How about a general purpose human rights bill, repealing DOMA, Don't ask don't tell, a reunciation of torture and prisoner's bill of rights and the restoration of habeus corpus all in one?

The idea is do mask any one disputed right behind others the congressmen on the fence can say they support.

We have behaved stupidly for many years and our quality of life is now threatened by the triad of peak oil, global warming and Chinese growth. Pretending that we can drill our way to endlessly cheap oil requires a unlimited faith in big oil crossed with complete disbelief in big oil's own data. Oil is going to harder and harder and more and more expensive to get.

Renewable energy and conservation is forever, every barrel of oil saved now is oil we will have later when we really need it and a hundred destabilizing petrodollars denied to the Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russias of the world. We fund most Islamic terrorism. Renewable is patriotic in a way a Hummer can only pretend.

Why should we subsidize roads over mass transit, cheap access and minimal clean-up requirements for drilling on federal land and waters, cheap insurance for nuclear but not the the capital intensive investment needed for solar, wind power and energy efficiency and conservation? Why shouldn't fuel efficiency be part of all building codes? The insurmountable environmental failure of our government for the last thirty years has been the uncertainty that has killed alternative energy. We need consistent support for alternative energy to florish.

When I was a child, science was what was saving us from the Russians, not a demon liberal plot to deny the rightousness of the V8. First we had the cigarette companies funding the "the evidence is unclear" idea with 20 years of success; money spread to the "it's junk science" groups, with cash from the Exxons of the world. Now the solution to any science result that identifies a problem with a product is not to seek to mitigate the problem or balance the cost and benefits but to attack the morals and motivations of the scientists themselves. The biggest thing Obama can bring to the table is a renewed commitment to truth over political expediency.

The usual mix:

1. falsehoods: The hockeystick temperature plot has been not shown wrong, the dataset is bigger than ever and the conclusion is the same. Wikipedia gives references.

2. False conclusions from complex interactions: Twenty years ago, the big complaint was that solar cycles weren't included, even as warming continued through a compete cycle, now models say an extreme slow cycle from the sun suggests a slowing of warming and legalese declares warming over. The models are just getting more accurate.

3. Annecdote: gee it was cold here or there.

4. The infamous medieval warming period. A historical annecdote. Gee it was warm for a while. Climate is the average statistical outcome of weather, single events neither prove nor disprove.

5. Roger Revelle died 17 years ago. A lot has been learned since. As a scientist I had doubts then also. Nowadays, the denier response is never: I have done a systematic study of all the data and developed a detailed model incorporating every physical interaction and it shows this. It's always, I don't believe that God would do this to me, it's all a plot. here's some potshots.

6. There is no question that CO2 is 150% of it's previous high. (While humans have been alive, we couldn't survive the dinosaurs climate.) We need to understand what CO2 is doing. Everything we can determine both in models and data is that it is changing the Earth's weather. If we do nothing this change is likely to cost us a lot. Our Southwestern cities depend on rainfall that will most likely go away. The dust bowl was 5 years of 8% less rain. The shift in the circulation zones is expected to produce a permanent 20% decrease. Our farms and populations depend on the weather we have now - any change and we have problems. If Africa and Middle East continue to dry we will have starvation and even more political unrest. We will pay for global warming one way or another, the question is finding the right balance in response. Doing nothing is a choice also with it's own costs. It is likely those costs are very high. Personally I think our response may be determined by peak oil first.

Using a false analogy with the Iraq WMD fraud to attack climate change is dishonest and built on an appeal to ignorance. The WMD fraud was based on microscopic scraps of secret evidence which even as it was tauted by the media was doubted by experts in the field (remember France and the UN?) and imploded at the first real data.

A better analogy would be to evolution or quantum theory, which began as narrow concepts but now are surrounded by vast and detailed data and supporting theory and calculation over a wide range of scales and disciplines, data all public and available. Yes, it helps to understand some mathematics, statistics, fluid mechanics, electromagnetics, chemistry, oceanography, fluid mechanics, biology and all that but with a little looking you can see how throughly picked over climate change concepts are and how well supported. Like evolution, each new discovery and improvement in model details (mostly driven by bigger computers) has buttressed the idea, a bad model would have fallen apart long ago.

If you say climate change theory is wrong - show me the more complete model and better and more extensive data to tell me what the real effect of the changes in CO2 concentration are, not just politically or philosophically inspired gut reaction.