Climate silence is a tragedy, and one that will cost us dearly in the long run, both in economic and environmental terms. But it is not a surprise. Climate science is abstract and complex. Even to the relatively few qualified people who make a living studying the subject, there are large uncertainties; if not around the fact that climate change is real (the preponderance of scientific evidence is so strong that “climate deniers” in the scientific community are thankfully regarded as fringe elements), then around the specific ways in rising greenhouse gas levels will affect the planet.

Clearly articulating the dangers of an issue as nuanced as climate change in a domestic political environment characterized by slogans and sound bites would be a difficult enough proposition even before the well-funded, well-organized groups that have an interest in deprioritizing or rejecting it outright weigh in. A favorite argument for inaction on climate change is that “now is not the right time”. In the past few years, the basis of this argument has been that a price on carbon would hurt the economy at a particularly weak time. Such arguments are usually supported by figures that show a supposed number of jobs that would be lost in the event of policy measures to control greenhouse gas emissions. These figures are based on assumptions that are bounded only by the imaginations of those with an interest in preserving the status quo. Earlier this week, we saw the first signs that the rationale for the argument is changing: in a panel discussion in Washington DC, Karen Harbert of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Institute for 21st Century Energy, argued – somewhat bewilderingly – that it is not the right time for a carbon tax because of the abundance of U.S. oil and gas and the high levels of production. The opponents of climate action thus have it both ways.

Arguments against climate action are usually accompanied by pablum about the need for greater efficiency and the need to invest in technology (both of which would be enhanced by a serious policy approach, such as a price on carbon), and the unimportance of the United States in the total global carbon budget relative to large and growing emitters such as China and India (a point that Jack Gerard of the American Petroleum Institute made at the same panel discussion). With unconventional oil and gas being produced in the US at an increasing rate, the case for alternatives to hydrocarbons is becoming harder to make to those who see the short-term benefits over the long term consequences.

Even when faced with powerful evidence of climate change on the very shores of the United States, there is a lack of interest in pursuing the issue as one worthy of serious attention. The recent devastating hurricane that hit the U.S. east coast caused untold amounts of suffering and privation for thousands of people. But, beyond filling some airtime on cable TV between pictures of smashed houses and gas-station lines, the link between the storm and climate change has been superficial and fleeting in the public conversation.

Two thousand years ago, the poet Juvenal lamented that the citizens of Rome, the world’s preeminent power, had neglected their duties to engage with serious public policy issues in favor of “bread and circuses”. With the majority of the U.S. public unwilling to entertain the notion of a small amount of short-term cost for an enormous amount of longer-term benefit, and the country’s principal information outlets treating the increasing evidence of climate change with their customary incurious and sensational vacuity, his criticism is as applicable to the world’s current democratic superpower as it was two millennia ago.

The United States has experienced a summer featuring heat waves, droughts, wild fires and floods. As I write this, an unparalleled hurricane and storm has devastated parts of the Northeastern coast and left major cities paralyzed in its stead. Climate change does not explain the incidence of any one of these events, but it is also foolish to treat as coincidence the increasing frequency of volatile weather in the US and across the world.

Climate change comes with costs. Firstly, there is the continued price of inaction. Silence does not solve the problem, and should not fool anyone into thinking the challenge we face has dissipated. Businesses are making investment decisions today with a view to many years into the future, particularly in the power sector. Without a price incentive to shift investment towards reduced carbon activities, business as usual will become just that: business as usual. Silence from policymakers inhibits business from receiving the clear signal to account for carbon in the strategic decisions they make today, and that makes the costs even greater tomorrow.

Furthermore, as the can gets kicked further and further down the road, greater amounts of capital will be needed to adapt to the effects of climate change, rather than prevent it. This means retrofitting offshore oil rigs to make them stronger in the face of extreme weather, erecting more coastal barriers to withstand ever more forceful storms, and solving irrigation issues to face droughts on croplands. These all have greater costs and greater risks that strong mitigation activities can help avoid.

There is also consideration needed on the costs of what actions we take to mitigate climate change. Movement towards using command-and-control measures such as mandatory performance standards create unnecessary costs for business – with such policies it is more expensive for an economy to reach its environmental goal. Conversely, providing business with flexible policy options to reduce emissions, such as emissions trading, significantly reduces the price for achieving an environmental goal. IETA believes the flexibility and price incentive delivered by a cap-and-trade program will allow us to reduce emissions with the greatest cost-effectiveness possible going forward.

Washington must come to realize that this challenge must be met with action, rather than silence. Whoever occupies the White House for the next four years, as well as the Congress that is formed, must find compromise on a comprehensive legislative approach to reducing emissions. Acting towards cost-effective policy now is the best way to give businesses the incentive to tackle emissions. The climate is changing. So must Washington.

