[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 100 (Friday, June 29, 2012)]
[House]
[Pages H4649-H4652]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  GLOBAL WARMING AND AMERICAN FREEDOM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California 
(Mr. Rohrabacher) for 30 minutes.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I have a policy in my office that every 
time anyone from my district actually comes to the Capitol, they have a 
right to see me and talk to me, especially young people. And I have, 
over the years, seen hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of young 
people from my home district in southern California. And I let them 
talk to me and ask any questions that they would like to ask.
  And I have a question that I always ask them, and I thought it would 
be interesting for my colleagues and perhaps any of those who are 
watching C-SPAN or reading this in the Congressional Record to know the 
answer that I get when I ask a question of the young high school 
students from my district.
  Mr. Speaker, when our kids come in to my office and are talking to 
me, I note that I was actually in high school in southern California 47 
years ago. And I always ask the kids, is the air better quality today, 
or is it worse today than when I was going to high school in southern 
California 47 years ago?
  And 90 percent of the students, over the years, whom I've asked that 
question to have had exactly the wrong answer. Their answer is, oh, you 
were so lucky to live at a time when the air quality in southern 
California and around the Nation was so good, and it's so terrible that 
we have to put up today with air quality that's killing us.
  They've been told that the air quality when I was in high school was 
so much better than it is today, which is 180 degrees wrong. But this 
is a general attitude among today's young people because our young 
people are being lied to. They are intentionally being given 
misinformation.
  Now, their teachers may not be intentionally lying to them, but their 
teachers maybe are given information from scientists and other sources 
that is an exact lie from people who know that, yes, the air quality 
back when I went to school, and I go into description about how the air 
quality was so bad at times we couldn't even go out on the playground. 
They wouldn't even let us out of the classroom on to the sports field 
because the air was so bad. Today that happens maybe once a year or 
twice a year in southern California. Back then it happened once a week 
at times during the summer and during the school year.
  So our kids have this view that their generation is being poisoned, 
and they're willing to accept stringent measures in order to protect 
the environment that take away a great deal of the opportunity that 
they should have in their lives in order to correct this horrible 
problem that they're told that they've got.
  Well, when I tell them it's just the opposite, they're so surprised. 
Well, the truth is, our Nation's environment is no longer the disaster 
that it was 50 years ago. And 50 years ago we did have a problem. Fifty 
years ago I remember that when my dad was a Marine down in Quantico, 
when I was a child I came up here several times and my dad would say, 
whatever you do, don't put your finger in the Potomac River or your 
finger will fall off. Well, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was really 
bad.
  We've made tremendous progress over the years on the Potomac River. I 
can't help but notice there are people water-skiing and sailing and 
fishing in the Potomac now.
  Well, we don't live in the same time of 50 years ago. The air today 
has never been cleaner than at any time in my lifetime. The water has 
never been cleaner in any time in my lifetime than it is today. And I 
am hopeful that my children will never have to experience the pollution 
that was rampant when I was their age.
  So, let's take a look and give credit where credit's due. That 
progress is, in large part, because of the efforts of the government, 
well, and the EPA, yes, which came in under President Nixon, and others 
who have used science to fight for environmental reforms and to improve 
the quality of life of our people.
  And while I am thankful, I also would like to heed the warning that 
President Eisenhower left with us in his farewell address. And I quote, 
``that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific 
technological elite.''
  He was warning us about government-funded research becoming so 
intertwined with public policy and the creation of regulations it would 
compromise the integrity of both.
  Well, in recent years, we've seen political agendas being driven by 
scientific-sounding claims being used to frighten the general public 
again and again and again.

                              {time}  1510

  An unjustified fear has been used, for example, to ban DDT. I 
remember when I was a kid, and I used to run through these clouds of 
DDT--again, when my father was in the military down in North Carolina. 
Yes, it was killing millions of mosquitos in North Carolina, but when 
they banned that DDT, I seem to remember it had something to do with 
the thickness of shells of certain birds. Well, they banned DDT, and 
because of that we have had millions of deaths due to malaria in 
Africa. Millions of young African children, because they don't have a 
good diet, succumb to a disease like malaria and die because of it. 
These children are dead--make no mistake about it--because we were 
frightened into an irrational position on DDT, banning that and thus 
destroying the lives of millions of children in the Third World.
  We've seen alarmism with ``The Population Bomb.'' Do you remember 
that in 1968? It was a book claiming that increasing populations and 
decreasing agricultural yield would lead to cannibalism and global 
warfare over scarce resources by the mid-1970s. Here we are a long way 
from the 1970s, and I'm afraid Malthus, who 150 years ago started this 
type of scarism, was wrong, wrong, wrong. Right now, there are a lot of 
scientists, unfortunately, who are molding themselves after the Malthus 
mistakes that were made 150 years ago.
  Today's environmental alarmists use faulty and, in some cases, 
deceitful computer models to ``prove'' that the world is being 
destroyed one way or the other, quite often, in the ones they've been 
using in the last 10 years, of course, was that the world was being 
destroyed by manmade carbon emissions. This is proven by their computer 
models, even though the Earth has seen significantly higher atmospheric 
carbon levels many times before. Those were not necessarily bad times 
for this planet, but those computer models were suggesting, because of 
carbon emissions, we were going to face a catastrophe. In fact, I 
remember very well the predictions of 10 and 15 years ago that, by now, 
we would have reached a tipping point in the temperature of the world--
that we'd have reached a temperature of about now--and then it would go 
up 5 to 10 degrees, which is a big jump, but we haven't seen that big 
jump.
  The alarmists, of course, are not interested when they make mistakes, 
and they're not really interested in solving real problems. They are 
part of a coalition that wants to change our way of life--that's their 
goal--with their computerizations showing that just horrible times are 
ahead of us unless we change. The idea isn't to stop those horrible 
times, because those horrible times are just a product of what they put 
into their computers. Of course we all know what ``garbage in, garbage 
out'' means. If you put into a computer that you're going to have some 
kind of disaster, that's what you're going to get out of your computer, 
but what they have in mind, of

