- THE FOUNDATION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

[House Hearing, 111 Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]

THE FOUNDATION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

=======================================================================

HEARING

before the
SELECT COMMITTEE ON
ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
AND GLOBAL WARMING
HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS

SECOND SESSION

__________

MAY 6, 2010

__________

Serial No. 111-17

Printed for the use of the Select Committee on
Energy Independence and Global Warming

globalwarming.house.gov

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SELECT COMMITTEE ON ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
AND GLOBAL WARMING

EDWARD J. MARKEY, Massachusetts, Chairman
EARL BLUMENAUER, Oregon F. JAMES SENSENBRENNER, Jr.,
JAY INSLEE, Washington Wisconsin, Ranking Member
JOHN B. LARSON, Connecticut JOHN B. SHADEGG, Arizona
HILDA L. SOLIS, California GREG WALDEN, Oregon
STEPHANIE HERSETH SANDLIN, CANDICE S. MILLER, Michigan
South Dakota JOHN SULLIVAN, Oklahoma
EMANUEL CLEAVER, Missouri MARSHA BLACKBURN, Tennessee
JOHN J. HALL, New York
JERRY McNERNEY, California
------

Professional Staff

Michael Goo, Staff Director
Sarah Butler, Chief Clerk
Bart Forsyth, Minority Staff Director

C O N T E N T S

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Pages
Hon. Edward J. Markey, a Representative in Congress from the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts, opening statement............... 1
Prepared statement........................................... 3
Hon. F. James Sensenbrenner, Jr., a Representative in Congress
from the State of Wisconsin, opening statement................. 5
Hon. Jackie Speier, a Representative in Congress from the State
of California, opening statement............................... 6
Hon. John Sullivan, a Representative in Congress from the State
of California, prepared statement.............................. 8

WITNESSES

Dr. James Hurrell, Senior Scientist, National Center for
Atmospheric Research........................................... 9
Prepared Statement........................................... 11
Answers to Submitted Questions............................... 112
Dr. James McCarthy, Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard
University..................................................... 31
Prepared Statement........................................... 34
Answers to Submitted Questions............................... 126
Lord Christopher Monckton, Chief Policy Adviser, Science and
Public Policy Institute........................................ 56
Prepared Statement........................................... 58
Supplement to Testimony, PowerPoint Slides................... 62
Answers to Submitted Questions............................... 134
Dr. Chris Field, Director, Department of Global Ecology, Carnegie
Institution of Washington...................................... 66
Prepared Statement........................................... 68
Dr. Lisa Graumlich, Director, School of Natural Resources and the
Environment, University of Arizona............................. 78
Prepared Statement........................................... 80

SUBMITTED MATERIAL

Hon. John Shadegg, a Representative in Congress from the State of
Arizona, the email exchanges of the University of East Anglia
climate scientists, entitled ``Climategate Emails.''........... 85

THE FOUNDATION OF CLIMATE SCIENCE

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THURSDAY, MAY 6, 2010

House of Representatives,
Select Committee on Energy Independence
and Global Warming,
Washington, DC.
The committee met, pursuant to call, at 9:40 a.m., in room
2237, Rayburn House Office Building, Hon. Edward J. Markey
(chairman of the committee) presiding.
Present: Representatives Markey, Blumenauer, Inslee,
Cleaver, Speier, Sensenbrenner, Shadegg, and Sullivan.
Staff present: Ana Unruh Cohen and Jonah Steinbuck
The Chairman. Good morning.
Welcome to the Select Committee on Energy Independence and
Global Warming. All eyes are focused on the economic and
environmental disaster unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico. The BP
oil spill is causing an immediate human and ecological tragedy.
The spill is yet another dramatic example of why we must find
alternatives to oil.
The American people are desperate for safe, clean energy
alternatives, solutions that add jobs, end our oil addiction
and heed the warnings of climate scientists who have called for
pollution reductions. Eleven people tragically lost their lives
in the BP rig explosion, and for the past week, an estimated
5,000 barrels of oil a day have been leaking into the ocean. As
a result, the Gulf Coast fishing, seafood and tourism
industries are bracing for the worst. Wildlife refuges and
marine sanctuaries remain in harms way.
Congress will keep a vigilant eye on BP's efforts to stop
the leak and clean up this environmental mess. However, the
visible oil is not the only carbon pollution we have to worry
about. Once gasoline is burned in our cars and trucks, carbon
dioxide is released into the atmosphere. We can see the oil
slick in the Gulf from space, but it is the buildup of
invisible carbon dioxide in our atmosphere that is preventing
heat from escaping back into space.
Even as carbon dioxide's concentration in the atmosphere
has been accumulating, so has our scientific understanding of
its effects and impacts. Based on over 150 years of scientific
research, a clear picture has emerged of rising temperatures,
increased droughts, severe rain storms and an acidifying ocean.
Those who deny global warming point to past uncertainties
that have been refuted. They ignore the overwhelming
observational evidence that the increased levels of heat-
trapping pollution are already warming the planet. Instead of
trying to understand the science, they use stolen e-mails about
analysis of tree rings in Siberia to turn an honest discussion
into a Russian tree ring circus. Or they manufacture a cooling
trend by cherry-picking a few years out of a longer record of
warming temperatures.
While the deniers hope to confuse the public, the real-
world consequences of inaction mount. Over the weekend, killer
storms blew through Tennessee, Mississippi and Kentucky. In
Nashville, nearly 13 inches of rain fell in just over 2 day's
time, almost doubling the previous record that fell in the
aftermath of a hurricane in 1979. These storms follow the
wettest March on record in Boston. Two 50-year storms occurred
within two weeks of each other. The National Guard was
mobilized. Hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes.
The region suffered millions of dollars in damages.
No single rain storm can be attributed to climate change,
nor can a snowstorm disprove its existence. But the underlying
science and the observed trends do point to more extreme
weather events, especially heavy precipitation events because a
warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. Extreme rainfall is
just one of the consequences of the carbon pollution we are
releasing into the air.
Our witnesses today will explain how science has revealed
this unseen pollution for what it is and discuss the very real
consequences of its continuing accumulation in the atmosphere.
As we approach summer, our clean energy debate needs to
acknowledge what many would like to deny: Our dependence on oil
carries with it national security, economic and environmental
risks. As gas prices rise and the oil slick spreads, perhaps we
will finally acknowledge that we cannot drill our way to energy
independence. We have 2 percent of proven oil reserves in the
world.
Perhaps we can also acknowledge the basic facts that have
been known for decades, increasing carbon pollution in the
atmosphere is warming the planet, and that the only way to put
a halt to such warming is to move to a clean energy solution.
I would now like to turn and recognize the ranking member
of the committee, the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr.
Sensenbrenner.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Markey follows:]

