In every case but one, the senior Republicans (with the help of Democrats) proved victorious. The lone exception? An amendment proposed by Maryland's Andy Harris, cutting $542,000 in funding for a climate website at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

After all, who needs more information about the climate? It's not like there's been anything weird going on with the weather lately.

Oh wait. On the same day that the House voted to reduce funding for NOAA, the agency announced that the United States had just recorded its warmest 12-month period of temperatures since records started being kept in 1895.

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The YouTube video of that bridge crashing into the raging river was Vermont’s iconic image from its worst disaster in memory, the record flooding that followed Hurricane Irene’s rampage through the state in August 2011.  It claimed dozens of lives, as it cut more than a billion-dollar swath of destruction across the eastern United States.

I watched it on TV in Washington just after emerging from jail, having been arrested at the White House during mass protests of the Keystone XL pipeline. Since Vermont’s my home, it took the theoretical -- the ever more turbulent, erratic and dangerous weather that the tar sands pipeline from Canada would help ensure -- and made it all too concrete. It shook me bad.

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According to a widely discussed 2010 report by London's Standard Chartered Bank, the world has entered a new "'super-cycle" in which traditional economic hierarchies are being upended. Ever since the financial crisis, the U.S. has lost the economic strength and force of will to be the world's policeman. The number of Americans, for example, who believe the U.S. should "mind its own business internationally" has spiked to a level unseen since the 1950s. Meanwhile, new powers, like China, India and Brazil, have been unwilling to fill the power vacuum the U.S. has left behind. One could argue that this is a nice change from America's aggressive past interventionism, but it has also helped create the global stalemate on everything from global warming to humanitarianism in Syria. And it's a fact that has the potential to radically affect our future, both in positive and negative ways.

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Someone had sent me a 2008 Pew report documenting the intense partisan divide in the U.S. over the reality of global warming.^. It’s a divide that, maddeningly for scientists, has shown a paradoxical tendency to widen even as the basic facts about global warming have become more firmly established.

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As Salon reported last week,  Heartland  called the strategy document a fake, while tacitly admitting the other documents were authentic.

Read Gleick’s statement on Hufffington Post.

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But virtually all scientists continue to believe that most indicators suggest the world as we know it is slowly ending, and that humans are to blame.  Nature – oceans, deserts, crops, animals and insects – is in the process of being transformed by rising temperatures due to the fuel we burn to stay warm or cool, and to power factories, cars and jets. In the academies, the argument now is only between experts who predict “bad” and those who predict “catastrophe.”

Some people don't want to hear it. Supporters of industries that profit from the fossil-fuel status quo routinely challenge those facts, and treat them as political talking points. This week, a dirty trick played on one of the chief industry front groups, the Heartland Institute of Chicago, a major source of “climate denialism,” as the fact-based scientists like to call it, revealed just how politicized the issue has become.

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In compensation, though, we have some truly beautiful images made possible by new technology. Last month, for instance, NASA updated the most iconic photograph in our civilization’s gallery: “Blue Marble,” originally taken from Apollo 17 in 1972. The spectacular new high-def image shows a picture of the Americas on January 4th, a good day for snapping photos because there weren’t many clouds.

It was also a good day because of the striking way it could demonstrate to us just how much the planet has changed in 40 years. As Jeff Masters, the web’s most widely read meteorologist, explains, “The U.S. and Canada are virtually snow-free and cloud-free, which is extremely rare for a January day. The lack of snow in the mountains of the Western U.S. is particularly unusual. I doubt one could find a January day this cloud-free with so little snow on the ground throughout the entire satellite record, going back to the early 1960s.”

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Some 20 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions now come from deforestation, especially in the lush, green band of tropical rainforest that circles the earth.

That is more than from global transport.

So representatives from member states involved in UN climate negotiations are attempting to hammer out a way to make it more profitable to protect forests than destroy them.

By providing cash for maintaining healthy forests, they hope to undermine the economic imperative for poor countries or individuals to cut down trees for timber, to free land for agriculture, or to make way for roads, housing and other infrastructure.

The idea, known as reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation, or REDD, will be included in the successor to the Kyoto protocol, which is now the only international treaty aimed at climate change.

The new treaty is due to be finalized in 2015 and take effect in 2020.

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In August, the East Coast had a close brush with calamity in the form of Hurricane Irene. Luckily, that storm had spent most of its energy by the time it hit land near New York City. Nonetheless, its rains did at least $7 billion worth of damage, putting it just below the $7.2 billion worth of chaos caused by Katrina back in 2005.

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In the face of catastrophic climate change and dwindling fossil fuel resources, this cartoonish narrative has gained traction because it invokes the moment's most powerful political metonyms, from implicit allegations of crony capitalism to hippie-themed epithets about environmentalists to "free market" fundamentalism. The underlying idea -- which will only be more amplified in the wake of the Obama administration's pipeline decision Wednesday -- is that fossil fuels are being persecuted by the American government.

