If you want the headline, it is that Keansburg is still reeling from Sandy. But it’s a headline that doesn’t scream at you when you first roll into town. As I drove down the Jersey Turnpike, I had in my head the iconic images of Sandy’s immediate wake — streets filled with sand, rollercoasters sumerged in water. That stuff is all gone. But that doesn’t mean things are OK. Not by a long shot.

I arrived around 9:45 am and headed for the beach, figuring that would be the place of worst damage. The first thing I saw was a sign of hope.

The amusement park was full of construction projects, but it looked like the kind of thing that might happen any year in the normal course of getting ready for the summer crowds. I talked to one restaurant owner who said he’d been open for a while, and a construction worker who told me he was looking to find a condemned house to buy, gut, and rebuild. He sounded hopeful. Out of the rubble emerges economic opportunity, I thought to myself.

From the beach I drove 8 blocks or so to the St. Marks Center for Community Renewal, where I was meeting Alyssa Durnier of Occupy Sandy, one of the key groups helping with recovery efforts, and the recipient of the Forecast the Facts donations.

We quickly hopped in Alyssa’s truck and headed out for a tour. As we cruised around the streets, the first thing that caught my eye were the piles of rubble. They weren’t particularly dramatic. Just a mess of boards and trash bags and other crap. But they were everywhere. This, I realized, was what remains when people have to gut their houses because everything inside has been destroyed.

Alyssa pointed out which streets had been underwater. In many places, water lines were still evident. We stopped to say hello to some guys doing construction work (Alyssa seemed to know everyone) and it dawned on me that every single person we spoke with or saw on the street, was engaged in some kind of construction or cleaning or rebuilding project. I mean everyone. One guy patching a roof. Another woman dragging tree limbs off her yard. Another one moving piles of trash. It’s the kind of thing that you would expect in the weeks after a big storm. But six months later? The water has long been gone from Keansburg, but for residents, the months since have been one continuous digging out project, which is not even close to being done.

One of the misleading things about a town that’s been flooded is that the houses are generally still standing. At least that’s the way it was in Keansburg. But just because a house is erect doesn’t mean it’s liveable. Alyssa called up a friend to show me what his home looked like. The bottom floor was gutted and full of mold, and the water had actually moved the house 4 inches off of its foundation.

I asked about insurance, with heartwarming All State commericals somewhere in the back of my mind. But if there is a place where insurance agents show up the day after a storm with a helping hand and a big check, it’s not Keansburg. Everyone I talked to had a story about how their insurance was dragging their feet, refusing to pay, or offering tiny sums that wouldn’t begin to address the probelm. And while government money has been allocated to help people out, according to Alyssa, none has arrived as yet.

Keansburg is not a wealthy town, at least not the sections I found. And in many cases, people are simply not going to have the resources to rebuild. Alyssa mentioned several people who had just moved away, deciding it was easier and cheaper to just start over somewhere else. Some landlords had taken a different approach, slapping a coat of paint on a house and putting it up for rent again, without actually doing anything to take care of the mold or structural problems. In any case, a lot of the houses affected by the storm still lay empty, and will eventually just have to be knocked down. For now they stand as a ghostly memorial to what the town looked like before the storm.

Halfway through our tour, Alyssa’s truck broke down, apparently not an uncommon occurence. She seems to spend every waking hour doing some kind of recovery work, so hasn’t had the time to fix whatever is wrong with her pickup. We left the truck near her friend’s house and walked back to the community center, which shares a driveway with a church. As we cut across the lawn, Alyssa nonchalantly mentioned that we were walking over the church graveyard. All the stones had been washed away by the storm.

The graveyard’s disappearance seemed emblematic of what a disaster like Sandy wreaks. We cannot predict all the things that go horribly wrong when a town is submerged by 10 feet of salt water. Rebuilding will take years, not months. And in the process, some part of the town’s essence is washed away, never to return.

So yes, Keansburg is still reeling from Sandy. My guess is that the town will forever divide its history between before and after Sandy. Thankfully there are people like Alyssa Durnien who are working hard to build a bridge between those two eras. But she is going to need a lot of help. In dealing with a world defined by climate change, we all will.