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Mr. Sensenbrenner. I thank the Chairman.
When global warming alarmists tried to advance their agenda
a decade ago, they pointed to a damning graph in the 2001 IPCC
report that showed a sharp rise in temperatures over the past
century. This graph is commonly known as the hockey stick, and
it did a good job of scaring a lot of people, especially
politicians. But the authors of the Hockey Stick may not have
done a good job with their math. At least that is what a couple
of enterprising researchers thought. And in double-checking the
hockey stick data, Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick showed
that it wasn't as solid as previously thought.
Lately, a lot of people have been taking a second look at
the so-called settled science of climate change. Data collected
by NASA may not be reliable as once believed. And the
Climategate scandal shows, at best, that some researchers did
everything they could to prevent review of their work, and at
worst, they outright sought to manipulate data.
The debate on the accuracy of climate science is good for
science. Proclamations that the science is settled are just
politics. The shortfalls in the scientific record could have
expensive consequences. Proponents of expensive regulatory
reform must understand that they need more than political
victories.
The EPA's burdensome regulatory regime must be based on
sound scientific foundation. The EPA's regulations will be
predicated in large part on the IPCC's most recent report. So
far, the list of errors in that report includes: One, a
sloppily sourced claim that Himalayan glaciers would disappear
by 2035; two, reliance on an unpublished study to claim the
world has suffered rising costs due to catastrophic weather
events, where the author later said there was insufficient
evidence to support the claim; three, stating that 55 percent
of the Netherlands is below sea level when, in fact, only 26
percent is; four, failing to support the claim that Africa's
agricultural output would be produced by 50 percent by 2020;
and five, an unsupported claim that Bangladesh will be 17
percent under water by 2050.
A citizen's audit of the IPCC study found that 5,587 cited
references, nearly a third of all the sources, were not peer-
reviewed publications, but rather gray literature, such as
press releases, newspaper and magazine articles, discussion
papers, master's and Ph.D. theses, working papers and advocacy
literature published by environmental groups. These sources
lack authoritative scientific rigor and are more often than not
intended as propaganda.
This week, the InterAcademy Council said that it had picked
the 12 member committee to conduct an independent review of the
IPCC's procedures. Hopefully the review will result in new
methodologies that will give the public more confidence in the
panel's conclusions before it releases its fifth assessment in
2014.
The Climategate scandal brought serious questions about the
reliability of data compiled by the Climatic Research Unit at
the University of East Anglia. These e-mails showed a clear
bias, a systematic suppression of dissenting opinion,
intimidation of journal editors and journals that would publish
articles questioning the so-called consensus, manipulation of
data and models, and possible criminal activity to evade
legitimate requests for data and underlying computer holds
filed under freedom of information acts. One of these e-mailers
called Steven McIntyre a bozo for trying to hold him
accountable for his work.
Dr. McIntyre also reviewed NASA's temperature data sets.
His work resulted in forcing NASA to change its history of U.S.
temperature data to show that 1934, not 1998, was the hottest
year on record. Another study shows that NASA may have cherry-
picked weather stations to favor those that would produce
higher temperatures that produce a record that is warmer than
truthful. Internal e-mails also showed that at least one senior
NASA scientist raised questions about the accuracy of that
agency's temperature data set.
The IPCC report relies heavily on the CRU and NASA data to
support its conclusions. And the questions raised about these
data sets raise even more questions about the accuracy of the
IPCC's study. A report issued today by the Select Committee
Republican staff shows that the EPA is violating its own rules
by relying so heavily on the IPCC report. Both the EPA and the
Office of Management and Budget guidelines state that an agency
must base any regulatory proposal on science that is clear and
transparent. OMB guidelines further state that simply because a
study is peer-reviewed doesn't mean that it fulfills the
requirement that the results are transparent and replicable.
I want to welcome here today Lord Christopher Monckton, the
Chief Policy Advisor of the Science and Public Policy
Institute. By helping to check and double-check the scientific
literature, Lord Monckton is helping to improve the state of
climate science.
And I look forward to hearing both his perspective and the
perspective of the other witnesses today.
Thank you.
The Chairman. We thank the gentleman.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Oregon, Mr.
Blumenauer.
Mr. Blumenauer. Mr. Chairman, I will just reserve my time
for the inquiry. As inviting as my good friend's--from
Wisconsin--comments were, I would rather save it.
The Chairman. Okay. The gentleman will reserve his time.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Washington State,
Mr. Inslee.
Mr. Inslee. I will reserve as well. Thank you, Mr. Chair.
The Chairman. The gentleman's time is reserved.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Missouri, Mr.
Cleaver.
Mr. Cleaver. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Out of guilt, I will
reserve as well.
The Chairman. The Chair recognizes the gentlelady from
California, Ms. Speier.
Ms. Speier. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I am not going to reserve.
I am glad we are holding this hearing on the science of
climate change. I welcome our scientific witnesses here today,
and I look forward to relying on their expertise as we address
the increasingly dire and challenging impacts of global
warming.
I am from the San Francisco Bay area, where our most
recognizable icon is the Golden Gate Bridge. A little known
fact, however, is just next to the bridge is our Nation's
oldest tidal gauge, a 150 year-old station that has given us
the longest continuous tide record in the Western Hemisphere.
The gauge shows an increased sea level rise of 8 inches over
the past century. And the rate of that sea level rise has
increased and is expected to accelerate further. In fact, the
area is referred to as ground zero for sea level rise. San
Francisco airport and surrounding communities could be under
water by the end of the century.
We in the Bay Area live on the edge. We know the
seriousness of this problem for our ecosystem, our
infrastructure and our coastal and shoreline communities. In
light of these most basic observations of our changing planet,
acting on global warming in the here and now is just plain
common sense.
That said, the complexity of how we act on these changes
demands our utmost attention. The sharp, tried and tested
knowledge of our top scientists must be the foundation for our
efforts to solve the climate crisis. I am pleased we have some
very qualified individuals here.
And once again, I expect to learn much more from their
testimony. I yield back.
The Chairman. Thank you.
The gentlelady's time has expired.
And all time for opening statements by the members has been
completed.
[The prepared statement of Mr. Sullivan follows:]
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STATEMENT OF JAMES W. HURRELL, PH.D., SENIOR SCIENTIST AND
CHIEF SCIENTIST, COMMUNITY CLIMATE PROJECTS, CLIMATE & GLOBAL
DYNAMICS DIVISION, NATIONAL CENTER FOR ATMOSPHERIC RESEARCH;
JAMES J. McCARTHY, PH.D., ALEXANDER AGASSIZ PROFESSOR OF
BIOLOGICAL OCEANOGRAPHY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY; LORD CHRISTOPHER
MONCKTON, THIRD VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY, CHIEF POLICY
ADVISER, SCIENCE AND PUBLIC POLICY INSTITUTE; CHRISTOPHER B.
FIELD, PH.D., DIRECTOR, DEPARTMENT OF GLOBAL ECOLOGY, CARNEGIE
INSTITUTION FOR SCIENCE, C-CHAIR, WORKING GROUP II OF THE IPCC;
AND LISA J. GRAUMLICH, PH.D., PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR, SCHOOL OF
NATURAL RESOURCES AND THE ENVIRONMENT, THE UNIVERSITY OF
ARIZONA

The Chairman. We will now turn to our first witness this
morning. He is Dr. Jim Hurrell. Mr. Hurrell is a senior
scientist within the Climate Analysis Section of the National
Center for Atmospheric Research.
His research focuses on climate variability and human-
caused climate change. He has contributed to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC
assessments. He is also actively involved in the International
Research Program on Climate Variability and Predictability. Dr.
Hurrell holds advanced degrees in atmospheric science from
Purdue University. He is a fellow of the American
Meteorological Society.
We look forward to hearing your testimony, Dr. Hurrell.
Whenever you are ready, please begin.

STATEMENT OF JAMES W. HURRELL, PH.D.

Mr. Hurrell. Thank you.
Mr. Chairman, Ranking Member Sensenbrenner, and other
members of the Select Committee, I thank you for the
opportunity to speak today on observed and likely future
changes in climate and the contribution from human activity to
those changes.
Although uncertainties exist, significant advances in the
scientific understanding of climate change now make it clear
that there has been a change in climate that goes beyond the
range of natural variability, and this change is almost
certainly due to human activities. This conclusion is drawn
from multiple lines of evidence published in thousands of
thoroughly reviewed scientific studies by many different
investigators and independently assessed by many groups,
including the U.S. National Academy of Science.
The fact is that the globe is warming dramatically, and
this change is already affecting both physical and biological
systems. Global surface temperatures today are almost 1.5
degrees Fahrenheit warmer than at the beginning of the 21st
century, and the rates of temperature rise are greatest in
recent decades: 14 of the last 15 years are the warmest
globally since 1850. And the last decade is .4 degrees
Fahrenheit warmer than the 1990s. There is a very high degree
of confidence in these numbers. Urban heat island effects, for
instance, are real but very local, and they have been accounted
for in the analysis.
There is no urban heat effect over the oceans where warming
has also been very pronounced at both the surface and at depth.
Moreover, warming ocean waters expand and thus contribute to
sea level rise. Observed and accelerating melting of glaciers,
icecaps, and ice sheets are also contributing by adding water
to the ocean. Instrumental measurements of sea level indicate
that the global average has increased over the last century and
the rate of sea level rise is increasing. Global sea level rise
is probably the single best metric of accumulative global
warming since it integrates the reactions from several
different components of the climate system and is accurately
observed from satellite instruments.
Changes in global temperature or sea level do not imply
however that changes are uniform around the globe. Regional
differences arise from natural variability, and these effects
can be large from year to year or even decade to decade. For
instance, a historically large El Nino event helped make 1998
one of if not the warmest year on record, while strong El Nino
conditions contributed to relatively cooler worldwide
conditions in 2008. Simply connecting these two data points in
time, as was shown in the graph, has been done by some to
misleadingly argue global warming has ceased, ignoring the fact
that the longer-term temperature trend is clearly upward, and
the years since 2000 have remained among the warmest on record.
Because of such natural variations in the climate system,
climate scientists expect occasional but temporary slowdowns in
the rate of warming, even while greenhouse gas concentrations
continue to increase. Climate models also predict such a
behavior, and today's best climate models are able to reproduce
many of the observed changes in climate observed over the past
century.
Climate models are not perfect. Uncertainties arise from
shortcomings in our understanding of climate processes and how
to best represent them in models. Yet the best climate models
are extremely useful tools for understanding and determining
the factors that are driving the observed warming.
And the results are clear, the surface warming of recent
decades, along with many other changes in climate, is mainly a
response to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the
atmosphere, which now far exceed pre-Industrial values.
In summary, the scientific understanding of climate change
is sufficiently clear to show that climate change from global
warming is already upon us. Many impacts are evident, and they
will grow larger with time.
Uncertainties do remain, especially regarding how climate
will change at regional and local scales. But the climate is
changing, and the rate of changes projected exceeds anything
seen in nature in the past 10,000 years.
Thank you again for this opportunity to address the
committee, and I look forward to answering any questions.
[The statement of Mr. Hurrell follows:]

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The Chairman. Thank you, Doctor, very much.
Our second witness today is Dr. James McCarthy. Dr.
McCarthy is a professor of biological oceanography at Harvard
University. He served as co-chair of the Impacts, Adaptation,
and Vulnerability Portion of the IPCC report published in 2001.
He was also one of the lead authors on the Arctic Climate
Impact Assessment. Dr. McCarthy received his Ph.D. from Scripps
Institution of Oceanography. He is a former president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow
of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a foreign
member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
We welcome you, Dr. McCarthy. Whenever you feel ready,
please begin.

STATEMENT OF JAMES J. McCARTHY, PH.D.

