Obama: First up: lower expectations, announce cabinet

One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, “so there’s not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair.” The aide said that Mr Obama himself was the first to realise that expectations risked being inflated.

In an interview with a Colorado radio station, Mr Obama appeared to be engaged already in expectation lowering. Asked about his goals for the first hundred days, he said he would need more time to tackle such big and costly issues as health care reform, global warming and Iraq. “The first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference,” he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days how “hard” it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.

Climate change deniers find themselves in bad company | ForceChange

After looking over the above list, it seems almost silly to try and mount another defense of human influenced climate change. As we noted before, scientists have been warning about it since the 1950’s and unfortunately, the effects they predicted are now coming true. And as the human history outlined above indicates, climate change deniers can proudly add their names to a long list of misguided people who buried their heads in the sand at the first sign of a change in their accepted view of the world.

Unfortunately, unlike many of the scientific discoveries listed above, we don’t have the luxury of waiting a couple hundred years for the climate change deniers to lose steam. Where most of the denial movements above have merely retarded civilization’s development, climate change denial could threaten civilization itself. Fortunately, however, the majority of scientific opinion is in agreement regarding the problem, the question now is, can we find political leadership to pursue the solution. That is an even bigger “if” than normal, given that one of the candidates in Tuesday’s election still holds at least one, if not two, of the above beliefs.