Climate change silence is costing us dearly, and the impacts on our communities are only compounded by the impacts on wildlife and our precious natural resources that we all depend upon.

Communities become more vulnerable when wetlands, streams, rivers and other natural places are compromised by extreme weather events such as Hurricane Sandy. And the impacts are not limited to our coastline.

All of us will face climate-change impacts no matter where we live, so it is important that we recognize and address the associated risks. Some impacts, like flooding, drought, wildfire and the effects of increased temperatures, may be lessened by the presence of intact or restored ecosystems such as wetlands, forests and prairie lands. Identifying these restoration initiatives is the first step toward developing policies that embrace the ecosystem approach.

Hurricane Sandy provides a clear picture of the costly impacts of climate change and the resulting extreme weather events. We need to end the silence on climate change and create solutions that protect our communities, wildlife habitat and our vital natural resources. The costs are too high to not start seeking solutions.

The cost of climate silence is measured in the number of houses flooded, businesses crushed, and lives turned upside down. The longer we wait to have an open national conversation about climate change, the more people are going to suffer from extreme weather.

Just look at what’s happening now. Hurricane Sandy pounded communities from Virginia to Maine, shutting down cities and racking up millions of dollars in damage. It will take weeks to assess Sandy’s destruction, but like the Midwestern drought and Western wildfires, this record-breaking storm is revealing what’s in store if we keep pushing climate change off the political agenda.

Climate change deserved more attention in this election cycle, yet it is no surprise economic issues have dominated. We’re recovering from the worst recession since World War II, and people want to know they will have a job and a roof over their heads. The presidential campaigns have focused on those concerns.

But Americans have other concerns as well. Seven in ten Americans believe the climate is changing, according to recent polls from University of Texas survey<http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-07-18/record-heat-wave-pushes-u-dot-s-dot-belief-in-climate-change-to-70-percent>, and 73 percent believe extreme weather events are connected to climate change, according to another poll from Yale University.<http://environment.yale.edu/climate/> People want protection from these threats. And that’s why at the end of the day, actions speak louder than words.

President Obama has cut America’s global warming pollution from two of our biggest sources: cars and power plants. He nearly doubled fuel efficiency standards for cars and light trucks<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/business/energy-environment/obama-unveils-tighter-fuel-efficiency-standards.html>, a move that will cut carbon emissions from new cars in half and save consumers $1.7 trillion at the pump. He has already proposed limits on carbon pollution from new power plants; now he has to finalize those safeguards and move on to setting limits for existing plants. Candidate Romney, meanwhile, has cast doubt on the causes of climate change and belittled Obama’s efforts to “slow the rise of the oceans and heal the planet.”

Tuesday’s election will shape the politics of climate change. If Obama wins, we will see deeper reductions in carbon pollution. If Romney wins, we have continued dependence on dirty fossil fuels, more extreme weather events, dirtier air, and less healthy kids. Hurricane Sandy—and all the people recovering in its wake—reveal why this stark difference matters so much.

William O’Keefe continues to make the same old silly arguments about climate change in his piece. I want to respond to several of them.

First of all, there is no real debate at all about the science. That debate is in the media, but it is not in the peer reviewed literature. There is not a single journal paper questioning the importance of human-related emissions having an important current and potential effect on the Earth’s climate system that has survived the scrutiny of the science community.

Second, Mr. O’Keefe fully misrepresents the state of the physics based models of the climate system and the role of natural variability in the changes in climate. Over a short period, e.g., up to a decade or so, natural variability can be extremely important in affecting the relative signal to noise in determining a human related trend. Even then, analyses that have only taken one major source of natural variability into account, the effects of El Nino and La Nina events, find that the trends are essentially linear since the late 1960s in showing an increasing trend in globally-averaged atmospheric temperature. Other studies have shown that this long-term trend can only be explained by the effects of human activities and not natural variability.

Today’s climate models encapsulate the great expanse of current understanding of the physical processes involved in the climate system, their interactions, and the performance of the climate system as a whole. These complex numerical models account for the many feedbacks that occur through interactions among the components of the climate system: the atmosphere, oceans, land and cryosphere (which includes sea, lake and river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground). Today’s climate models are extensively tested relative to observations and are able to reproduce the key features found in the climate of the past century, and simulations of the evolution of global surface temperature over the past millennium are consistent with past climate reconstructions.

However, these models are not perfect and likely can’t ever be perfect. Uncertainties arise from shortcomings in the understanding and how to best represent complex processes in models. Nonetheless, these models do many things well and provide the best representation possible of the climate system and its changes. It also should be mentioned that the models are aimed at climate time scales (of 20 years or more) and are not aimed at predicting the exact timing for natural variability events like El Nino events or a volcanic eruption.

