By the end of the third decade of this century, all of American life - politics, international relations, our homes, our jobs, our industries, the kind of cars we drive - will be forever transformed by the climate and energy challenge.

Ideology trumps rationality. Most conservatives cannot abide the solution to global warming - strong government regulations and a government-led effort to accelerate clean-energy technologies in the market.

The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

As long as a handful of U.S. scientists, most receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry, get equal time with hundreds of the world's leading climate scientists, the public inevitably ends up with a misimpression about the state of our scientific understanding.

On moral grounds, I think that if you believe a certain outcome is a very possible outcome, you have an obligation to tell people that. With global warming, the probability of a bad outcome if we stay on our current emission trends is incredibly high. If you know a bad outcome is likely to happen, what right do you have not to communicate that? You go into a doctor's office, what are they going to do - not tell you the diagnosis?

Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier?

Conservative Denyers and Delayers are the main reason America lacks the consensus and the political will to take up the fight against catastrophic climate change.