[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 28, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S88-S89]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        CLIMATE-RELATED CHANGES

  Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, with the administration expected to seek 
eventual Senate approval of the recent Kyoto Protocols on ``global 
warming,'' I would like to enter into the Record an excellent article 
on the subject by the noted author and historian T.R. Fehrenbach. It is 
a timely reminder of the many climate-related changes our planet has 
experienced and places the current debate in much needed historical 
context. I commend this article to my Senate colleagues and ask 
unanimous consent that it be printed in the Record.
  There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in 
the Record, as follows:

           [From the San Antonio Express-News, Jan. 4, 1998]

                     Who's Really Full of Hot Air?

       The most cursory study of geology, archaeology and history 
     shows that Earth has undergone vast climatic changes 
     throughout its existence. The oil and gas under Texas soil 
     come from natural decay when this land was a hot, fetid, 
     fern-filled swamp. Later Texas was covered by sea, emerging 
     again as geological ``new land.''
       When the first human beings arrived, it was much cooler and 
     wetter than today, supporting very different life forms from 
     those Indians hunted in historic times.
       Archaeology shows that Saudi Arabia was once a well-
     watered, populated plain, while Greece and Italy were heavily 
     forested. Yes, people cut down those trees, some to make the 
     ships that Helen launched, but man had nothing to do with the 
     enormous climatic changes around the Mediterranean during our 
     own geologic age, the decaying Pleistocene.
       The world has grown steadily warmer and drier, the reason 
     Spanish forests, once cut, never resprouted. Conversely, 
     today in Alaska cut-over forests regrow within a few years 
     without replanting.
       The evidence of repeated glaciations--they seem to come 
     about every 20,000 solar years--lies all over North America, 
     the most obvious being our Great Lakes. During these repeated 
     Ice Ages, Earth's water supply being constant, the oceans 
     shrink, falling as much as 200 feet. The first Americans got 
     here across a land bridge now sunk beneath

[[Page S89]]

     the Bering Sea. But as glaciation recedes the seas rise, 
     which they have been doing for thousands of years.
       In recorded history, we can trace a warming trend 
     interspersed with ``little Ice Ages'' or irregular cold 
     periods within the cycle. The Rhine and Danube froze over in 
     late Roman times; wine-growing in those regions was 
     impossible. With warming, olive orchards grew in France, only 
     to be destroyed by horrendous cold in the late 16th and early 
     17th centuries, the same change that killed off Norse 
     settlers in Greenland.
       Climatology, a still-rudimentary science, attributes these 
     cycles to sunspots, changes in the sun's energy output, or to 
     slight tilts in the Earth's axis. A wobble can make a 
     difference of a degree or two in average temperature, and 
     that much difference can make seas recede or flood and huge 
     areas unfit for agriculture.
       Then there's El Nino, killing off marine life and raising 
     hob on both sides of the Pacific Rim. It was around for 
     thousands of years before the media discovered it.
       Archeologists believe El Ninos in A.D. 546 and 576 
     destroyed an early Indian civilization in Peru with floods, 
     soil erosion and destruction of irrigation systems, followed 
     by a 32-year-long drought.
       And, of course, there's vulcanism, very active in our age. 
     The bubbling up of Earth's molten core causes volcanic 
     eruptions, earthquakes, and vanishing islands. Everybody 
     knows about Pompeii; few know about the many thousands killed 
     in this century, or the eruption of a Pacific crater that, by 
     smoke and dust hurled into the atmosphere, caused crop 
     failures across America in the early 1800s.
       And, friends, the tectonic plates, which once separated 
     continents, are still shifting ever so slightly. One day 
     California may join Japan, if it doesn't join Atlantis first.
       Climatic disasters occurred before man, and most have 
     happened when there weren't enough wood-burning people around 
     to create atmospheric pollution or much other kind. This is 
     why I suspect the recent Kyoto Protocols on global warming 
     (though it exists and governments should study it) are an 
     exercise in human arrogance.
       The Kyoto pontificators were mostly politicians, social 
     scientists (which the media accept as ``scientists'') and 
     bureaucrats, while climatologists, weathermen, and true 
     ``hard'' scientists remain divided as to the causes of global 
     warming and whether it's good or bad. They agree, meanwhile, 
     that nothing disastrous in any case will happen for 100 
     years, when we may be in a new Ice Age.
       Listening to the rhetoric makes me wonder if we've advanced 
     all that far from the days of the Aztecs, when priest-rulers 
     ordered sacrifices to propiate nature, in their case tossing 
     virgins down wells to bring rain and cardiectomies to make 
     the sun rise. We understand the forces of nature better--but 
     we have no more control over them than ancient peoples 
     praying to the moon.
       Without more proof--of the scientific, not the ideological 
     kind--I'm not prepared to sacrifice my Grand Cherokee to the 
     current shamans' gods.

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