Because models do differ in their representation of certain processes, we make use of these differences by examining suites of models in the climate assessments. However, it is worth noting that they all give the same basic story – human related activities are significantly heating up the Earth’s climate and altering its precipitation patterns and will continue to do so over this century and beyond unless the human effects are reduced. Also, despite the tremendous improvements in the climate modeling capabilities over my 40 years as a scientist, the basic response of a significant effect on the climate system from human activities continues to be about the same as the models were finding 40 year ago.

Third, on water vapor, Mr. O’Keefe is totally wrong. In fact, measurements clearly show that atmospheric water vapor has increased globally as a result of the warming temperatures.

The first problem is that talking about climate change asks something from the citizenry, rather than offering something to them. Sure there is money to be made in renewable technology, and it does and will generate jobs. But solving climate issues will require people to change the way they live and companies to change the way they do business. Change is hard even when it creates long-term opportunity. And politicians don’t do hard.

Remember how the Obama campaign was seen as “inspirational” in 2008? Do you remember the candidate actually asking us to do anything hard? At present, there is no room for a JFK-like request for shared sacrifice. The last politician who tried that was Carter, and that didn’t work out so well for him. In the new normal of our political process—vast sums funding political speech across thousands of micro-channels or modes of communication, such a request is even less likely.

The second problem is that, despite pressing need and decades of education, the voters don’t care enough for the campaigns to take it seriously as an issue. Like water seeking its own level, the modern national campaign apparatus will find issues that resonate with voters. Yesterday I read an analysis of targeted demographics that went as tight as 200,000 Hungarians in a city in Ohio; clearly if you are a voting bloc, you will be found and catered to. If the campaigns are not talking about climate change, it’s because highly sophisticated messaging operations can’t find a large audience willing to vote on the issue.

So what to do about climate change when the politicians are unwilling to tell hard truths to the citizenry and the citizenry is unwilling to require an answer or vision from their leadership?

People will not accept or affect drastic change of any kind without a direct threat to their bottom line. It’s the personal economy, stupid! When gas briefly reached $4 a gallon, people in my city started taking the light rail in droves. If electricity cost 25 cents per kilowatt hour, people would start to seriously build their life around reducing their carbon footprint. Power and fuel would cost much more than this if structural subsidies in our energy economy were removed. At, say, $5 gas and 25 cent power, climate change will begin to solve itself in the U.S.—and that’s where we desperately need to start first—without asking anything from either side of our greatly reduced political process. We do not need to join any climate protocols or other complex scenarios. We need to make carbon-based fuels compete on a level playing field, and make consumers pay the true price for them.

According to a recent study from the DARA Group, an NGO based in Europe climate change is costing $1.2 TRILLION per year, right now. That’s about 1.7% of global GDP (not to mention the associated 400,000 lives lost each year). That loss is of course not spread evenly across all countries, but it would be no leap at all to suggest that right now in the U.S. that the effects of climate change, caused at least in part by our own inaction on greenhouse gas mitigation, is the difference between moderate economic growth and our current anemic 2% growth. Projections have the toll at 3.2% of global GDP by 2030.

The impacts in the U.S. are of course very tangible this year. $50 Billion or more in damage from Sandy, $20 Billion or more in damage from this Summer’s drought, Billions more lost in a few hours during the June derecho through the Ohio Valley and Mid-Atlantic. While all of this damage can’t be attributed exclusively to climate change, there is no one credible that has suggested that there isn’t a clear correlation.

The time for silence (and certainly jokes) has passed – the cost of continued silence is no less than the future prosperity of our nation.

While there may be room for debate on how to best mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change, there is overwhelming consensus in the scientific community that it is real and that human activity is in all likelihood responsible. Addressing the realities of climate change will require that we make hard decisions, but delaying those decisions, and justifying the delay with false claims of uncertainty, will not make climate change and its impacts disappear.

Thankfully, The United States did not follow the lead of Europe and other industrial nations in signing the Kyoto Treaty, and otherwise taking heavy-handed government action to address climate change. Imagine how much additional damage would have been done to our economy with more government action. We’ve avoided the economic damage of making the foundation of our economy, energy, even more expensive, as well as the fraud of Europe’s emissions trading system. Our economy would be even more anemic than it is now, and our government even larger and more controlling of every aspect of our economy.

Despite government distortions such as renewable energy mandates and stimulus money to commercialization of today’s intermittent energy alternatives rather than basic research on the energy sources of the future, America has taken a more market-oriented approach to handling climate change. As the result of increased electricity generation from natural gas, the US is the world’s only major advanced economy that has meaningfully addressed climate change by significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions. We’re the only country that has come close to reaching Kyoto targets, even though we were smart enough not to bind ourselves to the economy killing command-and-control Kyoto system.