At Forecast the Facts, we called that refusal climate silence, and during the campaign, thousands of Americans, dozens of organizations, and numerous pundits joined us in doing so. But in the wake of the President’s reelection, and an acceptance speech in which he talked about “the destructive power of a warming planet,” there is a temptation to claim victory. Unfortunately, such a claim would miss the point entirely.

When we launched ClimateSilence.org, we did so with a specific analysis idea in mind. Before the campaign, we conducted exhaustive research into what the candidates had been saying about climate change, both during the presidential race and throughout their careers. One thing became immediately clear — the candidates were talking about climate change. President Obama, in particular, was diligent in mentioning climate change just enough so that no one could say that he wasn’t saying the magic words. And he was careful to talk about it almost exclusively to highly targeted communities — students and hardcore progressives — so he wouldn’t alienate any of those swing voters who his advisers believed would be turned off by an honest discussion of the problem.

But while the President would occasionally mention climate change on the campaign trail, there were two things that he (and Governor Romney) were totally unwilling to say:

1. Our nation has been wracked by extreme drought, wildfires, and floods fueled by climate change.

2. To avoid catastrophic global warming, we need to keep 80% of known oil and gas reserves buried in the ground.

In plainer terms, the President consistently refused to explain that the effects of climate change are hitting us right now, or offer any serious blueprint about how we can solve the problem.

I cannot imagine any unemotional assessment of the Obama campaign, or his acceptance speech, that contradicts this evaluation. Time and again the President refused to link climate change to the very real, very immediate destruction of extreme weather. And he had plenty of opportunities: When the Midwest was struck by the nation’s worst drought since the Dust Bowl, when Colorado was racked by unprecedented forest fires, and most notably when Hurricane Sandy came crashing through the campaign’s final week.

On energy policy, the President’s rhetoric was so far away from an honest assessment of where our country needs to go that it would be laughable if it wasn’t so enraging. His “all-of-the-above” strategy is more accurately described as “more-of-the-same.” And in evidence of how unwilling the President was to level with the American people, he regularly attacked Mitt Romney for saying in 2003 that coal kills people, even though he, his campaign staff, and most of America (including coal miners) knows full well that coal does, in fact, kill people.

Many Obama partisans, particularly in the environmental community, defended the President’s rhetoric throughout the campaign, saying that we should focus not on what the president says, but rather what he has done, and thus what we believe he will do in the future. On this point, it’s important to reiterate something we have said from the beginning of the campaign: we do not think that just talking about climate change is enough. What is needed is bold action, and that will require overcoming any number of practical and political challenges.

But it is also true that what the President (and by extension all those in power) says about climate change (or really any issue) has enormous significance. It really matters whether the President describes climate change as an urgent problem that is affecting Americans now, or something that might affect their children or grandchildren, or whether he says that slowing the rise of the oceans will be a huge challenge that will require massive changes in our entire society and deep sacrifice from the American public. To suggest otherwise is to throw away everything that we know about history or politics or basic human interaction.

When Winston Churchill rallied Britons in the face of a German bombardment, he did not sugarcoat the severity of the situation, nor did not diminish what would be required of his fellow citizens. Rather, he spoke honestly about the danger and called on people to be bigger, braver, and better than they thought they could be. (Anyone who questions whether such comparisons to war time are appropriate should go to Rockaway Queens right now, which can only be described as a war zone.) Nothing less than such a clarion call is required on climate, and the President has refused to offer one since the failure of cap and trade and the now well-publicized decision by his advisers in 2009 to stop talking about climate change.

The President’s refusal to seriously discuss the issue almost guarantees that our nation will not respond with the intensity and urgency required. We are in a crucial moment right now, when the President and the nation decide what we will focus on for the next four years. There are many important causes, ones that I feel deeply passionate about both politically and personally. But I am certain that, as Chris Hayes has said so eloquently, years from now, the only measuring stick that our descendants will use to assess this moment in history is what we did about climate change. And in that sense, the equation remains simple: words alone won’t save us, but silence seals our fate. President Obama’s campaign was defined by climate silence, and he has yet to break that silence. Which is why we won’t stop pushing until he does.

