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The silence in these elections around climate change is rather stunning–until you consider the context. For the context (i.e., voters worried about jobs and the economy), check out the pre-election edition of Frontline by John Hockenberry that aired on PBS October 23 about the current state of the climate-change conversation in Washington. It tracks the thinning of the climate debate since the 2008 election, when Barack Obama and John McCain “agreed that climate change was a critical issue demanding urgent attention.” Part of the program describes the work of a reporter, Coral Davenport, who covers energy and environment for National Journal. Davenport, at one point, attempted to survey Republicans in Congress with three simple questions on climate change (Republicans, she says, because almost no Democrats will flat-out deny its existence). “Normally lawmakers love to answer questions,” she says, but when she tried to ask members for their views in person, “they literally ran into elevators.” (An online interview with Davenport by Azmat Khan is here. Links to Davenport’s work can be found here.) Legislators who say they believe in climate change risk being crushed by candidates backed by skeptics’ money. Ask former Rep. Bob Inglis (S.C.), a Republican climate-change believer, whom Arthur Allen interviewed for LAM in November 2011–he appears in the Frontline report.  Also on the program: A rundown of the efforts this year by the North Carolina legislature to chill debate about climate change. One geologist near the center of that drama, Stanley Riggs, of East Carolina University, points to the surf and says, “That ocean will dictate what happens. The ocean is gonna win.”

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Cap and trade legislation, aimed at reducing global warming, has not progressed very far in recent years. But James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, remains optimistic that Americans will find a way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. And in a recent interview with Eliot Spitzer on Current TV, he offered an innovative approach to the problem.

“We should be collecting a fee from fossil fuel companies that gradually rises over time, and 100 percent of that money should be distributed to the public, not one dime to the government,” Hansen told Current TV. “If we did that, the people who do better than average in limiting their fossil fuel use will actually get more in this dividend than they would pay in increased energy prices.”

Is this a strategy for fighting global warming that conservatives could embrace? Spitzer thinks so. Of course, they would first need to agree that global warming is occurring. But, as Spitzer points out, a recent op-ed in the New York Times may offer some hope on that front. Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who had expressed concerns about global warming science in the past, has come to a new conclusion, based on careful analysis of temperature data.

“Call me a converted skeptic,” Muller wrote. ”Three years ago I identified problems in previous climate studies that, in my mind, threw doubt on the very existence of global warming. Last year, following an intensive research effort involving a dozen scientists, I concluded that global warming was real and that the prior estimates of the rate of warming were correct. I’m now going a step further: Humans are almost entirely the cause.”

Muller’s research is online here.

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According to the Buffalo News, there is a shortage of pussy willow branches in Buffalo, New York, which could put a damper on today’s Dyngus Day celebration. The News blames a number of 80-degree days in March for the shortage.

They say everyone is Polish on Dyngus Day, a holiday to celebrate the end of Lent. It has become the Polish-American answer to Saint Patrick’s Day in Buffalo. People celebrate their real or imagined Polish heritage by splashing each other with water, tapping each other with pussy willows, eating pierogies, and dancing to polka music in the old abandoned railroad terminal. See a video on Buffalo’s Dyngus Day celebrations here.

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