Although it wasn’t planned by the government, our reaction to climate change has been the most effective. Let’s hope the Presidential candidates continue to ignore climate change and focus instead on the economy. A robust economy is much more important to addressing any future impacts from climate change than cumbersome government schemes that distort market forces and hamper growth.

Note: To those so ready to jump to conclusions on an single weather event, start with Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog for balanced scientific information on the effects of climate change on any particular natural disaster. The last several years have seen the media jump to conclusions on the role of global warming in any drought, fire, hurricane or other extreme weather events, only to ignore real scientific evidence.

It is unfortunate that it takes an extreme weather event, such as Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina, before our leaders pay attention to climate change. While the effects of climate change are most extremely felt during these acute natural disasters, the effects of climate change are ever present and damaging to our environment and economy. Addressing climate change through both mitigation and adaptation strategies is imperative to avoiding further irreversible damage.

The World Bank estimates that every dollar spent on disaster preparedness saves $7 in disaster response. Improving the resiliency of our buildings and infrastructure could reduce the threats associated with mega-storms that affect our basic health and safety. Investing in green buildings is a silver bullet that addresses both our climate mitigation and adaptation needs. FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate said it best, “Being green is one part of being resilient.” Improving the sustainability of our buildings not only ensures the resilience of our infrastructure, but also our communities and economies.

(These comments were co-written by Jennifer Morgan and Kevin Kennedy, Director, U.S. Climate Program, WRI.)

The recent silence on climate change in the U.S. political discourse is extremely troubling. As we can see from the recent spate of extreme weather events, the costs of inaction are clear in terms of both environmental and economic impacts. If we are going to meet the challenge of the global climate threat, we need to have a real, rational discussion about climate change. Having that discussion requires national leadership on this issue.

The irony is that despite the relative silence on the campaign trail, U.S. public opinion on climate change is shifting, with a growing number of people recognizing that more needs to be done to address this issue. As WRI’s president Andrew Steer said in a recent New York Times interview, “On climate change, the political discourse here is massively out of step with the rest of the world, but also with the citizens of this country. Polls show very clearly that two-thirds of Americans think this is a real problem and needs to be addressed.”

Evidence of the impacts of climate change is already visible. Just look at the growing number of recent extreme weather and climate related events: record heat waves, more frequent and extreme rainfall, coastal flooding, Arctic ice melt, longer and more intense droughts, increasingly severe wildfires – all consistent with what scientists have long considered to be likely outcomes of a warmer world. Meanwhile, in recent months, several authoritative studies have drawn links between specific extreme events and climate change. A study by scientists from NOAA, the UK’s Met Office, and other institutions, published in July, attributed a number of recent extreme events to human-induced climate change by focusing on the probability of those events. In March, a report from the IPCC found that climate change has already contributed to changes in extreme events—such as heat waves, increased temperatures, and heavy precipitation—in many regions over the past 50 years. And, an article in Nature Climate Change linked heat waves and precipitation extremes to human-induced warming. Many of these conditions are only projected to get worse, unless we move to more aggressively cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The monetary costs are also staggering. Economic damages associated with extreme weather and climatic events are severe, whether from drought that destroys crops, sea level rise that threatens our coastlines, or floods and wildfires that damage our homes. According to a recent DARA and Climate Vulnerable Forum report, “Failure to act on climate change already costs the world economy 1.6 percent of global GDP, amounting to $1.2 trillion in forgone prosperity a year.” The report further noted that those costs are expected to double by 2030 due to rising temperatures and greenhouse gas emissions.

At the same time, the United States risks edging itself out of a global clean energy market with tremendous growth potential, ceding ground to countries like China and Germany, as it stays stuck in an outdated energy system.

We need our elected officials to break their silence on climate change. Whether climate change comes up in the final days of the campaign or not, the next president and Congress will need to step up and do more on this issue. Otherwise, America will face increasing economic and environmental consequences, as it falls further out of step with the rest of the world.

The near-absence of climate change from the recent national debate will hurt the United States economy and the global effort to address climate change.

Aside from brief mentions in his acceptance speech, at a few campaign stops, and in an MTV interview, President Obama has not raised climate change recently, while Governor Romney has gone silent on the issue since the mocking mention in his acceptance speech.

Worst of all, the campaigns’ silence is emblematic of a society-wide climate silence. Just a few years ago, there was much more discussion about climate change. After Hurricane Katrina in 2005, for example, climate change was on the cover of almost every national news magazine. But following the failure of cap-and-trade legislation, politicians, businesses, faith leaders, and even many environmentalists fell silent, leaving the naysayers to fill the void. No wonder the public ranks climate change at the bottom of its list of priorities.

