In the world of energy politics, the sudden vanishing of the word 'coal' is a remarkable and unprecedented event.

• In the U.S. alone, weather disasters caused $50 billion in economic damages in 2010.
• Extracting oil from the tar sands is a nasty, polluting, energy-intensive business.
• Bill Gates is a relative newcomer to the fight against global warming, but he's already shifting the debate over climate change.
• Among all the tests President Obama faced in his first term, his biggest failure was climate change.
• Geoengineering - the deliberate, large-scale manipulation of the earth's climate to offset global warming - is a nightmare fix for climate change.
• "If you are interested enough in the climate crisis to read this post, you probably know that 2 degrees Centigrade of warming (or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is the widely acknowledged threshold for ""dangerous"" climate change."
• Climate change is a global issue - from the point of view of the Earth's climate, a molecule of CO2 emitted in Bejing is the same as a molecule emitted in Sydney.
• Ever since the collapse of cap and trade legislation and the realization that President Obama is unlikely to ever utter the words 'climate change' in public again, much less use the bully pulpit to prepare the nation for the catastrophic risks of inaction, the movement has been in a funk.
• Maybe more climate activists will think about the climate change not as an international problem to be resolved in an air-conditioned meeting hall, but as a guerilla war to be fought in the streets.
• One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.