Mr. McCarthy. Thank you.
Good morning, Chairman Markey, Ranking Member
Sensenbrenner, and other members of the committee.
You asked us to address four questions.
The Chairman. Could you move that microphone in just a
little closer, please?
Okay, thank you.
Mr. McCarthy. You asked that we address four questions. And
I have done this in my testimony, and so I will very briefly
run through my responses to those questions.
You asked that we talk about observations. How do we know
that the climate is changing? What evidence do we have for
attribution of these changes? And what are some of the
anticipated impacts? And then, finally, you asked how climate
scientists should be furthering the understanding of climate
change?
So, I am an oceanographer. I have worked on all the oceans
in my career. Ocean temperatures are changing in a way that
could not have been imagined when I began my career as an
oceanographer. I distinctly remember a day in 1986 when someone
walked into my office and showed me the first graph suggesting
ocean temperatures were changing.
Now people ask, how confident are we of these changes? If
we look at the first slide, and these are the four graphics
from my testimony, this shows the array of sensing instruments
that are employed in the ocean today. This is a snapshot from
last month. There are over 3,000 buoys that have sensing
devices that profile, move up and down in the upper ocean to
depths of 6,000 feet, and they report their data by satellite
to shore stations. So this is how we are tracking today the
changes in ocean temperature, and are very confident that they
are responding to the climate system.
We know now that more than 90 percent of the heat that has
been trapped in the atmosphere by the accumulated greenhouse
gases is being stored in the ocean. The oceans are an intricate
part of the climate system.
Now I would like to say something about sea level rise,
which has already been introduced by my colleague. In 2001,
when the IPCC report was put to bed, it was estimated that sea
level rise over the present century would be relatively modest,
perhaps as small as 12 to 24 inches. But it was also not known
how rapidly ice in Greenland and ice in the Antarctic could
contribute to sea level rise. If you thought of a block of ice
sitting on the counter and imagined turning up the temperature
of the room, you would imagine it would melt faster; that would
be true. But what we didn't understand is how it could become
unstable and begin to lose ice to the ocean, and once in the
ocean, the ocean is warmer than the ice, it would melt even
more rapidly.
So if we look at estimates of sea level rise today, first,
if you look at the next graph, you can see, if you go back to
1990, which is where the three dotted lines begin to span off
to the right, these were the projections in 1990 of sea level
rise for the IPCC. And you notice the red lines, which are the
tide gauge data referred to earlier by Congressman Speier, we
see the blue line. These are the data which are now available
from satellites, which are tracking ocean elevation far more
precisely for global computation than local estimates at tide
gauge stations. And you will see that the blue line extends up
to the upper part of this curve, and the three bounds, the
upper, the middle, and the lower lines, or the dotted line,
were the estimates in 1990. In other words, the IPCC
underestimated quite starkly the rise in sea level.
We now know data, just in the last handful of years, how
rapidly Greenland and Antarctica are changing. And best
estimates of sea level rise now for this century are between
2.5 and 3 feet.
If you look at the next slide, you can see in the bars at
the bottom, the lower, higher emission, and even higher
emission scenarios for the IPCC, and on the left are the sea
level rise that was projected in feet. And the circles at the
top show what would be estimated today if you included the melt
from Greenland and Antarctica. And from this, you would see
this estimate I gave of 2.5 or 3.5 feet.
Next I would like to comment briefly on ocean chemistry.
The carbon dioxide added to the ocean changes the balance in
the mineral composition of what we call the carbonate system.
Organisms in the ocean that make shells, whether they are
snail-like animals that swim, there are one-celled plankton
that have shells, we call them foraminifera and
coccolithophorids, or corals; all make these shells out of
calcium carbonate. Calcium carbonate is in a very, very
delicate balance in the ocean. The organism is taking the
dissolved constituents out of the water, making its hard shell,
but the water is trying to pull it back in the solution and
trying to redissolve it. The organism is constantly working to
excrete material; the ocean is trying to dissolve it. As you
add carbon dioxide to the ocean, you change the composition,
change the relationship, with this buffering system. It becomes
more corrosive. That is referred to as ocean acidification.
We know now the rates at which this is changing are faster
than any time, any time in the history that we can reconstruct
over the last several million years. Now, just finally, I am
going to say something about the distribution of organisms.
This is very close to where Congressman Markey and I live,
which shows in the lower graph how the distribution of cod
would change with the warming that is expected.
Let me just conclude by saying that these changes are in
the scientific literature beyond all bounds of historic record.
And I would just like to comment with an opinion, in response
to your last question, that I think that climate scientists
have an obligation to do everything we can to help convey
clearly this message to the public. Thank you.
[The statement of Mr. McCarthy follows:]

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The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. McCarthy, very much.
Our third witness is Lord Christopher Monckton.
He is chief policy advisor for the Science and Public
Policy Institute. He holds a diploma in journalism from the
University College Cardiff. He has worked as an editor at
various news outlets, including the Universe, the Telegraph
Sunday Magazine, Today newspaper, and the Evening Standard.
From 1982 to 1986, he was an advisor to UK Prime Minister
Margaret Thatcher and gave policy advice on a variety of
issues. He is the founder and director of Christopher Monckton,
Limited, which consults in public administration.
We welcome you, sir. Whenever you are ready, please begin.

STATEMENT OF LORD CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON

Mr. Monckton. Mr. Chairman, sir, and Ranking Member
Sensenbrenner, it is a pleasure to see you both again and also
many other faces on your committee.
Thank you for having the courtesy to ask me to testify in
front of you. I am going to testify, not of course as a
scientist, because I am not one, but as a policy maker. And the
role of policy makers when confronted with scientists is to
know what questions to ask. And I am going to raise one or two
questions now about some of the evidence you already heard.
If you look at the slide now before you, that slide
purports but does not demonstrate that the rate of global
warming is itself increasing. This is taken from the IPCC's
2007 report where it appears three times, large and in full
color. However, it relies on a bogus statistical technique
which is applying multiple trend lines to a single stochastic
data set. And if you choose your starting and ending points
carefully enough, you can make it go in any direction you want.
This graph is regularly relied upon by Mr. Pachauri of the
IPCC. I challenged him on it recently in Copenhagen. It is also
relied upon by the EPA. It is defective, as I shall now show.
Next one, please. This graph is the same data, but this
time with different trend lines on it. From 1905 to 1945, you
will see that the temperature rose faster than from 1905 to
2005. Does this mean that the rate of global warming is slowing
down? No, it doesn't. But this graph and the previous one are
bogus, but they are using the same technique on the same data
to produce opposite conclusions. That is why the IPCC should
not have used that first graph, which has been so heavily
relied upon.
Let us now see what the true position is. Next slide,
please. You will see, in fact, there have been three periods of
quite rapid warming over the last 150 years, 1860 to 1880; 1910
to 1940; and 1976 to 2001. Those three rates of warming are
exactly parallel. Recently when Senator Vitter questioned Mr.
John Holdren about this, he tried to claim that the third rate
of increase was greater than the other two. It isn't. They are
exactly parallel at roughly 1.6 Celsius per century.
Now, we can't explain what caused the first two rapid rates
of warming because we didn't have the instrumentation to find
out. However, in the satellite area, to the right of the green
vertical line there, we are able to observe what caused most of
the third piece of rapid warming.
Next slide, please.
And this is from a paper by Dr. Pinker and her colleagues
in 2005 showing a very rapid increase in what is called global
brightening, the amount of sunlight actually reaching the
surface of the earth, enough global brightening, in fact, to
cause a warming of 1 Celsius degree, though only .37 Celsius
degrees was noticed over that 18-year period. So if anyone
tries to tell you that we cannot explain the global warming
over the last 30-years except by reference to carbon dioxide,
this graph and many others like it in the scientific literature
should suggest otherwise.
Next slide, please.
And if we now include that data from Dr. Pinker, together
with the various forcings and temperature increases from the
individual greenhouse gases, we will see that what we end up
with is a fourfold overstatement of the rate of increase in
global temperature that was actually observed if we use the
IPCC's methods to calculate what the warming would have been, a
fourfold exaggeration.
Next slide, please. And this result is confirmed most
recently by Professor Richard Lindzen and his colleague Yong-
Sang Choi in a paper published in 2009 and published again this
year, showing 11 models all predicting various rates of warming
from 1.4 to infinity Kelvin if you double CO2 concentration.
Next slide, please. The reality however is just .7, which is
less than a quarter of what the UN would predict for a doubling
of CO2 concentration.
The conclusion from this is that we can explain the warming
by other methods. Not very much warming is going to happen, and
therefore, one should be very careful before spending money--
next slide, please--on cap and trade, because even if we were
to shut down the entire global economy for 23 years, all you
would forestall is 1 Fahrenheit degree of global warming, even
if the UN is right in estimating the amount of warming from
CO2. Therefore, the correct policy is to have the courage to do
nothing. You will lose nothing thereby. There are many other
problems to address. I would recommend you address those and
not this.
[The statement of Mr. Monckton follows:]

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The Chairman. Thank you, Lord Monckton, very much.
Our fourth witness today is Dr. Chris Field. Dr. Field is
the founding director of the Carnegie Institution's Department
of Global Ecology. He is also a professor of biology in
environmental earth science at Stanford University. He was a
coordinating lead author for the 2007 fourth assessment report
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Currently he
is co-chair of the Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability
Portion of the upcoming IPCC report. Dr. Field received his
Ph.D. from Stanford in 1981. Among his many distinctions, he is
a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
We welcome you, Dr. Field.

STATEMENT OF CHRISTOPHER B. FIELD, PH.D.

Mr. Field. Thank you, Chairman Markey, Ranking Member
Sensenbrenner, and other distinguished members of the
committee.
What I would like to do today is take a couple of minutes
to talk about observed changes in the climate system. I won't
be focusing at all on projections, but only things that have
been observed and are clear in the record.
If I could have the slides, please.
As Dr. Hurrell has said, it is very clear that during the
period when we have had good instrumental records from weather
stations, the global climate has warmed. The record you see
here is the land temperatures from all the world's
meteorological stations. Since the late 19th century, the
warming has been about 1.5 Fahrenheit, with all of the warmest
years in the record in the last dozen; 2009, based on the data
from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was the
third warmest year on record.
If we look at the United States, next slide, please, you
see a very similar pattern but with a lot more jumpiness, as
you would expect for a region that represents only about 2
percent of the planet's surface.
What I would like to do is spend a couple of minutes
talking about whether there are other ways we could infer
whether or not the climates change. Is nature telling us how
climates change? And the next slide, please, gives an overview
of what the IPCC has concluded.
We have a wide range of observations, now spanning many
decades, on a tremendous number of physical and biological
systems. These are things like, what are the locations of the
snouts of glaciers? What are the times when buds burst or when
flowers flower?
The IPCC examined a bunch of these records and concluded
that there were over 29,000 statistically significant changes
in these physical and biological systems. And then it said,
well, which of these are changing in the direction that is
consistent with climate change being the forcing, and which are
changing in the direction that is not consisting? The
overwhelming conclusion is that the vast majority of these
natural thermometers are indicating that global warming is
occurring.
Fully 94 percent of the statistically significant changes
in physical systems are consistent with global warming. Fully
90 percent of the statistically significant trends in
biological systems are consistent with global warming.
One couldn't look at any single one of these trends and
conclude that it is proof that the climate system is warming.
But when you step back and look at all 29,000, there is a
tremendous level of confidence in the numbers.
Now, a lot of these trends are issues that don't
necessarily have a lot of traction on human systems, but I want
to focus on three that do. Next slide, please.
Most States in the American west get at least half of their
water supply for summertime from snowpack. And we have seen
dramatic changes in the water content of the spring snowpack,
the April 1st snowpack, over the last 50 years. In the Pacific
Northwest, there has been a decrease of about 30 percent. In
the interior ranges, there has been a decrease of about 20
percent. This is the water supply that water-short regions
depend on in order to make it through the summer, and over the
last 50 years, we have seen profound decreases.
Next slide, please.
Another impact that is really clear from the data is that
wildfires have been increasing across the American West and
that the frequency of wildfires is strongly sensitive to
temperature anomalies. What you can see in the plot is that the
black line tracing annual temperature almost traces precisely
the variation in the number of wildfires. Essentially, the risk
of wildfires goes up dramatically as the temperature goes up.
A third observed trend I want to talk about is in the next
slide. And this is the trend of observed changes in the days
with the heaviest precipitation. What you can see is that, from
the middle of the last century, there has been a 67 percent
increase in the days with the heaviest precipitation in New
England. Over all of the eastern U.S., there has been at least
a 20 percent increase in days with heavy precipitation. Heavy
precipitation is essentially the driving force for the kinds of
floods that we have seen in Tennessee recently.
We can't look at any single weather event and ascribe it
with 100 percent confidence to climate. But what we can see is
that this kind of change in the climate system is increasing
the risk of damaging weather events.
You know, I think that all of us would agree that you can't
get in a car with a bald tire and have confidence that you are
going to have an accident, but you can say that you would
consider the risk unacceptable. With climate, I think it is
very clear that we have now pushed the system to a point where
it basically has four bald tires and a flashing ``check
engine'' light. Thank you very much.
[The statement of Mr. Field follows:]

