[Congressional Bills 108th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[S. 1164 Introduced in Senate (IS)]







108th CONGRESS
  1st Session
                                S. 1164

To provide for the development and coordination of a comprehensive and 
 integrated United States research program that assists the people of 
  the United States and the world to understand, assess, and predict 
     human-induced and natural processes of abrupt climate change.


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                   IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES

                              June 2, 2003

Ms. Collins (for herself, Mrs. Murray, Mr. Jeffords, Ms. Cantwell, and 
  Ms. Snowe) introduced the following bill; which was read twice and 
   referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

_______________________________________________________________________

                                 A BILL


 
To provide for the development and coordination of a comprehensive and 
 integrated United States research program that assists the people of 
  the United States and the world to understand, assess, and predict 
     human-induced and natural processes of abrupt climate change.

    Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the 
United States of America in Congress assembled,

SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.

    This Act may be cited as the ``Abrupt Climate Change Research Act 
of 2003''.

SEC. 2. ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH PROGRAM.

    (a) Establishment of Program.--The Secretary of Commerce shall 
establish within the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research of the 
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and shall carry out, a 
program of scientific research on abrupt climate change.
    (b) Purposes of Program.--The purposes of the program are as 
follows:
            (1) To develop a global array of terrestrial and 
        oceanographic indicators of paleoclimate in order to 
        sufficiently identify and describe past instances of abrupt 
        climate change.
            (2) To improve understanding of thresholds and 
        nonlinearities in geophysical systems related to the mechanisms 
        of abrupt climate change.
            (3) To incorporate such mechanisms into advanced 
        geophysical models of climate change.
            (4) To test the output of such models against an improved 
        global array of records of past abrupt climate changes.
    (c) Abrupt Climate Change Defined.--In this section, the term 
``abrupt climate change'' means a change in the climate that occurs so 
rapidly or unexpectedly that human or natural systems have difficulty 
adapting to the climate as changed.

SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.

    There is authorized to be appropriated to the Department of 
Commerce for fiscal years 2003, to remain available until expended, 
$60,000,000 to carry out the research program required under section 2.
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