This, despite the fact that climate change is happening now and faster than anticipated, science points unequivocally to human activity as the primary cause, and the predicted increase of droughts, floods, wildfires, heat waves, and major storms like Hurricane Sandy has real costs to our economy and well-being.

Does it matter that our elected representatives aren’t talking about climate change? Yes, because we need them to hammer out the policies that will address it.

Granted, both President Obama and Governor Romney are talking a lot about energy, and energy policy has huge and direct implications for climate change. Obama has consistently supported low-emitting technologies ranging from wind power to carbon capture and storage. Both candidates support research and development for energy technologies, including through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy (ARPA-E), a branch of the Department of Energy established in 2007 to focus on transformational energy research.

But while it’s fine for the federal government to invest in clean energy, only the private market will be able to sort out and deploy the best low-emitting technologies, and that isn’t going to happen without a price on carbon emissions.

Market-based greenhouse gas reduction programs are either established or in the works in other nations – the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, and China – but they can only go so far in the competitive global economy without the United States doing its share. Two greenhouse gas cap-and-trade programs in the United States -- one covering power plants in nine northeastern states and California’s soon-to-be launched economy-wide program -- show that we can do this here at home as well.

For reasons good and bad (the vehicle fuel economy standards, the new access to shale gas, and the recession), U.S. greenhouse gas emissions are projected to be near or below 2005 levels through 2035. But we are not nearly on track to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050, a target that would reduce the risk of the worst consequences of climate change. To solve this problem, we must fully enlist the effort of the largest and most innovative economy in the history of the world.

Given the national climate silence of the past three years and the nasty partisanship of the current political season, perhaps it was just as well that the presidential candidates didn’t brawl over climate change, which might have risked driving the partisan wedge deeper into the issue. Once this election is over, however, we have to start facing the climate change problem again or we aren’t going to solve it.

Let's hope the forecasts are wrong and the hurricane loses its punch, but after a summer of record drought, temperatures and destructive wildfires, Hurricane Sandy should be treated less like an anomaly and more like the new normal.

Whether or not the presidential candidates want to talk about it, climate change is driving severe weather to new extremes—with costly results. Last year, U.S. property/casualty insurers paid out more than $32 billion in losses after facing a string of pronounced droughts, wildfires, flooding and other climate-influenced weather events.

These losses hurt taxpayers too. As insurers adapt to the changing climate, they are cutting off coverage in riskier areas, leaving state governments, the federal government and the American public to pick up the slack. Since 1990, total government exposure to losses in hurricane-ravaged states has grown more than 15-fold, up to $885 billion in 2011.

Many insurers have pulled out of Florida and the Gulf Coast, but they can’t entirely escape extreme weather. Now big storms and other extreme weather are hitting northern New England, the Midwest and other supposedly safer regions. For example, some of the biggest damages caused by Hurricane Irene last year were in Vermont and New Hampshire – states accustomed to snow, not hurricanes.

Of course hurricanes are only part of the problem. In other parts of the country, the biggest losses have come from devastating drought and wildfires. This summer’s drought resulted in about $5 billion of losses for private insurers, but - through the federal crop insurance program – the government and American taxpayers will pay far more.

This shift of exposure from private insurers to governments and taxpayers is a troubling trend, and it’s all the more reason why the insurance industry, policymakers and the winner of the presidential race need to come together in tackling the enormous threat from escalating extreme weather and climate-driven risks.

In a year marked by divisive debates over the Keystone XL pipeline, offshore drilling in the Arctic, and efforts to expand federal oversight of onshore natural gas production, one key fact about our nation’s energy progress was consistently overlooked: According to the International Energy Agency, the U.S. is currently leading the world in reducing its carbon footprint.

In fact, our carbon emissions have dropped in four of the last six years and are currently at their lowest point in the last 20 years. One large factor supporting this development is increased natural gas use in U.S. power systems, made possible by hydraulic fracturing.

The advancements we have achieved have been staggering. According to IEA data, U.S. carbon emissions have fallen by 430 megatons (7.7 percent) since 2006. This drop is equal to eliminating the combined emissions of ten western states: Alaska, Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Nevada. That’s a pretty significant environmental success.

Building on this success, the Energy Information Administration recently noted that U.S. carbon emissions are continuing their decline, dropping 6.3 percent between January and May of this year, placing the United States on track to reach emissions levels not seen since 1990.

At the same time our renewables industry is on the march. U.S. solar power has increased by about 14-fold since 2008, skyrocketing from 500 megawatts installed in 2008 to an expected 8,000 megawatts at the end of 2012. Over that same period, wind power increased from 25,000 megawatts to about 55,000 megawatts. This growth is encouraging and will result in our next generation of emissions reductions.