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The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Field, very much.
And our final witness today is Dr. Lisa Graumlich.
Dr. Graumlich is the director of the School of Natural
Resources and the Environment at the University of Arizona. Her
research focuses on the interplay of global climate change and
natural resources management. She has also directed the
University of Arizona's Institute for the Study of Planet Earth
and Montana State University's Big Sky Institute. Recently she
served on the Oxburgh inquiry panel that reviewed the
scientific work of the University of East Anglia's Climate
Research Unit following the release of private e-mails of some
of their scientists.
Dr. Graumlich received her Ph.D. from the College of Forest
Resources at the University of Washington. She is a fellow of
the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
We welcome you, Dr. Graumlich.

STATEMENT OF LISA J. GRAUMLICH, PH.D.

Ms. Graumlich. Chairman Markey and Ranking Member
Sensenbrenner and the rest of the members of the committee,
thank you so much for inviting me to speak with you today in
this very important hearing.
In what I am going to say today and in my written
testimony, I have focused on the observational record of
current and past climate variability. And I do that as a tree
ring scientist, as a dendrochronologist by training. And I want
to spend a moment talking a bit about the kind of perspective
that one brings to this question as someone that has looked at
tree ring records of the past.
And I am going to take you back in time 20 years, when I
was an assistant professor at UCLA. As a tree ring scientist, I
was off to the Sierra Nevada to look for very, very old trees,
and in fact found them, very, very old Foxtail Pines, a
relative of Bristlecone Pines, high up at the upper tree line
in the Sierra Nevada. But what shocked me when I got there was
not the old trees, I expected to find those there, but as you
went above the tree line, there were very large dead trees, I
mean very large dead trees, above current tree line. Not just a
couple, hundreds of them. And what that meant was that, in
previous eras, tree line had been higher, implying that
temperatures had been warmer.
So as a trained tree ring scientist it turns out that we
can very accurately date the innermost rings of those dead
trees that tells us when the trees were established and the
outermost ring with a little sort of 50 year or so error
because of the loss of sap which tells us when those trees
died. So what we know is over the last 3,000 years, tree line
was higher, and then somewhere around 950 A.D., there was this
massive die-off, and tree line reestablished at the current
rate.
So I went back to the lab, started looking at those data
and started to also reflect on the fact that if you thought
about those dates, those dates were very consistent with the
time in which the Norse Vikings colonized Greenland and
Iceland. And the dates at which my trees died were about the
same time as those colonies failed.
So, recall this is 20 years ago, there were two outcomes.
One is that I became fascinated with, what caused this long-
term variability in climate? But the second outcome that is
apropos today was that I was very much struck by the fact that,
when I described my research to the public, it was very clear
that it appeared to them that I had this very strong ability to
say that, yes, current climate trends were well within the
envelope of natural variability because I had trees in Sierra
Nevada and historical data in the North Atlantic.
That is not climate science. That is assembly of a couple
of just-so stories that tell us something about climate at two
places on the surface of the earth. And what has happened
subsequently is that, along with dozens of colleagues, we have
very carefully scanned the earth for other kinds of high-
resolution proxy data; tree ring records, historical documents,
speleothems, ice cores, any number of barb sediments, if you
try to understand how they reflect or don't reflect temperature
data.
In doing that, we discovered that in fact there were a
couple of other places around the globe that had this medieval
warm period, in particular the Eurasian part of the Arctic and
parts of, of course, the North Atlantic and the western part of
the U.S.
In other places, like the Northwest, the tropical Pacific,
temperatures were also cooler during the so-called medieval
warm period, and that this, dozens and dozens of peer-reviewed
studies have allowed us to be able to assert with great
confidence, after 20 years of looking for these kinds of
records, that in fact the late 20th Century is the warmest
period of earth history in the last 500 to 1,000 years.
So, finally, it is these kind of data that were assembled
by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
I had the opportunity to participate as one of the panel
members in Lord Oxburgh's Scientific Assessment Panel. And in
looking at that, and I want to quote the key response, is that
we saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in
any of the work of the climate research unit, and had it been
there, we believe that we would have detected it. Rather, we
found a small group of dedicated, if slightly disorganized,
researchers who were ill-prepared for being the focus of public
attention. The full report from that panel is appended to my
own testimony. Thank you.
[The statement of Ms. Graumlich follows:]

