Obama's Chance for a Fresh Start on a Climate-Smart Energy Quest - NYTimes.com

[Revkin] There’s plenty to parse in today’s speech, including the president’s unfortunate mashup of the clarity of basic greenhouse science (which is where the “overwhelming judgment” of scientific assessments lies) and the much tougher challenge of discerning what factors have caused recent large losses from fires, drought and storms.

In conflating robust and uncertain areas of science even as he tries to isolate those who would “deny” the basics, Obama may alienate Americans who agree climate change poses risks, and love smart energy steps, but challenge (legitimately) some recent conclusions about disaster losses and the like.*

MSNBC's Hayes: 'We Are Now on the Frontier of Climate Disaster' | NewsBusters

CHRIS HAYES: This is what I found the most interesting about that mention. The problem, politically, about climate change is the problem of getting people to act now for an abstraction in the future, and what has changed about the politics of it is that we are now on the frontier of climate disaster. We are seeing it now. It's not an abstraction in the future. And for the president to invoke fires and disaster, the impact of fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms is to communicate that what we are seeing now is the front edge of climate disaster. The problem isn't some future abstraction. And that to me is the only plausible political argument that will induce the kind of change we need policy wise on the issue.

World Economic Forum: Curbing climate change will cost $700 billion a year | JunkScience.com

Maybe Obama could milk the rich a little more?

“The world must spend an extra US$700-billion a year to curb its addiction to fossil fuels blamed for worsening floods and heat waves and rising sea levels, a study issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF) showed on Monday.”

“Six Americas” work on US climate & energy...

[Revkin] But the “dot connecting” described by Ed Maibach below is problematic given that patterns of derechos, U.S. hurricane strikes and damaging tornadoes have no evident link to global warming from the greenhouse-gas buildup