We have more to fear from politics than from asteroids.

Sure, in the outgoing Obama Whitehouse. The Scientifically Challenged Trump 'Lights-On-Nobody-Home' whitehouse will scrap it at the advise of Mike 'Teach-The-Bible-In-Science-Class' Pence who gleefully anticipates and welcomes planet wide destruction as the biblical 'End of Times.'

Why is this a White House problem alone? Like global warming, an existential threat like an asteroid calls for all able countries to meet the challenge together.

Laughable. I guess we have to plan. But people watch too much scifi and overestimate our abilities. I've heard so many stories of people watching 'The Martian' asking or commenting that it was based on a true story!
The best we have is hope. For now. Eventually we will be able to build a fast-response and effective system for early detection and mitigation, but it will not be in the near term. There are events we just can't protect ourselves from. Like volcanoes, earthquakes, hell, even regular old floods or tornadoes. NEO are simply in a totally different ball-game. It's like a cave-man thinking he has a stick to kill animals and now he can possibly go to the moon. He had to wait a few millenia for the tech to roll in. We will just be vulnerable in the mean time.

Mentioned are "glacial ice melts" and the Mexico meteor/dinosaurs, but nothing at all was mentioned about the global winter caused by the "splash" of rock going into the atmosphere. THAT is what killed the dinosaurs. Cooling, not warming. I'd hate to see us sling massive chunks of nickel iron at a meteor, miss, and allow it to go kill some other planet in another galaxy. Vince is right that global politics might end us before either could happen. We need a space-based transmogrifier which will convert the rocks to feathers so they can be caught in space. Then we can transmogrify them into nickel iron for use in building our intergalactic space ships. And then I woke up.

No attenuation in space. Maybe a space based nuclear powered laser could be used to superheat ice on on side of the asteroid causing a localized jet to cause it to go off original track.

But we've got Bruce Willis and Nukes! 'Murica! Yeah!

This Just In From Our Commander In Chief.
Big rock just landed on one of my golf courses, wiping out Scotland. Losing money while we rebuild. SAD

Twitter will be ablaze........

Simple really just get hold of Bear Grylls and he will knock them out of the Earths atmosphere!