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The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Graumlich, very much.
The Chair will now recognize himself for a round of
questions.
Today is election day in the United Kingdom, and it is
unclear which party will emerge as the winner. What is clear is
that the leaders of the three major parties believe carbon
pollution must be addressed. Nick Clegg, the leader of the
Liberal Democrats, has said, ``climate change scientists now
agree that time is running out; the next Parliament is the last
chance we have as a nation to introduce the bold measures of
radical legislation leading us to set us on the path to green
and sustainable growth in the future.''
Gordon Brown, leader of the Labor Party, has said,
``everybody knows the importance of climate change; it is one
of the key issues that has moved me most and has made me
determined to act internationally as well as nationally over
the past few years.''
David Cameron, leader of the Conservatives, has said, ``we
all agree that climate change is one of the greatest and most
daunting challenges of our age; we have a moral imperative to
act and act now.''
And this concern about global warming is not new for
British politicians. Please play the videotape.
[Video shown.]
The Chairman. So Dr. Hurrell, despite all the stolen e-
mails, IPCC issues, what is your conclusion in terms of the
strength of the case that has been made that global warming is
real and that the consequences are catastrophic?
Mr. Hurrell. I very much agree with those conclusions. I
think, as I tried to state in both my written and my oral
testimony, much of the strength lies not in individual papers,
individual data sets, individual analyses, but rather the fact
that there are many multiple lines of evidence conducted by
multiple investigators, as we heard in the other oral
testimonies, spanning many different physical and biological
variables that all give a very consistent picture of global
warming, of a warming world, and the science has advanced to
the point that we can clearly attribute these changes to human
activities and, in particular, the buildup of greenhouse gas
emissions in the atmosphere.
The Chairman. Dr. McCarthy, Lord Monckton had a very
complicated explanation of the global temperature record. Can
you tell us simply what is happening in the global temperature
record and if it is attributable to human activities?
Mr. McCarthy. There have been a number of efforts over the
last maybe 10 to 15 years to use the knowledge we have of what
could change climate, and some of these factors were referred
to by Mr. Monckton.
We know that greenhouse gases influence climate. We know
that clouds influence climate. We know that solar variability
can influence climate. And we know that there are natural
cycles, referred to earlier as, for example, the El Nino cycle.
And when you use these known aspects of climate to
reconstruct climate over the last few decades, you find that
there aren't big missing pieces, that the changes in climate
that we have observed can be explained. Why was 1998 such an
exceptionally warm year? As already referred to by Jim Hurrell,
a year of an exceptionally warm, probably the warmest El Nino
that we know for the last 100 years.
Why was 1992, 1993 and 1994 unusually cool relative to the
years before, immediately following the eruption of Mount
Pinatubo, the largest volcano to have affected climate? Our
most recent volcano that was very much in the news will
probably not have much effect on climate because the release of
material from that volcano was low in the atmosphere and, of
course, we know interrupted air traffic.
So when you put these pieces together you find that there
aren't big gaps. There aren't periods where you can't explain
how climate has changed.
Now, when you go back further in time, it becomes more
difficult. But if you mark from like 1980, which is when we
have satellite observations of Earth's surface, satellite
observations of ice. In 1991, when Mount Pinatubo was erupted,
satellites could measure directly its contribution to the upper
atmosphere. When you put these pieces together, there are no
great mysteries about how climate has changed over the last 10
to 20 years, and it is entirely consistent with the forcing by
greenhouse gases.
The Chairman. And Dr. Field, why don't you just quickly try
to answer that question as well?
Mr. Field. You know, one of the major focal areas in
climate science over the last several decades has been a topic
that is called fingerprinting; how could we really be sure that
the climate change that is now unequivocal is a consequence of
human actions?
And there are a large number of independent climate
fingerprints for human action, most of which don't require
fancy climate models at all. A good example of a fingerprint is
that if climate change is caused by greenhouse gases, we expect
most of the warming to be in the lower atmosphere, with cooling
in the upper atmosphere, exactly as we see.
Dr. McCarthy already mentioned this balance between the
heat that you calculate should be in the climate system, and
the amount of heat that we actually see in the oceans.
These fingerprinting techniques are very, very powerful at
discriminating alternative explanations, and they point
overwhelmingly at the human release of heat-trapping gases as
the dominant cause of warming over the last half century.
The Chairman. And you agree, Dr. Graumlich?
Ms. Graumlich. Yes, I do.
The Chairman. Let me ask this, do you each disagree with
Lord Monckton's analysis of whether or not there is global
warming trend and it is a danger to the planet? Do you disagree
with him, Dr. Hurrell?
Mr. Hurrell. Yes I do.
The Chairman. Dr. McCarthy.
Mr. McCarthy. Mr. Monckton said he is not a scientist; he
works in the policy arena and, on the basis of the sciences he
reads, that he doesn't think it calls for policy action.
I think most scientists who look at the data believe that
it does need policy action.
The Chairman. Thank you.
Dr. Field.
Mr. Field. Many scientists have looked at the issue.
Warming is unequivocal. The evidence for the human fingerprint
is very, very strong, and the prospect of continued warming in
the future is very strong.
The Chairman. So you do disagree with Lord Monckton?
Mr. Field. I do disagree with Lord Monckton.
The Chairman. Dr. Graumlich?
Ms. Graumlich. I disagree with Lord Monckton's conclusions
based on the evidence that he presented as well.
The Chairman. Thank you.
My time is expired.
Let me turn and recognize the gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr.
Sensenbrenner.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Graumlich, you were on the Oxburgh panel, weren't you?
Ms. Graumlich. Yes, I was.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Do you have a professional relationship
with any of the scientists who were criticized during
Climategate?
Ms. Graumlich. I, as a member of the paleoclimatic
community, have an acquaintanceship with many of the people
that were mentioned in the e-mails. You are probably aware that
both Dr. Malcolm Hughes and I are from the University of
Arizona and that we both have professional relationships with
the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research there.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Have you co-authored papers with Dr.
Hughes?
Ms. Graumlich. I have co-authored one book chapter with Dr.
Hughes.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Has your work relied on information or
data from the CRU?
Ms. Graumlich. No, it hasn't.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Pardon?
Ms. Graumlich. No, it hasn't.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. The tree ring data in the hockey stick
graph were directly called into question by Climategate. Have
you relied on any of that in any of your professional work?
Ms. Graumlich. The data that myself and my students have
produced have been at times part of these very, very large
compilations of data that have allowed us to assess the nature
of climate variability over the last 500 to 1,000 years. The
hockey stick, per se, is never quoted in my own professional
work.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. What did the panel learn from critics of
the CRU's scientists during its review?
Ms. Graumlich. What I think the panel took away from the
critics of the CRU scientists is that, in particular, what we
discovered was that, for example, the archiving of raw data and
the development of documentation on computer code, such that it
could be widely distributed and understood by the general
public, was something that for years had not really been a high
priority. Often it was unfunded by the kind of scientific
funding sources that were available. And what was clear to the
panel was that the stolen e-mails, as well as other things,
other events, had motivated both scientists and science funders
to do more public archiving of data.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Did the panel interview any of the
critics of the CRU data?
Ms. Graumlich. No. That wasn't our charge. We were charged
to----
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Well, why not? How can you get an
objective viewpoint if you just look at one side of the issue?
Ms. Graumlich. The charge to the panel was to look at the
scientific integrity of the publications of the CR unit, and we
fulfilled that charge.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Were--well, then, that was an extremely
limited charge, you know, that pre-ordained a conclusion. Was
there any analysis of the actual e-mails or the biases that
they exposed?
Ms. Graumlich. That was not part of our charge, and that
was actually part of other kinds of inquiries that have gone
on.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Okay. Now, were you aware of any of the
biases of the other members of this seven-person panel?
Ms. Graumlich. I believe that the panel was chosen to
minimize bias.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Well, Lord Oxburgh has strong personal
and financial interests in the anti-global warming policy. He
is director of an international environmental organization
called Globe International. He is also chairman of a green
energy firm called Falck Renewables, and president of the
Carbon Capture Storage Association.
And there was an article that appeared in the Times of
London on April 14th where Lord Oxburgh himself even told the
university that he was unfit to chair the panel because of
conflicts of interest and warning the UEA that people might
question his independence. Were any of those issues raised
either on Lord Oxburgh or any of the other members of the
panel?
Ms. Graumlich. Those issues weren't raised. What we were
focusing on was the science of the climate research unit as
revealed in their publication record and in their day-to-day
operations. And Lord Oxburgh was actually a--functioned very
much as someone who has a Ph.D. in Earth sciences and brought
his scientific mindset to that task.
Mr. Sensenbrenner. Well, if he is a director of an advocacy
organization called Globe International, you know, I have had
meetings with and tiffs with ever since Kyoto, you know,
together with the intertwining of you and other members, I
don't think that that was an objective review. I don't know how
universities in the United Kingdom get to the bottom of
potential scandals, but I don't think our news media here in
the United States would allow any university to get away with a
panel that would come to a pre-ordained conclusion.
And I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. Blumenauer [presiding]. I guess I am having these terms
echoing in my ear. I mean, it seems to me that it is a very
stark difference. Dr. Graumlich, you were talking about
focusing on the science. Our purpose today was to do precisely
that; and I find it a little embarrassing and sad that the
minority's witness is a journalist with no scientific training,
who didn't come here with any information against the science.
It has been intriguing to me. I have heard Mr. Monckton--I
have often thought appropriately named--in the past; and it is
entertaining, but it doesn't deal very much with the essence of
what we are talking about here. My sense is that it wasn't Dr.
Graumlich. There were several other studies. There has been one
by the British House of Commons. There has been one by the
university itself, if I understand it correctly, one by Penn
State.
Ms. Graumlich. Yes.
Mr. Blumenauer. All have looked at the science----
Ms. Graumlich. Right.
Mr. Blumenauer [continuing]. And concluded that this is a
tempest in a teapot. I mean, there is nothing here that
contradicts the basic science that has been reiterated by the
other three distinguished scientists that join you on the
panel; is that correct?
Ms. Graumlich. That is correct.
And if I could add to the list of reviews that have
happened, at my own institution, the University of Arizona, at
the request of the president, all of the e-mails--an inquiry
was made. Every single e-mail was read, including those that
dealt with Dr. Hughes; and there was a finding that there was
no impropriety that affected the scientific conclusions of Dr.
Hughes and others.
Mr. Blumenauer. Though I suppose I should declare, for the
purposes of the record, I have worked with GLOBE International
in other areas, dealing, for instance, with serious problems
dealing with international water supplies. I don't think it has
affected my objectivity, nor did I notice any sinister
underlying motives or an international agenda at work.
Dr. McCarthy, it is good to see you again. I am remembering
that we first met in your office 10 or 12 years ago, where you
