Juliet Eilperin drops this vial of nitroglycerin into her latest Washington Post piece:

… according to several people familiar with his private remarks at the home of clean-tech entrepreneur Vinod Khosla, Obama expressed concerns about the political pain involved, saying that “dial testing” of his State of the Union speech showed that the favorability ratings “plummeted” when he vowed to act on climate change if Congress refused to do so.

Not exactly “profiles in courage.” Not exactly “the Environmental President.”

This may not come as a big surprise given how Obama’s once soaring rhetoric on the moral urgency of climate action has recently crash landed.

But what makes this particularly feckless is that dial testing is all but meaningless. Compared to using polls to determine political positions — a common if widely criticized practice — using dial tests to do so is like consulting your horoscope.

For those who aren’t political junkies, I recommend this introduction, “What Are Those Squiggly Lines on CNN Telling You?”

Dial-testing relies on hand-held dials that can be turned to register positive and negative reactions in real time. Participants in the focus group — 30 is a typical size — sit together and are instructed to continually adjust the dial to reflect how they react to a word, phrase, or sentence.

Here is a typical expert view of the value of dial group information:

Cliff Zukin, director of the public-policy program at Rutgers University and former head of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, argues that dial-testing is unhelpful and misleading. He points to the fact that the sample of voters is far smaller than even the tiniest poll.

“It has no scientific validity — it’s not a sample of anything that has generalized validity,” he says. What’s more, he argues, it introduces inaccurate numbers that assume a power of their own. “The problem with bad numbers is that people tend to believe their eyes.”

So the President is basing his climate policy decisions on something that has no scientific validity. Awesome. Perhaps next time it’ll be Tarot cards — or denier blogs, which are much the same thing.

Even worse, it’s entirely possible that respondents give a negative dial reaction for something that in fact works.

CNN’s focus group is run by Rita Kirk, who concedes:
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The United States and China announced on Saturday that they will work together and with other countries to “phase down” the use of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are extremely potent greenhouse gases. A global phaseout would be the equivalent of cutting 90 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping just finished a two-day meeting in California initially thought to be more of an unscripted chance for the two leaders to forge a personal relationship than a meeting with any specific policy agenda. This is Xi’s first meeting with Obama as the General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, which is the analogue to the Chinese presidency. Recently China has made news on plans to cut carbon emissions but then appeared to partially walk some of that news back. The fact that powerful greenhouse gases were on the agenda during their talks is a welcome sign. And if the so-called “Group of Two” regularly acts to reduce the use of substances that cause climate change, it makes it much more likely that the rest of the world will agree to do the same.

Congressional Democrats urged the President to bring up HFCs during the meeting in a letter on Wednesday. According to the White House, the specific agreement between China and the U.S. reads:

Regarding HFCs, the United States and China agreed to work together and with other countries through multilateral approaches that include using the expertise and institutions of the Montreal Protocol to phase down the production and consumption of HFCs, while continuing to include HFCs within the scope of UNFCCC and its Kyoto Protocol provisions for accounting and reporting of emissions.

HFCs are used in air conditioning, refrigeration, and if released, stay in the atmosphere for 15 years. Their use has skyrocketed as a replacement for chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the ozone-destroying compounds whose production was banned in 1990 through a global agreement known as the Montreal Protocol. This agreement was signed in 1987 and required reductions in CFC use but an amendment in 1990 required a complete phaseout. Every country in the world is a party to this agreement. At the time, experts saw HCFs (and HCFCs, which were eventually regulated under the Montreal Protocol) as “one of the best substitutes for reducing stratospheric ozone loss.” In the 1990s, all new vehicle air conditioning systems began to use HFCs.

Yet HFCs are powerful greenhouse gases. While carbon dioxide is the most famous human emission that causes climate change, other so-called “super pollutants” are responsible for nearly half of global warming. HFCs are one of these super pollutants. Automobile manufacturers are aware that the air conditioning systems they sell contain substances that do this, and they encourage consumers to recycle their vehicles so that chemicals like HFCs can be reclaimed.

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Once upon a time there was a second term President who understood that the science was in on the danger posed by carbon pollution.

This visionary understood “heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods – all are now more frequent and more intense” as he made clear in his State of The Union Address: “We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence. Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science – and act before it’s too late.”

This leader spoke boldly of our moral obligation to act on climate in his second inaugural address: “We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations. Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms.

But, lo, a few months passed and he visited the Jersey Shore, much of which is still rebuilding from superstorm Sandy, yet his extended remarks made no mention whatsoever of climate change.

Then, just yesterday, he offered up these uber-lame comments at a California fundraiser:

When it comes to what I think will be one of the most important decisions that we make as a nation — this generation makes — the issue of climate change, we’re not going to be able to make those changes solely through a bunch of individual decisions that are made. We’re going to have to make some collective decisions about how much do we care about this when the science is irrefutable. And that means government is going to have a role to play in helping to organize clean energy research, and making sure that we’re taking into account the pollution that we’re sending into the air and that we’re encouraging new ways of delivering energy and using it more efficiently. We’re going to have a role to play.

“We’re going to have to make some collective decisions about how much do we care about this when the science is irrefutable…. We’re going to have a role to play”? What the hell happened to the guy who said:

But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

This latest Presidential gobbledygook sounds a lot like preemptive cover-your-ass DC-speak for “I’m going to approve the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.”

And what the heck does this even mean: “when the science is irrefutable”? The fossil-fuel-funded disinformers already refute the irrefutable and will do so long past the time it is too late to stop catastrophe. What happened to the guy who spoke of accepting “the overwhelming judgment of science”?

For the record, the National Academy of Sciences explained back in 2010 that man-made global warming is a “settled fact“:
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