There are a lot of things that could be said about this sad state of affairs, most of them discouraging. If we take presidential debates as a proxy for what our society deems important, we appear to be downgrading climate change in reverse proportion to the threat it presents. The arctic is melting, the Midwest is parched, and the West is burning, yet neither candidate can even bring themselves to say why as they explain to the nation why they should be its next leader.

It would be easy to go on along these lines, but the only conclusion that matters is this: the refusal of the candidates to discuss climate change is a clarion call for anyone who cares about the fate of humanity. We have no choice but to redouble our efforts in demanding that our politicians, corporate leaders, and the media recognize that climate change is the single greatest threat to our economic well being, our health, our national security, and every other aspect of “life as we know it.”

The conventional wisdom of today says there is little hope of meaningful action on climate change in the next four years. The conventional wisdom of 1929 said that older or disabled Americans would have nowhere to turn for support but their families. The conventional wisdom of 1953 said that black children and white children would never sit in the same classrooms. Conventional wisdom always looks rock solid, until it crumbles.

For the past two months, members of Forecast the Facts, Friends of the Earth, Public Citizen, Energy Action Coalition, and other groups have been protesting the Climate Silence of both candidates. Many of those members will continue that protest today. Across the internet, people are taping over their profile pictures with Climate Silence duct tape. You can participate by going to our Twibbon page or our online action center. And in Florida, young people are marching to the debate location to demand action on an issue that will define their future.

There are some people who think that now is not the time for a message that holds both candidates accountable for their refusal to address the defining issue of our time. Their argument is simple: a second Obama term would be immeasurably better for the climate than a Mitt Romney administration. The election is shaping up to be a nail-biter. Now is not the time for accountability, it’s the time for uncritical mobilization. I understand this point of view. It appears, like most conventional wisdom, as solid as stone.

But those who make that argument know full well that, if this past month’s election conversation is any indication, a second Obama term would not come anywhere near the kind of decisive action required to begin to address climate change. And it is in that light that we must remember that every struggle for progress — economic justice, civil rights, peace — has faced these same strategic questions. And each of those struggles has come to the same conclusion: the arc of history does not bend under the weight of conventional wisdom, it bends when conventional wisdom is ignored.

If we want future generations to look back at ours as the time when, to quote 2008 candidate Obama “the rise of the oceans began to slow,” it’s clear that the single most important thing we can do is to make climate change a voting issue, one that candidates at all levels of government feel that they cannot ignore. Chris Hayes, one of the few TV commentators to speak honestly about the scope of the problem, spoke powerfully on this point:

“The only way to get a sane climate debate in our national conversation is to create a cadre of activists and citizens and voters who will balance the ledger, who care as passionately about saving the planet from ruin as those on the other side do about their industry… because they see and understand just as viscerally as the other side, that, yes, this really is a life or death issue not for one industry or one region of one state but for the planet, and every single person we love who lives on it.”

Because we believe in creating that cadre, we are going to keep demanding for an end to Climate Silence. While we can’t guarantee that those in power will respond, one thing we can guarantee today, tomorrow, and every day hence: we will be heard. Please take a moment to join us: http://twibbon.com/support/end-climate-silence.

Fact No. 1: Climate change is already wreaking havoc in the U.S.

In the past four years, Americans have been struck by a barrage of climate-fueled disasters. From record heat waves to increasingly powerful storms, harvest-destroying droughts to unprecedented flooding, the impacts of climate change are now squarely being felt within our borders. But neither candidate has “connected the dots” in clear, straightforward language. Obama’s reluctance has been particularly notable: In recent speeches about Hurricane Irene, the Colorado wildfires, and this summer’s drought, the president made no mention of how climate change is exacerbating these “natural” disasters. This is a huge missed opportunity, as polls show that increasingly, extreme weather is (finally) convincing many Americans that climate change is upon us.

