansas, in 60-miles-per-hour winds that blew up blinding dust clouds."

"If the United States ever enacts a major climate-change law, it will owe a debt to Arnold Schwarzenegger."

"WASHINGTON -- For the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, whose lands straddle the North and South Dakota border, river water means drinking supplies. For Illinois farmers, it's irrigation for their crops."

"LOS BANOS, Calif. — The Morning Star Company’s three plants in California emit roughly 200,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year — about the same amount as the Pacific Island nation of Palau — as they turn tomatoes into ketchup, spaghetti sauce and juice used by millions of consumers around the world."

"Global warming driven by rising greenhouse-gas concentrations is expected to cause wet regions of the tropics and mid to high latitudes to get wetter and subtropical dry regions to get drier and expand polewards1. Over southwest North America, models project a steady drop in precipitation minus evapotranspiration, P−E, the net flux of water at the land surface, leading to, for example, a decline in Colorado River flow8. This would cause widespread and important social and ecological consequences."

"As moldy drywall thudded to the curb in a depressing drumbeat throughout Breezy Point, Queens, Thomas Ryan’s reciprocating saw stood out like a growling declaration of impatience."

"ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Two types of ice seals joined polar bears Friday on the list of species threatened by the loss of sea ice, which scientists say reached record low levels this year due to climate warming."

"A federal appeals court today rejected an industry-backed request that it reconsider its decision to uphold Obama administration greenhouse gas regulations."

"Barbara Kingsolver's novel, 'Flight Behavior,' opens with a scenario that could have been ripped from a Harlequin Romance: Dellarobia Turnbow, a restless young housewife in rural Feathertown, Tenn., is walking into the woods to meet a man who is not her husband. Things take a turn, as they always do in fiction. But this turn is not the usual one."

"The then-thirtysomething environmental lawyer watched Al Gore's climate change documentary while eight months pregnant with her second child. By her own admission, she 'cried through the whole film' and spent several sleepless nights plotting a way to increase public awareness of climate change."