At today’s pres­i­den­tial press con­fer­ence, New York Times reporter Mark Landler broke a trend that ran through the pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, a trend of silence about cli­mate change.  From the tran­script:

Q: Thank you, Mr. Pres­i­dent. In his endorse­ment of you a few weeks ago, May­or Bloomberg said he was moti­vat­ed by the belief that you would do more to con­front the threat of cli­mate change than your oppo­nent. Tomor­row you’re going up to New York City, where you’re going to, I assume, see peo­ple who are still suf­fer­ing the effects of Hur­ri­cane Sandy, which many peo­ple say is fur­ther evi­dence of how a warm­ing globe is chang­ing our weath­er. What specif­i­cal­ly do you plan to do in a sec­ond term to tack­le the issue of cli­mate change? And do you think the polit­i­cal will exists in Wash­ing­ton to pass leg­is­la­tion that could include some kind of a tax on carbon?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, as you know, Mark, we can’t attribute any par­tic­u­lar weath­er event to cli­mate change. What we do know is the tem­per­a­ture around the globe is increas­ing faster than was pre­dict­ed even 10 years ago. We do know that the Arc­tic ice cap is melt­ing faster than was pre­dict­ed even five years ago. We do know that there have been extra­or­di­nar­i­ly — there have been an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly large num­ber of severe weath­er events here in North Amer­i­ca, but also around the globe.

And I am a firm believ­er that cli­mate change is real, that it is impact­ed by human behav­ior and car­bon emis­sions. And as a con­se­quence, I think we’ve got an oblig­a­tion to future gen­er­a­tions to do some­thing about it.

Now, in my first term, we dou­bled fuel effi­cien­cy stan­dards on cars and trucks. That will have an impact. That will a lot of car­bon out of the atmos­phere. We dou­bled the pro­duc­tion of clean ener­gy, which promis­es to reduce the uti­liza­tion of fos­sil fuels for pow­er gen­er­a­tion. And we con­tin­ue to invest in poten­tial break­through tech­nolo­gies that could fur­ther remove car­bon from our atmosphere.

But we haven’t done as much as we need to. So what I’m going to be doing over the next sev­er­al weeks, next sev­er­al months, is hav­ing a con­ver­sa­tion, a wide-rang­ing con­ver­sa­tion with sci­en­tists, engi­neers and elect­ed offi­cials to find out what can — what more can we do to make short-term progress in reduc­ing car­bons, and then work­ing through an edu­ca­tion process that I think is nec­es­sary, a dis­cus­sion, the con­ver­sa­tion across the coun­try about, you know, what real­is­ti­cal­ly can we do long term to make sure that this is not some­thing we’re pass­ing on to future gen­er­a­tions that’s going to be very expen­sive and very painful to deal with.

I don’t know what — what either Democ­rats or Repub­li­cans are pre­pared to do at this point, because, you know, this is one of those issues that’s not just a par­ti­san issue. I also think there’s — there are region­al dif­fer­ences. There’s no doubt that for us to take on cli­mate change in a seri­ous way would involve mak­ing some tough polit­i­cal choic­es, and you know, under­stand­ably, I think the Amer­i­can peo­ple right now have been so focused and will con­tin­ue to be focused on our econ­o­my and jobs and growth that, you know, if the mes­sage is some­how we’re going to ignore jobs and growth sim­ply to address cli­mate change, I don’t think any­body’s going to go for that.

I won’t go for that.

If, on the oth­er hand, we can shape an agen­da that says we can cre­ate jobs, advance growth and make a seri­ous dent in cli­mate change and be an inter­na­tion­al leader, I think that’s some­thing that the Amer­i­can peo­ple would support.

So you know, you can expect that you’ll hear more from me in the com­ing months and years about how we can shape an agen­da that gar­ners bipar­ti­san sup­port and helps move this — moves this agen­da forward.

Q: It sounds like you’re say­ing, though — (off mic) — prob­a­bly still short of a con­sen­sus on some kind of — (off mic).