Fact No. 2: To avoid catastrophic warming, we have to keep 80 percent of known coal, oil, and gas reserves in the ground.

The “terrifying new math” of global warming, to borrow Bill McKibben’s powerful phrase, means we need an immediate and massive shift away from fossil fuels. But neither candidate is coming close to calling for such a transition. Instead, both have consolidated their talking points around a vacuous all-of-the-above energy policy that not only won’t slow climate change, but will actually speed the process up. Is there anything more Orwellian than hearing Obama acknowledge the reality of climate change in the same speech in which he promotes clean coal and 100 years of natural gas?

It wasn’t always this way. In the months after his election, Obama spoke powerfully about the realities of climate change and the need for action. And throughout 2008 and 2009, the president regularly called for large-scale legislative action. While Mitt Romney’s climate rhetoric never reached those heights, he has not always hewed so closely to the current Republican platform of climate denial. As governor of Massachusetts, Romney acknowledged the reality of climate change and even briefly signed on to a regional agreement to reduce greenhouse gas regulations.

Undoubtedly the “political realists” running the two campaigns have decided that talking about climate change is a political loser. And to help affirm that conventional wisdom, fossil fuel companies are pouring millions into this election to reaffirm our nation’s desperate need for oil, gas, and coal. But even so, it appears that voters haven’t gotten the memo. A recent survey [PDF] by the highly respected Yale Center on Climate Change Communication found that undecided voters — the ones on which the entire election is supposed to turn — tend to believe that global warming is happening and is caused by humans. They also want the next president and Congress to do more on the issue. Yet while Romney and Obama claim to be fighting tooth and nail for this magic middle, neither is willing to answer its climate concerns.

Since neither moral imperative nor political calculation has led the candidates to speak up, Forecast the Facts is joining with Friends of the Earth Action to help voters take matters into our own hands through a new campaign at ClimateSilence.org. We launched the site with two goals in mind. First, we wanted to chronicle the candidates’ collective descent toward mute acceptance of global calamity, to show just how far our national climate conversation has fallen. Second, and more importantly, ClimateSilence.org provides an opportunity for Americans concerned about the climate crisis to speak out and let the candidates know that they want to hear real, meaningful proposals about how our nation can respond.

People across political parties disagree on many things, but most concur that the job of the president is to explain threats to the public welfare and lead the country in tackling them head-on, especially when those threats put the very survival of our nation at risk. That is what Republican Abraham Lincoln did when he confronted a nation at war with itself. It’s what Democrat Franklin Roosevelt did when he rallied a nation beset by crushing economic collapse. Now, ClimateSilence.org is mobilizing voters to demand that Barack Obama and Mitt Romney follow suit on climate change. If you are one of the millions who recognize the urgency of real climate solutions, please add your voice to our call. Then keep an ear out for what the candidates don’t say on Wednesday night. If they aren’t talking about how climate change is impacting our country, if they’re ignoring the urgent need to shift away from fossil fuels, if they’re not offering a real plan to slow global warming — that’s climate silence. These days it’s disturbingly easy to hear, once you start listening.

Given the climate change-fueled storms, heat waves, droughts, and wildfires that have dominated the past year, global warming will undoubtedly be a “hot” topic at this year’s conference. But, amazingly, many broadcast meteorologists remain lukewarm to the subject: The majority of weathercasters, including many with AMS certification, don’t believe that humans are causing climate change, let alone that it’s dramatically shifting our weather patterns. These meteorologists are missing the opportunity to be journalistic heroes who can inform the nation about our increasingly poisoned weather.

For those weathercasters who want education on the subject, the conference will have plenty to provide, with panels like “Applying Climate Change to Google Earth,” “Climate Change and Ocean Stories,” and “Hot Topics for the Station Scientist.” But the source of the climate communication deficit is mostly not educational, it’s about politics. The ideological bent of some forecasters, and the pressures to avoid “controversial” subjects that might affect ratings, are leading some meteorologists to ignore science when airtime arrives. That’s why the staff of Forecast the Facts will be attending the conference, carrying a message from thousands of our members: that reporting on global warming is a professional and moral responsibility. Below are just a few of their powerful comments:

You have a captive audience and no other single spokesperson would be better to educate people so they can effect changes in their own lives and in how we as a nation or community address and deal with correcting this problem that impacts us all. – Peggy B., Ocean Isle Beach, N.C.