What makes these successes especially compelling is that just eight years ago our nation was roundly criticized for not ratifying the Kyoto Protocol. This criticism only grew when Congress failed to enact a government policy that sought to reduce carbon emissions via government regulation.

These are significant advancements that go a long way in showing what a true “all of the above” energy policy can accomplish and it’s worth noting they were achieved without federal legislative or regulatory mandates. We must avoid new government restrictions on energy development and instead build a national energy policy that embraces all of our resources. Doing so will benefit our economy and environment while reducing the impacts on current and future generations.

John McCain, Newt Gingrich and other prominent Republicans were leaders in talking about the compelling science of climate change. Coal-state Democrats like Rich Boucher came to the table understanding that the only way for coal to have a future was to promote a climate deal that actually preserved its role in electricity production.

As I said during my recent appearance on MSNBC’s Up With Chris Hayes, climate change wasn’t a question asked at a Presidential or Vice-Presidential debate for the first time in 24 years. This omission comes when 70% of Americans understand that global warming is real, and 54% believe that burning fossil fuels is the cause. Public opinion has been gathering strength on this issue, despite the hundred million dollar campaign funded largely by fossil fuel interests of Citizens United attack ads questioning environmental regulations and promotion of clean energy. The Wall Street Journal just reported on the “tens of millions of dollars” the American Petroleum Institute is spending to get voters in swing states and key districts to support candidates that toe the oil industry’s line―which actively ignores the industry’s obligations on climate change.

As long as politicians benefit from bashing the science of climate change, and as long as the fossil fuel industry continues to finance the denial campaign, America will continue to fall behind on energy competitiveness. On the campaign trail, Romney and Obama stump speeches feature competing sonnets expressing their love for coal and an “all of the above” fossil fuel strategy, making it difficult to tell which is blowing harder: Hurricane Sandy or the distortions about the ability of fossil fuels to secure America’s energy future.

Once upon a time (well, actually, only 4 short years ago) Congress and the White House offered bipartisan strategies for establishing national policy to address greenhouse gas emissions. Both Obama and Romney had it right back when they were vocal about the necessity of addressing climate change. Indeed, Obama successfully campaigned in ’08 on a platform of progressive carbon pricing: a carbon emissions cap, with 80% of the proceeds from selling carbon emission permits refunded back to families in the form of tax relief, with the remaining $15 billion/year used to finance the infrastructure investments needed to move us into the sustainable energy future. It’s refreshing that some conservative think tanks are still discussing the merits of carbon pricing as one component of a national climate change policy. We’ll have many new members of Congress after November 6. Let’s hope the 113^th Congress shows more leadership.

When the candidates for President of the United States leave a crucial issue like climate change out of their campaigns and debates they show a critical disregard for the importance this issue will have in shaping our nation’s future and influencing our economic health and national security. Further, they miss an important opportunity to inform voters on both the challenges and opportunities posed by addressing climate change, and what those impacts mean for communities and families across the country. As a nation we need to be exploring and investigating all the various options for addressing America’s climate challenges, but we cannot successfully do so when the people we look to lead our nation seem dismissive of the critical nature of those challenges.

Climate change poses dangers to our security, economy, public health, and resources. Rising sea levels threaten the 53% of Americans who live within 50 miles of the coast. The possibility of an ice-free Arctic means new trade and security issues for the U.S. and other nations. The greater frequency and intensity of droughts, heat waves, and wildfires endanger our crops, water supply, health, and safety. In 2011 alone, the drought and heat wave across Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, southern Kansas, and western Louisiana cost an estimated $12 billion and led to 95 deaths, and the wildfires in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona consumed millions of acres of land and destroyed more than 1,500 homes. These are crucial national and global issues, and the approaches we take to address them will affect our country’s well-being for decades and centuries to come.

We know that policy decisions that are informed by objective scientific knowledge are essential to our ability to mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change – decisions on energy use, building design and city infrastructure for extreme weather, public-health prevention during heat waves, identifying more or less vulnerable crops, and more. The scientific community is standing at the ready to provide that knowledge.

We are already feeling the effects of a warming world, and putting off until tomorrow what we should do today will only increase our risks and the cost of solutions. These critical issues require urgent attention, and the price of silence may be a heavy one.

Silence on climate issues over the past few years is a real problem. The more time that passes before the US enacts a policy to address climate change and takes action, the higher atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels rise. This is exacerbating the impact of climate change and edging us closer to the tipping point beyond which changes will become irreversible.

