Earlier this month, Mitt Romney at a fund-raiser with asshole coal-man Bob Murray:

“I finally figured it out,” Romney goes on to say.
Obama “is for all the sources of energy that come from above the ground, which means wind and solar.
I like all above the ground and below the ground, and we’ll develop those resources to get America free of our dependence on foreign energy.”

Such shit talk is is way-more than dumb-ass, it’s pretty-near criminal, and in just a short space of time, these kinds of tripe will be way-hated.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s sketch, ‘L’autruche (The Ostrich),’ found here).

However, we have to get there first, and the road to an obvious comprehension of climate change will be rocky at best.
The biggest problem humanity has ever faced in all of history is yet to be taken seriously.
A glaring example is the current meeting of climate folks in Bonn, Germany, to try and work up some workable agenda for next month’s Rio+20 in Brazil.
In fact, UN chief, Ban Ki-moon, says the whole process sucks and just too “painfully slow.”
From UK’s Guardian:

The pace was so sluggish, in fact, that Ban prevailed on the international community to agree to an extra five days of talks, from 29 May to 2 June.
The last-minute talks were aimed at getting at producing a face-saving outcome for a summit, which so far has failed to engage world leaders.
…
Negotiations were bogged down on minor details and narrow national interests which, Ban said, had overwhelmed far more important issue of setting the world on the right track for sustainable growth.
At one point, the negotiating text ballooned to an impossibly unwieldy 6,000 pages Ban said. It was currently about 80 pages.
Other UN officials involved in Rio preparations have also rued the failure of world leaders to fully engage with the summit.
But Ban added urgency to their concerns on Thursday.
“My message is that this is not the time to argue against any small, small items.
Please do not lose (sight of the) bigger picture,” Ban said.
“This is not the end.
Rio+20 is just the beginning of many processes so they should be flexible.
They should rise above national interests or specific group interests.”
He admitted the lack of urgency in the negotiations had drastically lowered expectations for Rio.
“There is some scepticism about whether this conference will be a success,” Ban said.
But he added that he remained optimistic.

Optimism flies in the face of deniers like big-bucks, hard-ass-coal-man Murray.

And as these people work in Bonn, more bad news seeps out from the cover of denial.
Via Raw Story:

In a report issued on the penultimate day of new UN talks in Bonn, scientists said Earth’s average global temperature rise could exceed the dangerous 3.5 C (6.3 F) warming they had flagged only six months ago.
Marion Vieweg, a policy researcher with German firm Climate Analytics, told AFP the 3.5 C (6.3 F) estimate had been based on the assumption that all countries will meet their pledges, in themselves inadequate, to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.
New research has found this is not “a realistic assumption,” she said, adding that right now “we can’t quantify yet how much above” 3.5 C (6.3 F) Earth will warm.

The earth is moving toward a nasty conclusion as all this shit blows in the wind.
And it’s all over, not just in the Arctic.
A glance at three new studies on warming in the southern hemisphere from RealClimate, which began like so:

In the Northern Hemisphere, the late 20th / early 21st century has been the hottest time period in the last 400 years at very high confidence, and likely in the last 1000 – 2000 years (or more).
It has been unclear whether this is also true in the Southern Hemisphere.

RealClimate is more technical that most, so we’ll transcribe only the bottom line or conclusions.
The first report, originally from the Journal of Climate:

The conclusion reached is that summer temperatures in the post-1950 period were warmer than anything else in the last 1000 years at high confidence, and in the last ~400 years at very high confidence.

The second study, from Geophysical Research Letters:

This result shouldn’t really surprise anyone: we have previously noted the incompatibility of O’Donnell et al. with independent data.
What is surprising, however, is that Orsi et al. find that warming in central West Antarctica has actually accelerated in the last 20 years, to about 0.8°C/decade.
This is considerably greater than reported in most previous work (though it does agree well with the reconstruction for Byrd, which is based entirely on weather station data).
Although twenty years is a short time period, the 1987-2007 trend is statistically significant.

And the third scientific paper:

Last but not least, a new paper by Zagorodnov et al. in The Cryosphere, uses temperature measurements from two new boreholes on the Antarctic Peninsula to show that the decade of the 1990s (the paper state “1995+/-5 years”) was the warmest of at least the last 70 years.
This is not at all a surprising result from the Peninsula — it was already well known the Peninsula has been warming rapidly, but these new results add considerable confidence to the assumption that that warming is not just a recent event.

Another one of those climate-related and continuing updates of the coming horror as in, considerably greater than reported in most previous work, which means, Hello, we’re at the front door, people.
Humanity needs to get its ostrich head/ass out of the frac-sand.