Surely as scientists you know the realities of climate change. We must share this scientific evidence with as many in the public as we can before it is too late. You have a unique position where you can make a real difference and educate the public to this ever dangerous reality. Please use factual evidence to educate our citizens about the difference between weather and climate and to explain the greenhouse effect so that it is easily understood. Thanks for taking on this vital task. — James L., Hardwick, Mass.

Everyone watches the weather and relies on local forecasting. I’d very much appreciate local forecasters/weather experts making the connection between climate change and current weather patterns, based on the latest data, and helping the public to distinguish between long-term variation and short-term variation. You can make a big difference in educating, motivating, and driving critical behavior change. — Henry K., Sparks, Nev.

These Forecast the Facts members are not alone. Most Americans want their meteorologists to report on climate change. According to a March 2012 Yale/George Mason survey, two out of three Americans believe that global warming is changing our weather and want to learn more. The survey also found that 58 percent of Americans [PDF] “would be interested in learning what my favorite TV weathercaster has to say about global warming.” Even those who aren’t expressly asking for that information are clearly in need. Over the past six years, 80 percent of Americans have been affected by extreme weather. Their local meteorologists are the ones who can help them understand what’s going on, and whether they should expect more.

Thankfully, some meteorologists have already heeded these calls. WLTX Chief Meteorologist Jim Gandy of Columbia, S.C., does a weekly segment called Climate Matters, which explores how global warming is affecting the planet and his own community. KMGH-TV Chief Meteorologist Mike Nelson of Denver and WBOC-TV Chief Meteorologist Dan Satterfield of Salisbury, Md., run popular blogs that contribute both breaking weather alerts and informative explanations of how humans are changing the weather. And others, like WPRI-TV meteorologist TJ Del Santo of Providence, R.I., have done stand alone segments on the climate change-fueled heat wave.

These intrepid reporters deserve our sincere appreciation; Forecast the Facts members have already been showing them love online, and we’re excited to convey our thanks in person this week. But too many meteorologists still fall far short of this ideal. If this past year has taught us anything, it’s that when meteorologists refuse to accurately report on climate change, they quite literally put their viewers at risk.

Forecast the Facts is a grassroots community that exists to ensure that Americans receive accurate information about climate change. The growing incidence of climate-fueled extreme weather makes our work more urgent, and polls suggest that the recent heat waves, droughts, and mega storms are convincing the public that global warming is here. But whether Americans get the full story about these climate impacts depends largely on how the nation’s broadcast meteorologists report on the subject. We should know a lot more about where their community is headed after this week’s conference in Boston, and we’ll be filing daily dispatches to keep the public apprised.

The facts of climate change are now blowing in the wind. But the question remains: How many heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and megastorms must we have before weathercasters start to forecast the facts?

It’s been a rough few weeks for the Heartland Institute, the “intellectual” nexus of the fossil fuel-powered machine that disparages climate science in the United States. Nineteen corporations have pulled more than $1 million in expected funding for the institute, leading President Joe Bast to ask attendees at the recent Heartland climate-denial conference whether they had a “rich uncle” who could help out. Seriously.

At a time when most news about climate change is bad, Heartland’s decline has been a rare bright spot. How did it come about? In the reductive rendering of the mainstream media, the narrative has become that Heartland simply overplayed its hand by launching a billboard campaign comparing people who believe in global warming to the Unabomber, one of the single dumbest PR moves in recent history. Others have gone deeper, pointing out that Heartland has been painting itself into the crazy corner for a long time, and its lies were bound to catch up with it eventually. In that view, Heartland’s demise was essentially inevitable.

The infamous Unabomber billboard.

While these narratives have elements of truth — the billboards were incredibly stupid, and Heartland has been lying for a long time — neither offers a full explanation because both deemphasize the crucial role of citizen action. Simply put, the post-billboard exodus of Heartland’s corporate donors would have been neither as big nor as fast if not for the actions of thousands of everyday Americans calling those donors to account. Indeed, it might not have happened at all.