At the moment, a so-called “Frankenstorm” is bearing down on the East Coast of the United States. As Hurricane Sandy moves northward from the Caribbean, it is interacting with powerful jet stream winds that are boxing Sandy in along the coast. Blocking patterns such as this have appeared with greater frequency and intensity in recent years, which some scientists have attributed to the loss of Arctic sea ice as a result of global warming.

The 2012 sea ice melt season, which recently ended, saw sea ice extent, volume, and other measures all hitting record lows. The large expanses of water this opens up absorb sunlight and add heat and moisture to the atmosphere, helping to alter weather patterns. According to the Capital Weather Gang, the North Atlantic Oscillation, which is a measure of this blocking flow, “is forecast to be three standard deviations from the average – meaning this is an exceptional situation.”

The climate silence is also damaging our reputation in the global community. Because we have failed to enact a policy, some of my colleagues are advocating for legislation to authorize the Secretary of Transportation to prohibit US airlines from complying with EU aviation law on emissions. This would set the disturbing precedent of undermining the international rule of law and open the door to other nations’ legislatures using the same tactic regarding US laws with which they disagree.

Democrats in the House tried to do something about this back in 2009 when we passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) in an effort to cap emissions at reduced levels over time and provide incentives for the development of a clean and green energy economy. I often hear from innovative Silicon Valley firms regarding their work in this area. They want to take the international lead in the development of "clean tech" but are frustrated by the lack of incentives, and even disincentives, in our country to develop renewable energy.

Unfortunately, big fossil fuel companies waged a disinformation campaign to create “doubt” about climate change and the role of fossil fuels in causing it and used political influence to kill ACES and other climate efforts. Exxon has paid 40 organizations to create “doubt” about the settled science of climate change, using some of the same public relations people that the tobacco companies used to create “doubt” about the health hazards of cigarettes. According to an American Petroleum Institute memo “Victory will be achieved when average citizens ‘understand’ uncertainties in climate science.’” And as recently as October 26, 2012, Chevron donated $2.5 million to the “Congressional Leadership Fund,” a SuperPAC with close ties to Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner.

This is an important moment in the history of our country. A recent survey by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication found that, despite the industry’s efforts, more than half of Americans now believe global warming is a result of human activities and is worried about the problem. Fortunately, there are things we can do to address this problem, by reducing emissions through greater energy efficiency and the use of renewable energy sources.

Now is the time for policy makers and political leaders to build on that sentiment and to take steps to reduce the impact we are having on the climate. Silence cannot be a long term strategy.

(These comments were co-written with Rose Braz, climate grassroots director, Center for Biological Diversity.)

Put the deck chairs here? Or place them over there? No, really, we want to know where we can watch that lovely massive iceberg break off from Greenland.

If the Titanic had hosted this year’s presidential debates, seating arrangements might have been a hot issue. Global warming, on the other hand, would probably still have gotten the cold shoulder. But this troubling, frankly irrational, climate silence raises an even larger issue: If leaders do start discussing our planet’s most pressing problem, what should they say?

We have two fundamental recommendations:

First, any climate change conversation must highlight the steep price of inaction. Recent polls show that Americans are increasingly aware of the link between climate change and extreme weather. But that connection is still underreported and underappreciated – and absolutely critical to understanding why we must act.

Hurricane Sandy, the hybrid “Frankenstorm” now menacing the East Coast, offers an example of the kind of catastrophic storms we’re likely to see more of in a warming world. That’s because climate change has huge impacts on the hydrological cycle, increasing the risk of flooding and intense precipitation. That hydrological effect has a flip side: Climate change also increases the risk of events like this year’s horrific drought, which drove up food prices and brought down natural disaster designations on more than half the counties in America. Much of the globe is already suffering from climate change. One in every 100 humans on earth became a forced migrant last year, according to a new report from the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and climate change often worsened their plight. Thousands of Vietnamese, for example, are being driven from their homes by recurrent flooding in the Mekong Delta – a not-so-natural disaster created by climate-change-driven sea-level rise.

Second, (true) leaders should focus the indispensable role of the Clean Air Act and other successful environmental statutes in fighting greenhouse pollution.

The Clean Air Act’s effectiveness was underscored in a report released last week by the nonprofit Resources for the Future (RFF). The United States, the report found, is nearly on track to meet the emissions reductions goals we agreed to at the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit – and the Clean Air Act is playing a major role. The Copenhagen cuts are, of course, profoundly inadequate given the urgency of the climate crisis, and have serious enforceability issues. The truth is that we have to cut emissions much faster to have any chance of averting the worst effects of climate change. It’s also true that other factors have helped reduce carbon emissions. Local and regional efforts to cut pollution are playing important roles. A far more problematic contribution comes from the rise of natural gas, which depends on fracking, an extraction process that can pollute our air and water and release large quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse pollutant. But the RFF report’s most surprising – and heartening – finding is that Clean Air Act regulations will help America reduce carbon emissions to a greater extent than would have been achieved through passage of the doomed Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. That bill, by the way, would have effectively ended use of the Clean Air Act to fight greenhouse gas pollution.

