Stepping Back; Moving Forward -- Brooks Hanson, Deputy Editor for physical sciences at Science

One U.S. senator has called 17 prominent climate scientists criminals, and pundits have suggested that climate scientists should commit suicide. [Which pundits, and which climate scientists?  He can't be referring to the Limbaugh/Revkin thing, because Revkin is no climate scientist.] 
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The main societal challenges—global energy supply, growing the food supply, and improving public health, among others [why doesn't he list the alleged climate crisis here?]—depend intimately on science, and for this reason society requires a vigorous scientific enterprise.
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In turn, it is time to focus on the main problem: The IPCC reports have underestimated the pace of climate change while overestimating societies' abilities to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

[Climate hoax promoter Peter H. Gleick: Those mean skeptics are trying to distract attention from our overwhelming evidence of AGW; evidence that is really really convincing, but dang it all, I'll always be too busy to spell out in detail]

This focus on the art the editors chose to accompany the letter is an attempt by climate deniers to divert public attention once again from the facts of climate change.
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Oh, by the way, there really are polar bears on ice flows [sic]. I'm sure the editors at Science can find a real photo that illustrates the same thing.

Sweating the Details in Climate Discourse - Dot Earth Blog - NYTimes.com

The problem, as Randy Olson has emphasized, is that imagery and appearance matter — particularly in an information landscape where passionate Web trollers questioning warming are so seamlessly tied in with professional partisans fighting restrictions on greenhouse gases through the amplifier of conservative talk radio and columnists.
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Polar bear pictures, particularly, have proved problematic. Remember the image of the bear struggling in the waves circulated by an environmental group awhile back? The waves were from the prop wash of the helicopter overhead.