It looks like Romney’s mockery of Obama’s 2008 pledge of climate action had one positive impact.

At the 2012 Democratic National Convention, President Obama said tonight to a large national TV audience:

And yes, my plan will continue to reduce the carbon pollution that is heating our planet – because climate change is not a hoax.  More droughts and floods and wildfires are not a joke.  They’re a threat to our children’s future.  And in this election, you can do something about it.

Worth filling up a couple of shot glasses, I’d say — though repeating the denier “hoax” frame is not the way to debunk it.

Here’s what leads up to it:

You can choose the path where we control more of our own energy.  After thirty years of inaction, we raised fuel standards so that by the middle of the next decade, cars and trucks will go twice as far on a gallon of gas.   We’ve doubled our use of renewable energy, and thousands of Americans have jobs today building wind turbines and long-lasting batteries.  In the last year alone, we cut oil imports by one million barrels a day – more than any administration in recent history.  And today, the United States of America is less dependent on foreign oil than at any time in nearly two decades.

Now you have a choice – between a strategy that reverses this progress, or one that builds on it. We’ve opened millions of new acres for oil and gas exploration in the last three years, and we’ll open more. But unlike my opponent, I will not let oil companies write this country’s energy plan, or endanger our coastlines, or collect another $4 billion in corporate welfare from our taxpayers.

We’re offering a better path – a future where we keep investing in wind and solar and clean coal; where farmers and scientists harness new biofuels to power our cars and trucks; where construction workers build homes and factories that waste less energy; where we develop a hundred year supply of natural gas that’s right beneath our feet.  If you choose this path, we can cut our oil imports in half by 2020 and support more than 600,000 new jobs in natural gas alone.

Yes, that’s an “all of the above” energy policy. So down one drink and put the other down the drain.

Beats mockery, though. Comments?

UPDATE: Good speech with a great finish. I’d still give Bill Clinton props for the best speech of both conventions. Gov. Jennifer Granholm had the best line of the night:

In Romney’s world, the cars get the elevator; the workers get the shaft.

I’m bringing back the question of the week. This one is inspired by a Christian Science Monitor story, and this  stunning map  of US drought conditions:

The story, “Drought threatens to darken Obama reelection prospects,” opines in its sub-hed:

With nearly two-thirds of the US enduring drought conditions, food prices are expected to jump ahead of the November election. That could add to voter anxieties about the economy.

Certainly one of the biggest impacts of warming-driven drought and extreme weather is food insecurity (see “Climate Story of the Year: Warming-Driven Drought and Extreme Weather Emerge as Key Threat to Global Food Security” and links below).

And this drought is (almost) as brutal as it gets:

The PDSI [Palmer Drought Severity Index] in the Great Plains during the Dust Bowl apparently spiked very briefly to -6, but otherwise rarely exceeded -3 for the decade (see here). Nearly half the country is now -3 or worse.

If you want to see how these drought indices stack up against the historical record since 1895, click here. For the nation as a whole, the PDSI is in the lowest 1%. Over much of the Midwest is just about the worst drought ever.

The Monitor story explains the impact of the current drought on crops:

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Stanford public opinion expert Jon Krosnick and his colleagues analyzed the 2008 presidential election and the 2010 congressional election.  They found:

“Democrats who took ‘green’ positions on climate change won much more often than did Democrats who remained silent,” Krosnick said. “Republicans who took ‘not-green’ positions won less often than Republicans who remained silent.”

I asked Krosnick by email about the implications of his research for the President who has all but dropped “climate change” from his vocabulary.  Krosnick answered:

Our research suggests that it would be wise for the President and for all other elected officials who believe that climate change is a problem and merits government attention to say this publicly and vigorously, because most Americans share these views.  Expressing and pursuing green goals on climate change will gain votes on election day and seem likely to increase the President’s and the Congress’s approval ratings.

I’ve talked to senior officials from the Administration as well as journalists who cover them — and both groups report that team Obama has bought into the nonsensical and ultimately self-destructive view that climate change is not a winning issue politically (see “Can you solve global warming without talking about global warming?).

And it is nonsense.  Prof. Edward Maibach, Director of George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, made the exact same point in a Climate Progress guest post last month: “Polling Expert: Is Obama’s Reluctance to Mention Climate Change Motivated by a False Assumption About Public Opinion?”

At the end, I repost yet again the umpteen polls that support this painfully obvious conclusion.  This new election analysis supports earlier polling analysis by Krosnick, which found:

“Political candidates get more votes by taking a “green” position on climate change – acknowledging that global warming is occurring, recognizing that human activities are at least partially to blame and advocating the need for action – according to a June 2011 study by researchers at Stanford University.”

Krosnick’s new study, “The Impact of Candidates’ Statements about Climate Change on Electoral Success in 2008 and 2010: Evidence Using Three Methodologies” here.  Let’s look at some more of its findings,  particularly at the presidential level:

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