[Congressional Record Volume 153, Number 171 (Tuesday, November 6, 2007)]
[Senate]
[Page S13986]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 GLOBAL CHANGE RESEARCH IMPROVEMENT ACT

  Ms. SNOWE. Mr. President, I am pleased to join with Senator Kerry in 
introducing the Global Change Research Improvement Act of 2007, that 
amends and strengthens the existing U.S. climate change research and 
assessment program that will ultimately benefit all of the citizens of 
our Nation. Our intent is to improve upon the basic research and 
products that the Federal Government develops on climate change and its 
inherent impacts. We believe our legislation would refocus the emphasis 
of the nations' climate change program and fulfill the need for 
relevant information for States, and local and nongovernmental 
decisionmakers.
  In addition, the creation of a new National Climate Service within 
the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, will provide 
climate change forecasting on a regular basis to end-users, and create 
a permanent network for the delivery of such information so that 
decision makers in every city and town, county and State, and the 
Federal Government can make timely planning decisions to deal with 
impacts and develop adaptation methodologies.
  The legislation also calls for an Abrupt Climate Change Research 
Program within NOAA--a program I have been supporting for at least 5 
years now--so that scientists can gather more knowledge about a change 
in the climate that occurs so rapidly or unexpectedly that human or 
natural systems have difficulty adapting to the change. I am proud to 
say that my alma mater, the University of Maine at Orono, has a world 
renowned abrupt climate change research program under the direction of 
Dr. Paul Mayewski. He and his colleague Dr. George Denton, UMaine Libra 
Professor of Geological Sciences have been major contributors to 
research on abrupt climate change. There is a need for a national 
research program to coordinate and further research on past climate 
shifts so that scientists can better predict what future climate change 
holds for our fragile planet.
  The Global Change Research Program, GCRP, the country's climate 
research and assessment program, was established in law by the Global 
Change Research Act of 1990. Consider what has happened technologically 
since then, what was generally unheard of at that time. We now drive 
hybrid cars, we are tuned into iPods, we use hand held blackberries for 
instant communication, we have much more advanced and high speed 
computers for modeling and, most importantly for our legislation, more 
comprehensive knowledge and understanding of climate change through 17 
more years of peer-reviewed scientific research, monitoring, and 
assessments. Our nation's climate change research program needs 
restructuring so that we can turn that knowledge into timely and useful 
information for decisionmakers. This is exactly what our bill does.
  Unfortunately, the overall GCRP program's budget has been steadily 
declining since fiscal year 2004, which is alarming since, at the same 
time, we have a growing need, a truly urgent need, to better understand 
and predict climate change. Over the past several years, independent 
reports, including a review by the National Academy of Sciences, have 
documented weaknesses and gaps in the current implementation of the 
GCRP. In fact, a Federal district court found that the current 
administration had failed to comply with the statute's mandate to 
provide regular assessments of the impacts of climate change on 
critical resources; no such assessment has been published since October 
31, 2000.
  Our legislation makes important changes to address these weaknesses 
and gaps, making important changes to strengthen the mandate to provide 
assessments, enabling the GCRP to perform critical climate observations 
and research on climate systems; improve our ability to predict climate 
impacts at national, regional and local levels; and, importantly, to 
communicate those impacts in a timely and useful fashion to State and 
local decisionmakers, resource managers, and other stakeholders.
  Back in the 14th century, a Franciscan friar William of Ocklam came 
up with the principle that has, through the ages, been called Occam's 
razor. The Latin explanation ``entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter 
necessitatem,'' which paraphrased means, ``All things being equal, the 
simplest solution tends to be the right one.'' This is what Senator 
Kerry and I are attempting to accomplish with this bill, to simply 
focus rather than to continue to multiply and to dilute how our climate 
change research programs are currently carried out with no real usable 
information for the decisionmakers who must deal with the problems of 
global warming. We hope our colleagues agree with these necessary 
improvements and will join us with their support.

                          ____________________