I know, I know: If you support "adaptation" in the global warming debate, you run the risk of being mistaken for someone who opposes "mitigation." But I'm not one of those adaptation-only Bjorn Lomborg types.

I support both capping emissions, and also getting ready for climate change, because I believe the science is clear: We have to do something, fast, to prevent the worst outcomes; but we're already so far down the global warming path that there will be many changes we can no longer stop, and must live with - and so must prepare for.

But my question is, where is Barack Obama on all of this?

Late yesterday, reports started zinging around suggesting that the Obama transition team was ready to announce its energy and environment leaders.

By now it's clear they are the following: former New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection commissioner Lisa Jackson will head up the Environmental Protection Agency; current Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory director Steven Chu will become Secretary of Energy; and Clinton administration EPA head Carol Browner will fill a newly created post, that of White House "climate czar." In addition, Nancy Sutley, the current City of Los Angeles "deputy mayor" for Energy and Environment (and, of these four, the person with the thinnest Wikipedia profile), will come in as chair of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

All the pieces seem to be falling into place this week.

Even as renewable energy stocks continued to plummet along with the rest of the market—the PowerShares WilderHill Clean Energy Index, which seeks to represent the industry, has declined 37 percent this year—we're finally seeing some striking signals that at last things will be different when it comes to climate and energy policy.

As recently as last week, my colleague Sheril Kirshenbaum wrote here that while we're on the verge of a sea change, it was still unclear precisely how the incoming Obama administration would move on global warming.

by Sheril Kirshenbaum

It's not clear how the Obama administration will move on climate change, but they must focus on a single defining message: advancing national economic interests.

Just a week ago, Barack Obama addressed the nation that had just elected him the 44th President of the United States. When he named America’s greatest challenges, “a planet in peril” was a centerpiece. After the Bush administration’s eight-year war on our air, oceans, and wildlife, concerned citizens everywhere had justified reason to celebrate, feeling that they too had possibly won a great victory that night.

I mean, it's pretty staggering when you think about it: The campaigning George W. Bush in the year 2000 was more progressive on this increasingly pressing issue than the lame duck George W. Bush in 2008.

The major news from Bush's speech, policy-wise, is that he said we'll "stop the growth of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 2025"--or, just under two decades from now. But everybody who knows anything about this issue knows that would amount to running a completely unacceptable risk.

The good news is that amid calving ice shelves and new estimates from James Hansen suggesting that we've already passed the climatic tipping point, I'm sensing there may be an emerging new mood of unity out there on legislative action--at least if it passes a certain threshold.