[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 56 (Wednesday, May 10, 2006)]
[House]
[Page H2481]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                            CLIMATE CHANGES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Gilchrest) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GILCHREST. Mr. Speaker, I would like to talk for 5 minutes on 
this issue known as climate change. Are humans affecting the climate or 
is it the natural influence of natural variabilities?
  Mr. Speaker, if people will look back into their middle school and 
high school years, they will remember their silence class, their 
geography class, maybe their geology class, and they learned that the 
planet Earth over millions of years varied in its climate. Sometimes we 
had very warm periods and sometimes we had very cold periods. Sometimes 
the tropics were as far north as Canada and sometimes ice ages covered 
much of North America. But the point is, what do we remember about the 
details and the facts on how they occurred?
  I think maybe Jay Leno should ask that question in a ``Jay Walking'' 
exercise, ``What do you know about climate change?'' Well, in past eons 
of times, tens of thousands of years ago, millions of years ago there 
were very few human beings on the planet and those human beings were 
not burning fossil fuel.
  Today we have six billion people on planet Earth and many of those 
people are burning coal, natural gas, oil, gasoline. They are burning 
for their energy sources fossil fuel. And the fossil fuel that we are 
burning in the modern era of time is putting more greenhouse gasses 
into the atmosphere in decades than the natural variabilities of planet 
Earth locked up over millions of years.
  Why is fossil fuel important when we are looking at the issue of 
climate change or global warming? When you burn fossil fuel it puts 
into the atmosphere a gas known as CO or carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide 
is the chief element, the chief gas, in the atmosphere that controls 
climate, that controls the heat balance. We call this the ``greenhouse 
effect.'' Sunlight comes in, but because of COG, some of it cannot be 
radiated out so we have had a pretty good of balance of climate on the 
planet, at least for the last few thousand years.
  Now, how much COG is in the atmosphere that has this huge effect on 
the climate?

                              {time}  2015

  Less than 1 percent of the atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide. 
Way less than 1 percent of the atmosphere is made up of carbon dioxide, 
but it has a huge effect. So you can see that any variability in carbon 
dioxide will have quite severe consequences on the planet.
  How much CO2 was in the atmosphere 10,000 years ago, at 
the very edge of the end of that Ice Age? Ten thousand years ago, there 
were 180 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 
Thousands of years later, with a warming trend, a natural warming trend 
on the planet, almost 10,000 years later, it was 280 parts per million.
  Two hundred years ago on the planet, during the early American days, 
there were 80 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere. One 
hundred years ago, that increased by a small fraction; 100 years ago, 
there were 290 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. 
Now, this sounds like a lot of calculations and a lot of numbers. 100 
years ago, 290 parts per million, heat balanced because of 
CO2. One hundred years later, now, we are talking about 100 
percentage points, 100 parts per million difference over 10,000 years.
  What happened in the last 100 years? We are at 380 parts per million 
in the last 100 years. What normally would take 10,000 years to happen 
in a natural variation, variability, fluctuation, we did in 100 years. 
The estimate will be, by the year 2050, we are likely to be over 500 
parts per million. That means we have had more of a dramatic increase 
in CO2 that controls the climate in 100 years than happened 
5 million years ago.
  The Earth is warming because of the increase in CO2 
because of the burning of fossil fuel. The hottest years on record have 
happened since the 1980s. The major institutions of science in the 
United States have concluded that the matter of climate change is 
settled. Human activity is having an influence on the planet.

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