were kind enough to help walk me through some of these issues.
In the course of those 10 or 12 years, not going back now to
1986 when you talked about the trends that first sort of caught
your attention, but just in the 10 or 12 years since we first
met, have you seen anything in terms of the trend lines? Could
you talk about whether the situation has gotten more urgent or
less in that decade or more?
Mr. McCarthy. Congressman, one thing I remember quite
distinctly was our discussion about infrastructure and
wondering the degree to which planning, particularly for a
built infrastructure--the bridges, tunnels, mass transit
systems, utilities of all sorts--should begin to be taken into
consideration for our coastal cities the prospect of sea level
rise. And at that time I can only guess that I would have said,
well, this is something that we need to be concerned about in
the future. But if you took the best estimates of the IPCC at
that time, the planning horizons were out many decades. Now
that has all become very compressed in time in the last decade
because of the new knowledge of the rate at which ice loss is
going to affect sea level rise.
So you look at any of our coastal cities, if you look at
the shape of Florida, with 2\1/2\ or 3\1/2\ feet of sea level
rise a century, it is a very different-looking Florida. And
although you think that rise--just the height of the counter
here is not a lot, but when you consider low-lying land and how
far that reaches inland, our Gulf Coast, very much in the news
these days, will be dramatically affected by a sea level rise
of that sort. And, of course, there are entire island nations
that, with the combination of the sea level rise and the loss
of coral through the change of pH in the ocean, will be at
risk. So that would be my biggest sense of change.
And, of course, in that period, as has been pointed out, we
have seen temperature record after temperature record broken
for the global average temperature.
Mr. Blumenauer. And in terms of the, quote, ``mistakes of
the IPCC,'' I mean, what you have demonstrated with your
testimony is that the studies, the projections were actually
very conservative.
Mr. McCarthy. People tend not to appreciate how
conservative the IPCC process is. When you get a bunch of
scientists together and get them to agree on a statement,
trimming as many caveats out as you can because the scientists
always want to add caveats, well, we are not entirely sure, but
this would be what would be expected, you end up with a
conservative statement. You end up without extremes on other
side being represented. In this case, in sea level, it was a
very conservative statement.
Mr. Blumenauer. Thank you.
And it is. In terms of the risks that are at stake, we take
in the Northwest very seriously that diminution of the snow
pack, the less water content, pretty dramatic just in the
community that I live in. And the fact that more than half of
the American population is in the 673 coastal counties, when
you are talking about inches, let alone feet, this is pretty
compelling, at least in my mind.
But the point I guess in terms of a policy perspective,
based on the potential risks, based on the economic, the
security problems, and just the waste of resources, is there
any good scientific reason not to advance sound policies, even
if we weren't concerned about global warming?
Stunned silence. All right. That is fine. Why don't we--I
will turn to Mr. Shadegg for your inquiry.
Mr. Shadegg. Thank you, Mr. Acting Chairman, if that is
what you are.
First, let me begin by apologizing. I have had to duck in
and out a couple of times because I have another hearing going
forward downstairs on the health care issue.
Second, I want to welcome Dr. Graumlich. You are now at my
alma mater, the University of Arizona, where I received both my
undergraduate and law degree. I am pleased to have you here,
and I am proud of the University of Arizona and proud of it
being recognized for the knowledge and skill of its scientists
and professors.
I guess I have to begin, Dr. Monckton, by expressing a
little shock at the questioning that just went forward and some
reference to your name. I think that is a little inappropriate,
but if that is what we are going do in this hearing, so be it.
I do believe you were just told that, because you are not a
scientist, you didn't bring forward any scientific information
or any information of any value to this hearing. Somehow I
don't seem to agree with that. I think you brought forth an
analysis of scientific information, which I thought was fairly
clear. And I guess I would like to see you at least have an
opportunity to repaint that picture, because, apparently, some
people in the room didn't understand that what you said was,
here is scientific data, here is how it was presented, here is
the conclusion that was drawn from that scientific data, and
here is why that conclusion is, in fact, unsupported. And,
apparently, that escaped the attention or the understanding of
some people here. Is there a possibility we could call that
graph back up and you could explain it to us? Maybe we can get
it the second time.
Mr. Monckton. I am most grateful. I think obviously what is
happening here is that a certain amount of politics has crept
in on one side of this debate----
Mr. Shadegg. What a shock.
Mr. Monckton [continuing]. And, therefore, inconvenient
science has been dismissed as not being science at all.
That is the IPCC's graph with the four separate trend lines
on it. That, as I have said, is an inappropriate statistical
technique.
Next slide again.
Mr. Shadegg. While we are on that one, the purpose of those
lines, this actually appears in the IPCC report?
Mr. Monckton. It does three times, yes.
Mr. Shadegg. And all those lines slope upward at different
angles.
Mr. Monckton. That is right. As you get nearer to the
present, they slope up at steeper and steeper angles. The
implication which is stated three times in the report being
that there is an acceleration of the rate of global warming.
No, there isn't, as we see from the subsequent slides.
First of all, if you choose different starting points and
ending points for where you do your trend lines, you can make
the lines go completely--make the trend go in completely the
other direction. There you have got 1905 to 1945 it was warming
at twice the rate of 1905 to 2005.
Mr. Shadegg. So it is the exact same data.
Mr. Monckton. Same data, same technique. It is a bogus
technique, of course, and that is why you get completely
opposite results depending on where you choose to start and end
your trend line.
Mr. Shadegg. Incorrectly analyzed in the earlier graph to
show a rapid increase in warming.
Mr. Monckton. Exactly, and incorrectly analyzed again here.
Next slide.
Here is the true position where you have the three parallel
rapid rates of warming. The first two cannot have been caused
by CO2 on any view. The increase in CO2
over those periods wasn't enough, even on the U.N.'s formula,
to cause that. The third one we know was largely caused because
it falls in the satellite era, largely caused by a naturally
occurring decrease in cloud cover chiefly in the tropics
allowing more sunlight to hit the ground. And that, if you use
the U.N.'s multiplying up of the warming effect of that should
have caused one Celsius degree or 1.8 Fahrenheit of warming.
Only naught .37 Celsius was, in fact, observed. So we now know
that that third of the three rapid rates of warming was caused
by a natural event almost entirely.
Mr. Shadegg. Could you clarify something for the panel and
for the people in the room listening? What is the satellite
era?
Mr. Monckton. The satellite era, from about 1983 onwards,
we had satellites up there not only measuring changes in global
surface temperature, which they do by reference to platinum
resistance thermometers, comparing that with the temperatures
they see on the ground, but also changes in outgoing radiation
and changes in cloud cover. All of these satellite data show us
exactly what has caused the warming of that most recent rapid
period; and it was largely, in fact, very nearly all, to do
with the reduction in cloud cover that happened quite naturally
over the period. Nothing to do with CO2.
Mr. Shadegg. And with regard to--I mean, you don't take the
position that there has not been warming.
Mr. Monckton. There has been warming. You can see it on the
graph there. Of course there has been warming. Mr. Chairman,
you have got that slightly wrong when you said I didn't say
there had been warming. Of course there has been warming. What
I am saying is that in the one period we can tell about what
caused the warming, the satellite period, it is clear that the
warming was largely naturally caused, and there is paper after
paper in the literature establishing this.
Go on again, please. Next slide.
This is Dr. Pincus' paper establishing that the warming of
that period was caused largely by a naturally occurring
reduction in cloud cover, extra sunlight reaching the ground.
Next slide, please, and the next one. We will miss that one
out.
We go on here to the 11 models, I should say, all
predicting very, very rapid rates of warming, but this is the
relationship between warming at the surface and extra outgoing
long-wave radiation. Most of the models predict there will be
less radiation escaping into space if you warm the surface. The
truth, however, as you see in the middle panel now, that is the
earth radiation budget experiment satellite measurement, it
shows a very rapid increase in the amount of outgoing radiation
escaping to space as you warm the surface. What that means very
simply is that the radiation isn't being trapped down here to
cause warming at anything like the rate that the U.N. predicts,
and that is why Professor Lindzen of MIT has concluded that the
amount of warming you can expect to get from a doubling of
CO2 concentration--this is scientific measurement,
not playing with Xbox 360 models--is only naught.7 Kelvin,
compared with a 3.26 plus or minus naught.69, which is the best
estimate of the U.N.'s climate panel. Now, naught.7 Kelvin for
a doubling of CO2 concentration is small, harmless,
and generally beneficial.
Mr. Shadegg. I thank the gentleman, and I appreciate the
indulgence of the chair in allowing you to answer.
I guess your conclusion was we--I will just conclude with
this remark--that we should do nothing. Certainly it appears to
me that the majority got to pick four witnesses here. We got to
pick one witness here. It is pretty evident that whether we do
nothing, or what we do, there is clearly at least a dispute
about the evidence. And it is not, in fact, apparently agreed
upon.
Mr. Chairman, I would also like at some point to ask
unanimous consent to put into the record the actual e-mails
which were exchanged which I believe show the dialog going on
with regard to the analysis of the IPCC report.
The Chairman. Without objection, it will be included in the
record.
[The information is in Select Committee records and is
available at: http://globalwarming. house.gov/files/WEB/shadegg
Materials.pdf or http://globalwarming. house.gov/pubs?id=0018]
The Chairman. The gentleman's time has expired.
The chair recognizes the gentleman from Washington State,
Mr. Inslee.
Mr. Inslee. And I would note there is a dispute about
whether we actually landed on the moon, and there is a dispute
about whether the earth is round, and there is a dispute about
gravity in some places, but there is no----
We will get to you, Lord Monckton, shortly, but I want to
talk to the scientists on the panels, first, if that is okay.
Thank you very much.
Dr. McCarthy, I appreciate you bringing up the ocean
acidification issues, which Dr. Jane Lubchenko of NOAA has
called the evil twin of climate change. I would like you to
describe what actually happens to species when they are
exposed, and I want to put up a slide that I believe I got from
Dr. Lubchenko.
This slide basically shows what happens when you put a
pterapod, a small creature, in the water. In the left, you see
its picture. These are relatively small. And this shows what
happens when you put a pterapod in water that will be in the
same acidic conditions that will exist in the year 2100 if we
do not change our course. So it basically shows that, according
to Dr. Lubchenko, the pterapod melts. Its little calcium
carbonate structure actually melts.
And I just wonder if you can describe what the oceans will
look like from an acidity standpoint in the next hundred years
if we don't change course and what that does to the plankton
that serves or could do to the bottom of the food chain.
Mr. McCarthy. Thank you.
This, like a lot of the other change we are talking about,
is not simply a difference of one condition to another but the
time period over which it happens. So if we look at changes in
the ocean over the last million years, every 100,000 years or
so we saw ice advance, retreat. We saw organisms that lived in
the high north moving closer to the Equator, during the cool
periods moving back on land, out of the ocean. In fact, it is
interesting. There are very few extinctions during that period,
that the memory, the genetics of organisms know in their
history that being able to accommodate those changes is
essential for survival.
But when you crank those rates of change up, pH changed
during those periods. Temperature changed. When you crank those
rates of change up 100 or close to 1,000 fold, in some cases,
then you exceed the capacity of ecosystems to adjust.
Now, in this case, the pterapod--I was tempted to put a
picture of a colorful animal in there. Pterapods are absolutely
beautiful animals. And if you could have one in here in a
