"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."