All snark aside, you're doing a great job in keeping supposedly nerdy issues on the front page over there. Do you have an explicit mandate to do so, or is that your own editorial choice?

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

But he's doing the same equivocation as usual, in effect: Well, we need to look into this and figure out the right thing to do.  Wouldn't want to take steps that were the wrong thing.

Like try to impose regulations in the US on carbon emissions, etc.  I predict that this administration will, as usual, do absolutely nothing.  Well, maybe make more speeches about that hydrogen car.  Bush wanted more money for the Healthy Marriage Initiative than even for that torte-dans-le-ciel scheme.

No way.  People need to see the M.O.  Not everyone does, even on the liberal side;  there are quite a few dense ones out there, and they need to see that it extends to everything.

a new additive to aircraft fuel so planes will spray the clouds from above with happy shiny particulates thus creating a shield around the world?

Don't worry, US technical ingenuity will find a way!

Maybe the pols understand the boiling-frog problem.  

A) the onset curve for climate change effects is initially slow, so the great addled public doesn't care -- if it doesn't make their house burn down tomorrow, or if it just means a few tens of thousands of unimportant Asian people getting killed by heavy weather events or an extra hundred thousand African kids starving over the next 5 years, then it doesn't matter and they don't want their tax dollars "wasted" on attempting to address the problem.  

B) the hysteresis is enormous in such a huge system as the planetary atmosphere and oceans, which means that even radical measures implemented today will not result in a perceptible improvement in a time frame suitable for the TV-viewer's impaired attention span, i.e. temperature extrema will go on spreading, extreme weather events will go on occurring, and the same addled public will say, Why O Why have our Useless Pols saddled us with these onerous carbon restrictions and rationing when we can see it is doing not a Blind Bit of Good?  Throw the Rascals Out!

So the politician says cannily, There is no political capital to be made from this situation, whereas there is filthy lucre to be obtained from taking big bribes from the dirty energy industries to spread soothing disinformation, and the public also likes the soothing disinformation because it reassures them that their all-important luxurious way of life need never change.  So the political capital is all to be had on the obscurantist or foot-dragging side of this issue (I am tempted to say "knuckle-dragging").  Whereas it is political suicide to tell people they must change their energy-squandering ways and then not show instant, visible beneficial results the minute demand reduction measures are implemented.

Unfortunately I do think that modern media/entertainment patters may have exacerbated our primate short-horizon problems (a kind of species-wide ADD).  There is perhaps some kind of mapping between forward outlook capability and the type of entertainment we consume -- the readers of 500 page novels issued serially in 20 volumes (zenith of the C19 novel) perhaps can manage a generation of forward outlook, but the consumers of 1-hour (actually more like 45 minute when you subtract commercial intrusions) TV shows or 90 minute theatrical-run movies might have a forward outlook of only a year or two.

I also will bet that the transition from agrarian to manufacturing activity as the occupation of the majority of the polity has shortened historical attention spans.  No farmer can survive without planning several years ahead and most farmers plan a generation ahead, intending to bequeath the family farm and fortures to a favoured son (very rarely a daughter alas).  The factory worker, particularly post-Taylorism, need only look forward as far as the next atomised, repetitive, disconnected task during daily activities, and to the next biweekly paycheque financially.  This shortening of the forward outlook is, I think, deeply undermining of any democratic potential in the polity.

We could argue whether the rank and file of agrarian labour (not yeoman farmers but serfs, peasants, coloni and the like) shared the forward outlook of their bosses and petty-bosses, but I suspect that some sense of the rationale behind their tasks must have seeped through.  The factory worker on the other hand is familiar with the bizarre and brutal vagaries of corporate decision making based on the next-quarter bottom line or the attractive inflation of stock prices.  Management does not set a better example.

But this is a blue-sky theory, I don't have anyone else's informed opinion to back it up.  It is always tempting to think that people may have been less stupid at some earlier epoch.  I mean, even the Soviets at least had 5-year plans, which compared to current corporate planning and strategy looks like wisdom of the ages.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...