beaker, the foot of the mollusk is thin and flaps like a wing.
They are called sea butterflies. If you ever see them swimming,
they are really--they are just spectacularly beautiful. It is a
very delicate shell. They are a very, very important part of
the food web in the north Pacific, particularly for salmon. We
know that the pink salmon depends heavily on the pterapod for
its food.
That was just one example. I mentioned others, microscopic
plankton, the foraminifer, and, of course, corals are all
subject to the same condition. That is, as carbon dioxide is
added to the ocean more rapidly than it can adjust, and if this
were being added over the thousands of years, rather than over
100, it would be a whole different story, more rapidly adjust.
Then the constant tension of the animal, of trying to keep its
skeletal material, its shell from dissolving becomes more and
more in the favor of water. That is, water pulls those minerals
back into solution. So this is the condition.
And, of course, we know in the past, there has been more
carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We know that in the past the
pH of the oceans have been different. We also know that there
are periods in the past where organisms like this disappeared,
that the conditions were not suitable for corals or mollusks to
survive. So this is a very important issue.
Mr. Inslee. So I am told that the waters are more acidic,
30 percent more acidic than they were in pre-industrial times.
What will they be at the end of the century, approximately, if
things don't change?
Mr. McCarthy. Well, I don't know how to express it in terms
of percent, but if you take these extrapolations, as is done
here experimentally, you can show what the effect would be of
that changing acid base balance referred to in the vernacular
as acidification. The oceans aren't becoming acid. They are
becoming less alkaline. But it will dissolve these minerals.
Mr. Inslee. Thank you.
I was impressed--we are here as the House of
Representatives to have the state of the science discussed
about climate change. And I was impressed that those who have
denied the threat this poses to the planet Earth couldn't
produce one scientist, not one scientist to propose the
hypothesis to explain what the Earth is undergoing, all the
changes we are undergoing now. They produced somebody that
doesn't even have a field, a background in science, and that is
what they produce to try to convince Americans somehow that
this is a big hoax. I think that is impressive or unimpressive,
depending on how you look at it. So I want to ask about Lord
Monckton's viewpoint and basis for that.
Lord Monckton, when did you start serving in the House of
Lords? I noticed you brought fraternal greetings from the
mother of parliaments to Congress to our athletic democracy.
When did you start serving in The House of Lords?
Mr. Monckton. Sir, I have never sat or voted in The House
of Lords, as you have probably been informed.
Mr. Inslee. Thank you.
So, basically, I want to understand--thank you. You have
answered my question.
You come here, you call yourself a Lord, to try to convince
the world to ignore something that threatens our grand kids;
and you are not even a Lord.
Now let me finish my question, and then I will let you
speak. Lord Monckton, in our athletic democracy, we will ask
the questions, and you will answer them. Thank you very much.
You come to our athletic democracy, sir, calling yourself
Lord Monckton. Not only are you not a scientist, you are not
even a Lord who served in the House of Parliament. Isn't that
correct? In The House of Lords. Is it correct you did not serve
in the House of Lords?
Mr. Monckton. I think I have already answered that one,
sir.
Mr. Inslee. Okay. Thank you.
So we not only have the deniers who have denied this clear
science upon which there is enormous global consensus, they
cannot only not produce one scientist to deny this clear
consensus, they can't even send us a real Lord from The House
of Lords.
Now, I think that says a lot about the status of this
debate which we should not be having. Because we have an
overwhelming consensus, and I note that it is not just by these
four scientists. Joe Barton, our good friend, asked the
National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration to review
your testimony, Lord Monckton, and this is what they said:
``The fact that globally average surface air temperature
has shown no trend or even slight cooling over the last 7 years
is not an accurate reflection of long-term general trends. In
fact, calculation of a trend over the last 7 years is a gross
mischaracterization of the longer-term trend. The last 7 years
have been part of a strong warming trend that began in the
1970s which is attributable to human influences, citing IPCC
2007. During the last 7 years, six of the seven warmest years
on record have all been observed based on NOAA's global land
and ocean data. Deducing long-term trends over such a short
period of time is comparable to estimating the height of a sea
swell by looking at the short period waves on top of a swell.''
NOAA, the people who work for our athletic democracy, have
concluded we don't need a fake Lord to tell us not to act. We
need real science, and we need us to have a clean energy
policy. Thank you.
The Chairman. The gentleman's times has expired.
The chair recognizes the gentleman from Oklahoma, Mr.
Sullivan.
Mr. Sullivan. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And, Lord Monckton, I guess I think you have a right to
explain why you are a Lord, and I don't think you had an
opportunity to.
Mr. Monckton. I will do that very briefly, because this is
not the subject of this hearing; and, once again, I see
politics of a not particularly pleasant kind creeping in.
My grandfather was created a hereditary peer, one of the
last to be created, in 1957 and by letters patent issued by the
Queen. Until those letters patent are revoked--and they have
not been--I remain and am correctly addressed as the Viscount
Monckton of Brenchley. I am therefore a Lord, but by virtue of
the 1999 House of Lords Act I no longer have the right to sit
or vote. That was taken away from my father, so I have never
sat or voted in The House of Lords, nor have I pretended
otherwise. And I think that really should deal with that
matter. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Sullivan. Thank you.
Lord Monckton, what could the climate scientists do to
regain the public trust in their work? What can they do to
insure transparency and accountability in the climate scientist
community, especially as we look towards the development of the
upcoming IPCC's fifth assessment report?
Mr. Monckton. Let me first of all begin with the quotation
from NOAA's response to my written testimony which,
incidentally, I wasn't given a copy of before this hearing, and
I think somebody has slipped up there.
But the passage that was quoted focused on one short
sentence which mentioned that for the last 7 or 8 years there
has been, if anything, a certain amount of global cooling. So
there has. But, however, my temperature record goes back as far
as the Neoproterozoic era, 750 million years ago. The graphs I
showed today are for the last 150 years. So I don't think I can
be fairly accused of having unreasonably cherry-picked the
periods over which I was looking at the data.
Now, what I think scientists therefore need to do if they
want to start commanding the respect of the public, because
they are losing that respect over this issue, is to stop
chattering about consensus. Science has never been done by
consensus, and it isn't going to be done by consensus now. Stop
using in the IPCC's documents references to documents not
produced by peer-reviewed sources but by green propaganda
groups and by journalists and confine their analysis to the
peer-reviewed literature, as I did today.
And, also, they must make sure that, instead of trying to
push one agenda and shout down anyone who dares to put an
alternative point of view, as I have politely sought to do
today, they should treat those who disagree with them with
courtesy, hear with some care what they have to say, and
instead of dismissing an argument they perhaps don't
understand, as one of the panelists here did when asked to
comment on my testimony, they should instead engage in a
rational debate via the columns of the peer-reviewed literature
with the many scientists who disagree with the official line.
And, of course, scientists could have been paraded here
today, but, quite rightly, the minority group, knowing that the
majority would merely want to throw brickbats at them, decided
that, instead, somebody with a certain amount of experience in
politics and a thick skin should sit and take the cow pats
flung at him, which I am more than happy to do, so as to spare
the many thousands of diligent scientists who are questioning
every aspect of this ludicrous scare to get on with their work,
and that is what in the end is going to decide this matter. It
is going to be diligent, scientific inquiry and not the hurling
of childish political insults.
Mr. Sullivan. Lord Monckton, some of these scientists--or I
guess anyone can answer this question. Do some of these
scientists--how are they funded? Do they get grants or are
their organization that give them funding? Do you think that
that has a potential to corrupt the process? And do they feel
beholden to certain results because of that?
Mr. Monckton. That is a very shrewd point, sir. The only
reason why the notion that consensus decides science has
unfortunately crept in is that science these days effectively
is a monopsony. There is only one paying customer, and that is
the unwilling taxpayer. And because of that and because of the
grant-funding structure and because of the resultant academic
pressures to come forth, it take enormous courage for any
scientist to stand out against the political line that is now
being taken among the scientific institutions and to say, hang
on a moment; the numbers don't add up.
I have just shown you today various points at which the
numbers very plainly don't add up, and they are established in
the peer-reviewed literature, and they are established by
measurement and not by modeling.
You have heard the rather qualitative replies of the four
scientists here. They didn't really quote numbers much. They
were quoting models. But science is best done and most
accurately done by measurement, and those papers that rely
chiefly on measurement are finding that there isn't the problem
that we are told there is.
Mr. Sullivan. Thank you, sir.
Mr. Blumenauer [presiding]. Congressman Cleaver.
Mr. Cleaver. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Dr. Field--and I may want to get the other three to respond
to this as well. I think all of the denials and all of the talk
of Climategate has had an impact, at least in the United
States. In 1997, Gallup began conducting polls on attitudes in
the United States on climate change; and, tragically, the
number of people who believe that climate change has been
exaggerated, according to Gallup, the latest poll is 48
percent. And until the latest poll, the number of those who
embraced climate change as being impacted by human activity was
on the way up. So the folk who have been fighting this have,
unfortunately, from my vantage point, been winning.
The poll also shows that--and maybe this is one of the
reasons--that in areas where there was extreme cooling over the
past winter, the people polled in those areas tend to embrace
the theory that there has been exaggeration.
One of the questions that I would like to ask is, what
atmospheric condition needs to be at play for a higher level of
snow on the planet?
Mr. Hurrell. Well, perhaps one comment along those lines.
Indeed, as I tried to emphasize in my testimony, global warming
does not mean that changes are uniform everywhere. There are
pronounced regional and seasonal variations, and this is due to
the natural variability in the system. We still expect under
climate change that we will have snowstorms. We will still have
cold periods. Cold periods may become less frequent as we go
into the future, but they will certainly occur.
In terms of some of the heavy precipitation events, as my
colleagues have spoken to today, a key ingredient in that is
that, as the atmosphere warms, as it has unmistakably been
observed, the warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture;
and, therefore, any given storm will precipitate more than it
otherwise would have. As we have also been very explicit, that
does not mean that you can attribute any individual storm to
climate change, but, on average and statistically, we would
expect to see an increasing trend in heavy precipitation
events, including heavy snowstorms; and this indeed is being
observed over many parts of the world.
Mr. Cleaver. Though it is counterintuitive, the scientific
truth is we have more snows if it is warmer.
Mr. Hurrell. Yes. Again, that relates to the ability of the
atmosphere to hold moisture. A warm atmosphere can hold more
moisture, so when it does snow it will snow more.
Mr. Cleaver. Dr. McCarthy.
Mr. McCarthy. Thank you.
This is a very complicated subject and one can take one
little piece of it and make a headline out of it and find that
it may be true but it sounds like a contradiction.
So the place I live right now in the Northeast, what limits
snowfall in the winter is not temperature but moisture, and
that moisture may come off the Atlantic with a Nor'Easter. It
may come up from the Gulf, or it may come off the lakes, the
Great Lakes.
So one of the early projections in climate models was in a
warmer world we would have more snow accreting in Greenland and
