James Bruggers

@jbruggers

It's time for some fact-checking of comments made Thursday by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell to the editorial board of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

My colleague, Courier-Journal political writer Joe Gerth, captured the senator's fairly extensive commentary on climate change and whether there should be any political response to the heavy weight of evidence that greenhouse gases are warming the planet, with potentially catastrophic results.

McConnell, who is in a tight race with Kentucky Secretary of State Allison Lundergan Grimes, dismissed a question about whether climate change is a problem. "I'm not a scientist," he said. True, but lawmakers form opinions and make decisions all the time on a variety of issues without the benefit of having specific academic expertise. (For her part, Grimes has also been attacking the EPA and the president on coal and climate change).

Further, there is widespread agreement among climate scientists and scientific societies and academies that human activity is causing global warming. NASA has assembled some of those scientific statements on its website.

So while scientists are in pretty remarkable agreement about the basics of climate change, there is still a huge political debate over the subject, and that's mostly where the senator was on Thursday.

McConnell said:

The president made it quite clear, he was in New York at the Climate Summit a couple of weeks ago, that he thinks it's important to address global carbon emissions. Without even getting into the question of whether that is a worthy pursuit, I think it's noteworthy that nobody else is going to do that. The Indians and Chinese are building coal plants, the Europeans having started off in this direction, are now importing coal and the Australians, just a couple months ago, repealed their carbon tax, which is their version of what the EPA regulations are doing in this country. Our country, largely pursuing this alone, will be about as effective as dropping a pebble in the ocean, even if you believe global carbon emissions are an important thing to be addressed. It strikes me from at least our point of view, from a Kentuckian, Midwestern point of view, it's all pain for no gain, even if you believe this is a cause that needs to be pursued.

Let's unpack that a little bit.

President Barack Obama does believe it is important to address climate change. That's accurate.

But is it accurate to say that the United States is largely alone in the world, pursuing a solution to climate change?

In fact, some 196 nations are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and representatives from those countries have been meeting in recent years, leading up to a possible new international treaty to be hammered out in Paris next year, to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

Regarding China and India, the leaders of those countries did dodge the recent UN Climate Summit, but they sent delegates. And as for China anyway, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that it was decreasing its dependence on coal, even if India has, according to the Times, shown itself "nowhere ready to wean itself off coal." China is also a world leader in renewable energy investment, according to Bloomberg news.

Still, UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon managed to get a lot of commitments from other governments and businesses at the summit, illustrating how Obama is not "pursuing this alone," as McConnell suggested. As veteran journalist Andrew Revkin wrote in his respected New York Times blog, Dot Earth, the summit harvested a host of such pledges:

They range from a substantial new push to reduce and eventually eliminate forest loss to boosted investment in a planned clean-energy corridor in Africa. The difference between this summit and the meeting the secretary general convened in 2009 is enormous. The goal five years ago was to build momentum to "seal the deal" on a binding climate treaty — a fruitless task given the divisions among the world's nations — while this conclave was centered on a more modest, but more concrete, achievement — "to raise political momentum for a meaningful universal climate agreement [notice there's no mention of the word "binding"] in Paris in 2015 and to galvanize transformative action in all countries to reduce emissions and build resilience to the adverse impacts of climate change."

A list was produced, including:

-- European Union countries agreed to a target of reducing emissions 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030.

-- Leaders from more than 40 countries, 30 cities and dozens of corporations agreed to double the rage of global energy efficiency by 2030 through vehicle fuel efficiency, lighting, appliances and buildings.

-- Some 73 national governments signaled their support for pricing carbon.

MORE |McConnell touches on health care, foreign policy, coal in interview.

McConnell suggested Obama wants to go it alone. But the president has said the United States cannot do that. On that poknt, the president and the senator are actually in agreement. Obama is insisting that all countries participate in any new treaty. The last climate treaty, Kyoto, exempted developing countries from emissions cuts, which made it especially toxic politically in the United States.

It's not clear what will come out of this treaty process designed to replace Kyoto, which expired in 2012. But who could not agree that reaching an accord on a complex global challenge as daunting as climate change will be difficult, as the action by Australia illustrated. But it's not accurate to suggest that only the United States is taking climate change seriously.