The Courier-Journal

The climate news is so gloomy it could make anyone go into denial.

Skeptics continue to refute science and facts that show how climate change is already happening, putting our weather on steroids and our future in peril.

And those who buy the science that places most of the blame on activities like burning coal and driving cars almost have to go into denial to avoid the need for antidepressant prescriptions.

All the while, heat-trapping gases continue to soar beyond levels not seen on Earth in at least 800,000 years, yet the politics of the issue remain hugely unsettled.

The latest studies include a trifecta of trouble:

• The new National Climate Assessment concluding today’s severe droughts, floods, wildfires and heat waves are being made worse by global warming. Kentucky and Indiana can’t escape climate disruption, either.

• The NASA research that found melting of massive ice sheets in Antarctica is almost certainly unstoppable, adding 4 to 12 feet to current sea levels in the coming centuries. Sorry, Florida.

• The group of retired generals and admirals concluding climate change has become a catalyst for global conflict that will get worse, with stresses over water, food and energy. Our military will be strained for decades.

We have but one Earth and its tiny biosphere, the only place in an unfathomably large universe where life is known to exist. But where is the leadership?

President Barack Obama and his Environmental Protection Agency are obligated under existing federal law to take action, and they have rightly been doing so, including promised controls on coal-fired power plants.

We all would be better off, however, if Congress could craft a path forward to curb climate pollution, build resilience, while also helping coal states like Kentucky and Indiana make the transition.

But leadership isn’t coming from Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell. The Senate Republican “leader” recently mocked Mr. Obama for talking “about the weather,” and called for coal use. That’s like demanding more smoking to fight lung cancer.

Worse, Mr. McConnell dished out sophomoric base bait when he said the president would get “cheers from liberal elites, from the kind of people who leave a giant carbon footprint and then lecture everybody else about low-flow toilets.”

Kentucky’s other senator, Rand Paul, has said he’s not sure anyone can explain global warming. Then there is McConnell’s likely opponent in the fall election, Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes , who tries to out-coal McConnell at every turn while offering only vague statements on global warming that could lose her support from her own Democratic base.

“The science of global climate change is real, and must be addressed,” she conceded in a letter to Stanford University, objecting to its endowment policies that sold off stock in coal mining companies. But what does that mean, really?

Her answer was more research on burning coal safely — a worthy suggestion, but one that falls far short of a meaningful response to the challenge ahead.

Stonewalling will have far greater long-term economic consequences.

If political leaders won’t listen to the Sierra Club, or any number of businesses that grasp what’s at stake, maybe they can listen to those generals and admirals who only have safeguarding Americans on their minds.

They wrote they are “dismayed that discussions of climate change have become so polarizing and have receded from the arena of informed public discourse and debate.”

Time and tide, they concluded, “wait for no one.”

Our failure will bring future generations’ condemnation upon all of us. All they will see is the denial.