For those who haven’t been closely following the saga, here is the basic chronology. In February, documents containing a list of Heartland funders were leaked to a number of bloggers by climate scientist Peter Gleick, who risked his professional reputation to expose the sources of Heartland’s support. Two days later, the organization I work for, Forecast the Facts, launched a campaign calling on all corporate funders of Heartland to withdraw their support, with our initial focus on General Motors. Within a week, more than 20,000 people, including 10,000 GM owners, had signed on. After adding their names to the effort, those citizen-activists then called GM, posted hundreds of comments on GM’s Facebook page, uploaded photos of themselves with their GM cars, showed up at events where GM’s CEO was speaking, and generally made it clear that they were extremely upset about GM’s Heartland association. After weeks of pressure, including considerable media coverage, GM pulled its support on March 28 — more than a month before the now infamous billboard went up.

Forecast the Facts isn’t an established player; our ability to influence General Motors was not due to our reputation. It was entirely the result of our active members, who organized around an idea and spoke in a louder voice than any single person or institution could.

Because GM’s pullout happened before Heartland’s Unabomber messaging fiasco — a key point that’s been overlooked by many media outlets — it offers the clearest demonstration of how citizen activism can impact corporations. There is literally nothing more valuable to a public-facing company like General Motors than its brand. And in the wake of the government bailout, GM has a great deal invested in building its environmental identity. Exhibit A: The Chevy Volt. Twenty thousand customers and potential customers pissed off about GM’s ties to climate-change denial represented a real threat to GM’s image makeover. Which is why GM’s CEO agreed to review the matter personally, and eventually decided that the company’s 20-year relationship with Heartland was just not worth the potential brand damage.

In the weeks following GM’s announcement, Forecast the Facts staff, together with partners at Greenpeace, contacted the rest of Heartland’s corporate donors to ask why they were still supporting climate-change denial. In doing so, we made clear that we were speaking on behalf of the 20,000 people who had signed on to the campaign. And our questions sparked conversations within many of those companies about whether the lobbying that Heartland did for them was worth the risk to their brands.

Then came the billboards. The companies that had already been thinking about leaving because of the aforementioned public pressure immediately did so. Another 150,000 people joined our campaign through groups including 350.org, SumOfUs.org, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Sierra Club. And again, these people did more than just sign a petition. Thousands posted on company Facebook pages and chipped in to fund billboards calling out remaining Heartland holdouts, hundreds made phone calls to corporate headquarters, and dozens showed up in person to protest Heartland’s conference. All of those actions sent a message to Heartland’s remaining donors: There are a lot of people who care about this issue, and your brand is at risk. In response, corporate supporters have continued to scurry for the exits.

I’ve asked a number of people why citizen activism tends to get short shrift, and I’ve gotten a lot of thoughtful responses. One of them stuck out as the most likely explanation: People like the idea that Heartland carried within it the seeds of its own destruction — that is, Heartland consists of a bunch of unhinged conspiracy theorists who mislead the public for a living, and they were destined to eventually destroy themselves because scientific truth inevitably wins. While that teleology is attractive, it ignores the fact that the truth only wins when enough people stand up on its behalf.

Institutions like Heartland don’t fail just because they lie to the public. If that were true, Heartland would have disintegrated a long time ago, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would be defunct, and the corporate-funded campaign to discredit science would no longer hinder our societal response to the climate threat. Institutions like Heartland only crumble when people speak up and say they are tired of being lied to, and provide a credible threat to whomever makes the misinformation possible — in this case, hypocritical corporate donors that profess to care about climate change while simultaneously supporting a group dedicated to the exact opposite purpose.

A shift in cultural attitudes and attendant policy changes will only come when enough people consistently, loudly, and unrepentantly reject climate denial and demand action. So when everyday people do exactly that, and their actions make an impact, they deserve to be credited. We need to reinforce the behavior that is our only hope for real progress on climate change.