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The evidence keeps piling up:

At least some of the weather extremes being seen around the world are consequences of human-induced climate change and can be expected to worsen in coming decades, a United Nations panel reported on Friday.

It is particularly likely that greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity have already led to more record-high temperatures and fewer record lows, as well as to more extremes of precipitation and to greater coastal flooding, the report said.

Whether inland flooding is getting worse because of human influence is murkier, the report said. Nor can any firm conclusion be drawn at this point about the human influence on hurricanes, typhoons, hail storms or tornadoes.

And where's the largest economy (U.S.) in the world (more than twice as large as the next economy - China) stand on this issue? It's nowhere to be found:

In 2008, both the Democratic and Republican candidates for president, Barack Obama and John McCain, warned about man-made global warming and supported legislation to curb emissions. After he was elected, President Obama promised "a new chapter in America's leadership on climate change," and arrived cavalry-like at the 2009 United Nations Climate Conference in Copenhagen to broker a global pact.

But two years later, now that nearly every other nation accepts climate change as a pressing problem, America has turned agnostic on the issue.

Though the evidence of climate change has, if anything, solidified, President Obama now talks about "green jobs" mostly as a strategy for improving the economy, not the planet. He did not mention climate in his last State of the Union address. Meanwhile, the administration is fighting to exempt United States airlines from Europe's new plan to charge them for CO2 emissions when they land on the continent. It also seems poised to eventually approve a nearly 2,000-mile-long pipeline, from Canada down through the United States, that will carry a kind of oil. Extracting it will put relatively high levels of emissions into the atmosphere.

"In Washington, 'climate change' has become a lightning rod, it's a four-letter word," said Andrew J. Hoffman, director of the University of Michigan's Erb Institute for Sustainable Development.

Yup. Completely absent in the global dialogue on global Climate Change is the U.S. All while the planet cooks.

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