in Antarctica. Now that to many people sounded like a
contradiction. But indeed, for exactly the reason that Dr.
Hurrell just explained, a warmer atmosphere holds more
moisture. The air comes off the ocean over Antarctica, over
Greenland.
Now early studies showed that that was indeed happening,
not possible until we had very precise estimates of the
elevation of these ice masses with satellites. But what we see
at the edges, even though they are gaining snow more rapidly,
Antarctica, it is the coldest continent. It is also the highest
average elevation of any continent. It is the windiest. It is
also the driest. That is our biggest desert. So as the ocean
warms up around it, more moisture into the air, more moisture
into the interior. But what we see now as you look more
carefully is it is gaining in the middle, but it is losing at
the edges; and, on balance, Antarctica and Greenland are losing
ice more rapidly than it is being formed.
So you can take any--back here where you started with this
comment. Any sort of one of those short phrases you could make
a headline out of it. And, often, the public is very confused
because they see these fragments of information and don't
understand how they fit together.
Mr. Cleaver. Thank you. That is important. And I don't
know, one of the things we have got to do is to be able to
figure out a way to present complicated information in a--you
know, I think the newspapers are supposed to be printed at a
sixth-grade level. And I think something as important as this,
we have got to figure out how to simplify the language for the
public. Because, otherwise, they are going to get a headache
and bail out because they--not because they are not concerned,
but they don't get it. Now, we, some of this we learned in
eighth grade. But my frustration is simplifying the language,
and I don't know how to do it.
Mr. McCarthy. Could I make a further comment?
Mr. Cleaver. Yes, sir.
Mr. McCarthy. Consensus seems to get a bad word at times.
But when decisionmakers come to groups of scientists and say,
tell us the simplest version of this story, that is where the
consensus statement comes from.
If you get scientists together and say, what do you want to
talk about, we don't talk about things we agree on. We talk
about the parts that we disagree on, the things that we don't
understand, where all the interest in furthering the science
lies. So if you made two rosters and say, where are the
statements on this subject that say there is a problem? Because
the climate is changing. We know the causes of that. If those
trends continue, all of the sort of impacts we talk about will
come in play.
Who is on that ledger? All the national academies of
sciences--in my testimony, I included a statement that came out
last October--eighteen organizations, scientific organizations
of the United States. Look at any of our societies--the
American Meteorological Society, the American Geophysical
Union, the American Ecological Society--all of their statements
are very similar; and I have given an example here.
So we are asked at times to try and simplify this, and this
is the consensus or where consensus comes into play. Scientists
don't sit around talking about what they agree on. They talk
about what they disagree on.
Mr. Blumenauer. Thank you all.
The gentleman's time has expired. We are about to be
summoned to the floor with bells and whistles for our robust
democracy on the floor of the House. We deeply appreciate your
coming here. I think any review of the record today, as well as
the materials you have submitted, illustrates the purpose of
the hearing. But you have been so patient with us.
We want to make sure that--and apologize for trying to
bring it to a conclusion--but we would like to give every
member of the panel a minute, a minute and a half just for any
summary conclusion that you may have, any takeaway. If you have
decided that it was just cloud cover and you were wrong, any
wrap-up thoughts?
Mr. Hurrell. Sir, I appreciate the opportunity to make some
concluding comments.
I think that transparency in process, making data
available, making model codes available is extremely important;
and that is something that, by and large, the climate science
community does a very good job of. I work at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where we
develop one of the world leading climate models in the world
that is used to understand climate, as well as project future
changes in climate; and that entire code and all of the data
that go into that model are publicly available. You can go out
to the Web site right now and download that data. And I think
that climate science spanning the breadth of the sciences makes
a very valiant attempt to be as transparent as possible.
I also want to emphasize, in terms of the IPCC process,
that it is indeed an assessment; and, as Dr. McCarthy pointed
out, the consensus view is indeed a very powerful view. The
IPCC report does an exhaustive job documenting not only what we
do know but also what we don't know and where the grand
challenges are and where the uncertainties are. There are many,
many peer-reviewed papers that are thoroughly assessed in those
international assessment reports.
When we saw some of Lord Monckton's evidence today, those
are largely based on single studies, and I could take the time,
if you wanted, to go through those on an individual basis and
point out some of the flaws in those studies as well. That is
the scientific process; and, indeed, for the papers that he has
highlighted, there are other papers in the literature that
counter those points and raise issues.
And very quickly, the final last word, what I did not
address was indeed the importance of communicating; and I
thoroughly agree that that is a very fundamental, very critical
thing that all scientists need to be doing.
Mr. Blumenauer. Thank you very much.
Dr. McCarthy.
Mr. McCarthy. Thank you. I will try and make four points
very briefly.
I want to emphasize a point that I made in my testimony,
that what we are talking about here are not just changes,
changes that we may see analogs for in the past, but very rapid
changes, rapid rates of change, rapid rise of sea level, rapid
changes in ocean chemistry; and that is a very, very important
part of the message.
Secondly, I would like to say that we should think about
this like assessing risk. What if we are right? What if we are
wrong? What is the worst thing we could do? And you will puzzle
your way through that logic. Think of how we assess risk,
whether we buy fire insurance for our houses or not. I don't
think my house is ever going to burn down, but I would not own
a house without fire insurance. And we look, we assess the risk
here. We say, could we err on the right side or the wrong side?
I think we want to err on the right side.
Then you look at all the projections for cost; and,
increasingly, from the report from Sir Nicholas Stern and many
others, you see that doing the right thing to move us away from
dependence upon fossil fuel is not inordinately expensive and
that there are enormous benefits, many of which have never been
cost in this ledger.
Then just finally, if you go through these exercises, you
see that we have a limited period in which to act if we are
going to avoid some other things we didn't even talk about
today, some of the high consequence, low probability, high
consequence changes. And a lot of models show that if we do not
act within the next decade to begin to bend these curves then
we are entering dangerous territory.
Finally, we all need to communicate better. Scientists are
clumsy at this. It is not our profession. We learned how to do
science, not how to communicate well, and we need to work on
that.
Mr. Monckton. The central point I should like to leave the
panel with is that there is no hurry. If you do nothing about
this at all for the whole of the next 23 years, the worst that
will happen, using the U.N.'s own estimate, is a 1 Fahrenheit
degree warming, which will be largely harmless and beneficial.
So you have plenty of time to check the studies, just a few of
which I have shown you today in the peer-reviewed literature
suggesting that there is another side to this story, another
side based not on modeling but on measurement, which
establishes and with increasing clarity establishes that there
is no scientific problem. Even if there were, adaptation, as
and where and if necessary, would be orders of magnitude
cheaper and more cost effective than trying to stop the
emission of carbon dioxide.
Who is going to get hurt if you start closing down coal-
fired power stations, putting up the price of gasoline and
electricity? Who is going to get hurt? It is the working people
of America. Is that a good thing? I don't think so and nor
should you.
Mr. Field. Thank you very much for the opportunity to make
a couple of concluding remarks.
One of the things I think really needs to be emphasized is
that the scientific evidence on climate change is based on many
lines of independent evidence, on thousands and thousands of
scientific studies that are quantitatively careful. Some are
based on models, many are based on observations, and they all
fit together in a fabric in which the general kinds of
conclusions that indicate that the climate is changing, that
the changes are important are very, very real.
It is also important to note, however, that there are
important unknowns. Some of those have been discussed today,
and many of the unknowns are in the direction of risks that are
potentially higher than we have been able to accurately
categorize. The risks of sudden sea level rise, the risks of
carbon release from ecosystems, and the risks of dramatic
changes in the Earth's system have all been very difficult to
quantify and are not generally recognized in the more
conservative kinds of assessments that typically come from the
IPCC and other organizations.
I also want to emphasize the point that Dr. McCarthy made
about the importance of viewing climate science as essentially
problem in risk management. We don't know precisely what the
future will look like, but we have a very clear picture of the
risk elements that are introduced by changes that people are
causing in the earth's system, and we can have an increasingly
clear picture of the consequences of commonsense investments in
decreasing those impacts.
Now, finally, I want to conclude with a very strong comment
that Lord Monckton's conclusion that we don't need to do
anything now is fundamentally misleading. We haven't seen
crises that we can unambiguously attribute to climate change,
but we have seen increasing risk to a wide range of Earth's
systems, and we also know that the longer we delay the more
difficult it gets to address the problem and the more expensive
it gets. This is a problem where commonsense investments in the
shorter term are likely to pay big dividends relative to
waiting and hoping against hope that the situation isn't as bad
as the science indicates.
The Chairman [presiding]. Great. Thank you, Dr. Field very
much.
Dr. Graumlich.
Ms. Graumlich. Thank you for the opportunity to make a
final comment.
I would like to, first off, simply agree with my colleagues
on this panel that the scientific consensus is clear and that
the urgency to act is very much upon us. But I am struck by
Congressman Cleaver's comments about the degree to which public
perception is perhaps lagging behind the perceptions of some of
you on this particular committee and want to give my view from
the Southwest.
I am part of a land grant institution that has a very
strong relationship with the ranching community in the
Southwest. Since 2002, we have been in a deep drought; and
there is very good scientific evidence that that is due to the
northern migration of the westerlies that are no longer
bringing as much precipitation to the Southwest as there was
before. Our ranching community is not arguing about whether
climate change is here or not. They are coming to us saying,
what are we going to do about it? And climate is the number one
issue in this community, and they are asking us to give them
guidance about how to adapt, both in the short term and the
long term. So I think that the public perception that climate
is an issue, whether it is called climate change or whether it
is not called climate change, is particularly keen among the
peoples of the Southwest.
Secondly, as a professor in a large public university, we
share your concern about the increase in scientific literacy
that is going to be demanded to address the complex trade-offs
that we are coming up against, and we are very much engaged in
that enterprise.
Thank you.
The Chairman. Thank you, Dr. Graumlich, very much.
We thank each of you for your participation in this very
important hearing. We will continue with additional hearings on
this issue so that we can ensure that all of the science is out
in a way that it makes it possible for the public to be able to
make an informed decision as to whether or not there really is
such a thing as global warming that has been caused by manmade
activity. We think that there is no more important debate that
we can have in the Congress or in our country, and the experts
that we had today I think very clearly laid out the scientific
reality and has only added to my conviction that we have to act
and we have to act soon.
The Waxman-Markey bill passed last June 26, 2009. The
Senate has a bill which, with a little bit of luck, it will
begin consideration of in the relatively near future. But time
is of the essence.
So with the thanks of the committee, this hearing is
adjourned.
[Whereupon, at 11:20 a.m., the committee was adjourned.]

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