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I — that I’m pret­ty cer­tain of. And look, we’re — we’re still try­ing to debate whether we can just make sure that mid­dle-class fam­i­lies don’t get a tax hike. Let’s see if we can resolve that. That should be easy. This one’s hard. But it’s impor­tant because, you know, one of the things that we don’t always fac­tor in are the costs involved in these nat­ur­al dis­as­ters. We’d — we just put them off as — as some­thing that’s uncon­nect­ed to our behav­ior right now, and I think what, based on the evi­dence, we’re see­ing is — is that what we do now is going to have an impact and a cost down the road if — if — if we don’t do some­thing about it.

This is a wel­come change from the com­plete silence of the last few years, but falls well short of what the Amer­i­can peo­ple and the world deserve.

Sci­en­tists and engi­neers have been in con­ver­sa­tion with pol­i­cy­mak­ers for decades.  The pol­i­cy­mak­ers who reject cli­mate sci­ence will not be con­vinced by anoth­er com­mit­tee hear­ing with IPCC authors, or the next Nation­al Cli­mate Assess­ment.  Sci­en­tists and engi­neers have said what needs to be said: humans are caus­ing cli­mate change, the con­se­quences of this cli­mate change will be dra­mat­ic and dis­as­trous, the way to min­i­mize the dam­age is to reduce glob­al emis­sions of car­bon pol­lu­tion, and the US is one of the lead­ing car­bon pol­luters.  The sci­en­tif­ic con­sen­sus cov­ers quite a bit more than that, but that’s enough for Con­gress to act on, and that con­sen­sus has been sol­id for at least a decade.

Sci­en­tists cer­tain­ly have opin­ions about what poli­cies would work best to stop cli­mate change, but those are pol­i­cy deci­sions, and sci­en­tists and engi­neers are not the ones who need to reach a con­sen­sus about pol­i­cy.  We need Con­gress to find agree­ment (guid­ed by sci­en­tists, engi­neers, econ­o­mists, etc.), and we need the Amer­i­can peo­ple to reach and express their agree­ment that this is a priority.

Today is the first day of Cal­i­for­ni­a’s statewide trad­ing sys­tem for green­house gas­es.  Many Euro­pean nations are using emis­sions trad­ing to reduce their role in cli­mate change.  A sim­i­lar scheme passed the US House in 2009, but bogged down in the Sen­ate.  Con­gress could revive that deal any time, and if Major­i­ty Leader Har­ry Reid goes for­ward with his fil­i­buster reform plan, the deal would clear the Sen­ate.  But the teabag­ger House elect­ed in 2010 (and large­ly re-elect­ed last week) is unlike­ly to take it up.

Alter­na­tive­ly, there’s talk of a car­bon tax as part of nego­ti­a­tions over the fis­cal stair­case.  But get­ting a tax that’s a) large enough and b) used to fund use­ful things like pub­lic tran­sit and ener­gy effi­cien­cy and research and deploy­ment of new ener­gy tech­nol­o­gy will not be easy.  And it’s far from obvi­ous that sci­en­tists and engi­neers are the main peo­ple with lever­age on that matter.

That’s not to say sci­en­tists and engi­neers should sit the fight out.  As investor Jere­my Grantham writes in this week’s Nature:

I have yet to meet a cli­mate sci­en­tist who does not believe that glob­al warm­ing is a worse prob­lem than they thought a few years ago. The seri­ous­ness of this change is not appre­ci­at­ed by politi­cians and the pub­lic. The sci­en­tif­ic world care­ful­ly mea­sures the speed with which we approach the cliff and will, no doubt, care­ful­ly mea­sure our rate of fall. But it is not doing enough to stop it. …

It is cru­cial that sci­en­tists take more career risks and sound a more real­is­tic, more des­per­ate, note on the glob­al-warm­ing prob­lem. Younger sci­en­tists are obsessed by thoughts of tenure, so it is prob­a­bly up to old­er, senior and retired sci­en­tists to do the heavy lift­ing. Be arrest­ed if nec­es­sary. This is not only the cri­sis of your lives — it is also the cri­sis of our species’ exis­tence. I implore you to be brave.

The same advice goes for investors, busi­ness own­ers, farm­ers, coastal dwellers, food eaters, and even polit­i­cal leaders.

The time for silence is past.