The moral is clear: our existing environmental statutes, passed with bipartisan support, are both indispensible and invaluable. Our leaders must push the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of the Interior and other agencies to use them more quickly, ambitiously and creatively to drive down greenhouse gas pollution from a greater range of sources.

National conversations focused on these two points may seem hard to imagine right now. But they are, in fact, inevitable. As rising temperatures and increasingly destructive extreme weather make the true cost of climate change more and more clear, our politicians will eventually find it impossible to avoid the iceberg in the living room. We just need to make sure they start talking – and start acting – while there’s still time to steer clear of catastrophe.

For a number of years, environmental issues in general, and climate in particular, have not been at the top of the public’s list of concerns. That is why the issue has been largely absent in this year’s campaign. The public is focused on jobs, economic growth, deficit spending on steroids, and the national debt. If our elected leaders had a similar focus, our economy would be in much better shape.

Attention directed at Washington-driven “climate solutions” is a form of waste and distracts from what should be Job 1: restoring healthy economic growth and fiscal integrity. The human impacts of economic stagnation over the rest of this decade will be far greater than the impacts of climate change, the cause of which is still not fully understood.

The lack of discussion during the campaign does not equate to a lack of action “to do something about it.” Improvements in energy efficiency continue to move us down the road of “de-carbonization” as does the abundance and use of natural gas, which will reduce emissions from power generation. Accelerating the switch from coal to gas will do more than ill-conceived legislation.

The debate over climate change has been going on for more than two decades. What more is there to say? Any discussion during the campaign would simply be repetitious. To the extent that there is new knowledge, it does not reinforce the view that human activities are the primary cause of climate change or that there is an urgent need to take some mitigation actions that would burden the economy with hundreds of billions of dollars in unnecessary costs.

What we know is that the dire predictions of the past have not come about, although climate advocates will be quick to blame fossil energy use for Hurricane Sandy. The models on which advocates base their faith remain seriously flawed. In a recent discussion about the lack of warming for 16 years, Phil Jones of East Anglia University admitted that we really don’t understand natural variability. If that is not better understood, it is impossible to lay the blame for warming between 1976 and the 1990s, or over the past century, on human activities.

The crux of the human causality argument is that increases in greenhouse gas emissions will prevent more solar radiation to be reflected back to outer space. For that to happen there has to be an increase in atmospheric water vapor. That has not happened. In addition, more recent research has raised the possibility that that the climate pattern observed over the past 30+ years has been the result of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. There also is more robust information on the relationship between solar radiation and cloud formation.

It is unlikely that Congress in the near future will pass any legislation that forces a reduction in fossil energy use. The real danger is that EPA will continue its regulatory onslaught even though CO2 emissions have been falling and according to the EIA will not exceed their 1990 level until about 2035.

It is equally unlikely that international negotiations will be any more productive that past ones. EU nations that have led the charge for another Kyoto-like agreement are moving away from emission reduction actions because their economies are in crisis and will remain in such states for many years to come. These annual climate meetings are nothing more than a way to keep climate bureaucrats and hand-wringing advocates employed.

If the UN and others were really interested in taking positive action to slow the growth in greenhouse gas emissions, they would focus on global poverty. About 1.6 billion people have no access to commercial energy, live in devastating poverty, and burn the most polluting forms of energy. We can help change their condition but haven’t. The Millennium Challenge has turned out to be nothing more than pious rhetoric. As these people pursue a higher standard of living they will consume more energy than they do today. Helping them develop the capacity to use today’s energy technology instead of yesterday’s will do more to influence emission growth than the path that has been advocated since the Rio conference 20 years ago.

Our national leaders' failure to address emissions that accelerate changes in the global climate, is comparable to refusing to have a termite inspection on your home or business. You can deny the science of termite inspections, but when termites come you may be lucky and get them first, or their infestation may be so intense, you might lose your building. So as weather patterns become more intense, heat swings become common, sea level rise threatens our cities, along with harsher droughts -- we now are exposed to greater losses of life and property, losses in food production with increases in pest infestation, higher water loss and predictability. The carbon-intense industries mounted a well-funded disinformation campaign using benign-sounding front groups. The Congressional attempt in over 1100 pages to make the cure 'complicated and unequal' spooked the political middle while the more limited 100 page bipartisan cap and dividend proposals were cast aide as too little-to-late. And now in a more intense Presidential fight, the Republican contender is against everything the sitting President was for, even though he supported environmental and greenhouse gas mitigation programs as Massachusetts governor.