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The Atmospheric Brown Cloud, formerly known as the Asian Brown Cloud, is a mass of air pollution hovering over northern India along the southern Himalayas and down across Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal. The cloud began growing shortly after World War II, a smoggy mass of soot and sulfates from diesel emissions, wood fires and other burning stuff that’s almost two miles thick.

A new study by scientists from a number of research organizations – including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography – finds that the cloud’s pollutants are making cyclones in the Arabian Sea more intense.

This is a very big deal, because, as Dean Kuipers writes in the Los Angeles Times, “After the apparent recent increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, including the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, climate watchers everywhere have speculated whether these storms were made stronger by industrial or man-made emissions. This is reportedly the first study to indicate that human activity may, in fact, affect large storms.”

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Extreme weather plagued much of the world. Drought in East Africa has caused mass starvation; catastrophic floods came to Thailand, southern Africa and Australia. Winter temperatures across Russia averaged 4 degrees Celsius (roughly 9 degrees Fahrenheit) above average. Arctic sea ice was the second lowest on record.

Closer to home, extreme drought and wildfires turned Texas and adjacent Southwestern states into a living hell last summer. In Texas alone, 3 million acres burned up. Conditions haven’t improved much since. Cattlemen wonder if their way of life can be sustained there very much longer. F5 Tornadoes destroyed huge swaths of Tuscaloosa, Ala., and Joplin, Mo. In August, Vermont and upstate New York suffered record hurricane damage — Vermont!

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In 2000 Eugene Stoermer, an ecologist, and Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist, proposed that human agency has so transformed the Earth’s ecosystem that we are living in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, or the Human Age. Proponents of the Anthropocene concept disagree about when the era began. Was it with the industrial revolution, which began to release great quantities of pollutants and gases including greenhouse gases into the atmosphere? Was it earlier, when agrarian societies cleared vast tracts of wilderness for farms and pasture? Or was it earlier still, at the end of the last Ice Age, when, according to the “Pleistocene overkill” hypothesis, hunter-gatherers drove large animals including mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths to extinction in both the Old World and the New?

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At first sight, this rare climatic coincidence might seem to be of no more than academic interest. The North Pole is after all just a theoretical, symbolically significant point in an empty, frozen sea. Its circumnavigation is a largely meaningless exercise. But crossing the polar ocean is altogether a different matter. Sailors began probing for a safe way through its many dangers hundreds of years ago, almost as soon as they realised the world was round.

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But a new study by Urgewald, a German environmental organization, establishes a strong link between large multinational banks and the coal industry, one of the biggest contributors to climate change.

The study (.pdf), “Bankrolling Climate Change,” identifies the top 20 “climate killer” banks by the amount of financial support they give the coal industry. Number one is JP Morgan Chase, followed by Citi and Bank of America. That’s despite lofty rhetoric from these companies about their work to address climate change.

To learn more about the banks’ role in climate change, I spoke with Heffa Schuecking, the director of Urgewald and the principal author of the new study. She recently returned from a week at the U.N. climate talks in Durban, South Africa.

What was the goal of embarking on this study?

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Then let's mull over this news: According to the scientists at the Global Carbon Project, in 2010, global emissions of carbon dioxide set a post-Industrial Revolution record.

From the New York Times:

Emissions rose 5.9 percent in 2010... the increase, a half-billion extra tons of carbon pumped into the air, was almost certainly the largest absolute jump in any year since the Industrial Revolution, and the largest percentage increase since 2003.

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The fires were a function of drought.  As of summer’s end, 2011 was the driest year in 117 years of record keeping for New Mexico, Texasand Louisiana, and the second driest for Oklahoma. Those fires also resulted from record heat.  It was the hottest summer ever recorded for New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, as well as the hottest August ever for those states, plus Arizona and Colorado.

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Here's what Joan Walsh described as his baggage: Newt Gingrich served his first wife with divorce papers while she was recovering from cancer surgery, he left the woman he left his first wife for for another mistress (he then converted to Catholicism in order to ask the church to annul his second marriage), he petulantly shut down the government in 1995 in part because he was upset that President Clinton sat him in the back of Air Force One, he gleefully led the Clinton impeachment drive while cheating on his (second) wife, and he had, for some reason, a $500,000 line of credit at fancy jeweler Tiffany and Co. And he blamed Susan Smith's horrific murder of her children, and the Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres, on Democrats. And he says racist stuff.

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The pipeline decision was a true upset. Everyone -- and I mean everyone who "knew" how these things work -- seemed certain that the president would approve it. The National Journal runs a weekly poll of “energy insiders” -- that is, all the key players in Washington. A month to the day before the Keystone XL postponement, this large cast of characters was “virtually unanimous” in guaranteeing that it would be approved by year’s end.

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