But while national polls may show that the climate issue appeals to independents, the campaign is being fought in a small number of battleground states -- Colorado, Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and so on. At the briefing, the question arose whether the campaigns may have more detailed and granular analyses, suggesting that the issue won't actually help them in these critical swing states. Could that explain why they're ignoring climate?

The panel was having none of it. If anything, Bledsoe argued, many of the 2012 swing states ought to be better places for climate messaging, in light of the extreme weather they've experienced. "Colorado and New Mexico are two swing states that have experienced extreme wildfires," he pointed out. And "Florida is on the cutting edge of climate change for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which, extreme weather but also sea-level rise."

"We're reaching now the point where almost every state is getting some sort of extreme weather event that is off the charts, including that derecho that ripped across the country and went into Virginia," Romm added. He cited a recent poll from Yale University and George Mason University researchers, breaking down concern about global warming by U.S. regions. In the Midwest, for instance, the perception that droughts are getting more common has shot up 25 percentage points since March, to 66 percent.

So why, then, aren't politicians like President Obama taking up climate change messaging to win votes? Taylor said that following the economic collapse of 2008, this was a more or less a conscious strategy. "By the spring of 2009, with the fiscal crisis, there was a decision made, and adopted, not to talk about climate change," she related. "That was adopted by the majority of the environmental groups, and by the White House. I was at that meeting. Bill McKibben stood up and said, 'This is a mistake -- it's going to come back and haunt us.'" Talking about clean-energy jobs was fine, she continued. But the "C-word" was a no-go.

Romm went further. Asked if there was some individual giving politicians bad strategic advice, he commented, "I will absolutely blame someone. Because I have relatively high confidence, based on conversations I've had, that David Axelrod is the guy who shut down a lot of this talk. And even went up to the Hill and told the Dems not to message the climate science." Bledsoe added that the scarring experience of failing to pass the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in Congress probably led many Democrats to back away from the issue.

All three panelists agreed that while extreme weather gets Americans to care about climate change, if no solution is offered, people feel overwhelmed, and ultimately fatalistic. The way to get past this, explained Taylor, is to talk about the strength of American ingenuity, and its ability to solve the problem of global warming through new clean energy technologies. In the polling data she presented, 84 percent of Democrats found such a message convincing, as did 61 percent of independents -- even 46 percent of Republicans.