[[Page H4650]]

course, and what they want to do is to change the way of life--our 
life--which requires us to acquiesce, or better yet, they frighten us 
into submission.
  Make no mistake: manmade global warming, as a theory, is being pushed 
by people who believe in global government. They have been looking for 
an excuse for an incredible freedom-busting centralization of power, 
and this global warming is just the latest in a long line of such 
scares.
  This was recently acknowledged by the godfather of the global warming 
theory, a man who over the years has been given such credit for laying 
the intellectual foundation and the scientific foundation for the 
theory of manmade global warming. His name is James Lovelock. James 
Lovelock, however, has changed his mind. James Lovelock now concedes--
and after a longtime dialogue with Burt Rutan, one of the great 
engineers of our day--has come around to understand that he was not 
being totally honest about things when he was accepting information 
that bolstered his position, and was rejecting the consideration of 
other information. He has changed his mind about the real threat that 
global warming poses to the Earth--not that there wouldn't be any 
global warming but that it has been totally exaggerated by the 
scientific community, and that he, himself, played a major role in that 
exaggeration.
  Dr. James Lovelock is in an article in the Toronto Sun, which is 
entitled, ``Green 'drivel' exposed: The godfather of global warming 
lowers the boom on climate change hysteria,'' which is what we have 
been hearing over these last few years.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce for the Record this article 
that was just recently in the Toronto Sun, and I would like to put this 
in the Record at this point.

                 [From the Toronto Sun, June 23, 2012]

                         Green `Drivel' Exposed


   The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change 
                                hysteria

                         (By Lorrie Goldstein)

       Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global 
     warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he 
     acknowledged he had been unduly ``alarmist'' about climate 
     change.
       The implications were extraordinary.
       Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist 
     whose Gaia theory--that the Earth operates as a single, 
     living organism--has had a profound impact on the development 
     of global warming theory.
       Unlike many ``environmentalists,'' who have degrees in 
     political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at 
     age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic.
       His inventions have been used by NASA, among many other 
     scientific organizations.
       Lovelock's invention of the electron capture detector in 
     1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs 
     (chlorofluorocarbons) and other pollutants in the atmosphere, 
     leading, in many ways, to the birth of the modern 
     environmental movement.
       Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of 
     the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based 
     climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, ``the 
     problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We 
     thought we knew 20 years ago.'' Now, Lovelock has given a 
     follow-up interview to the UK's Guardian newspaper in which 
     he delivers more bombshells sure to anger the global green 
     movement, which for years worshipped his Gaia theory and 
     apocalyptic predictions that billions would die from man-made 
     climate change by the end of this century.
       Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is 
     occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas 
     emissions, but says it's now clear the doomsday predictions, 
     including his own (and Al Gore's) were incorrect.
       He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that, 
     unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government 
     funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he's 
     never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new 
     evidence. Indeed, that's how science advances.
       Among his observations to the Guardian:
       (1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as a way to 
     lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular 
     with environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour 
     of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also 
     oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.
       As Lovelock observes, ``Gas is almost a give-away in the 
     U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way. 
     This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying 
     to knock it . . . Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get 
     Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going 
     mad on it.'' (Kandeh Yumkella, co-head of a major United 
     Nations program on sustainable energy, made similar arguments 
     last week at a UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, 
     advocating the development of conventional and unconventional 
     natural gas resources as a way to reduce deforestation and 
     save millions of lives in the Third World.)
       (2) Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming 
     like a religion.
       ``It just so happens that the green religion is now taking 
     over from the Christian religion,'' Lovelock observed. ``I 
     don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the 
     sort of terms that religions use . . . The greens use guilt. 
     That just shows how religious greens are. You can't win 
     people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon 
     dioxide) in the air.''
       (3) Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered 
     by wind turbines.
       As he puts it, ``so-called 'sustainable development' . . . 
     is meaningless drivel . . . We rushed into renewable energy 
     without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly 
     inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand 
     windmills at any price.''
       (4) Finally, about claims ``the science is settled'' on 
     global warming: ``One thing that being a scientist has taught 
     me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never 
     know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a 
     bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth. 
     You don't know it.''

  For those who are listening or who are reading this specifically in 
the Congressional Record, I would like to quote from that article now. 
That article reads:

       Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of 
     the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based 
     climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, ``The 
     problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We 
     thought we knew 20 years ago.''

  The sign of a very intelligent person, really, is to admit the things 
that he doesn't know. I mean I've always said I'm not the smartest guy 
on the block, but I know what I don't know. Thus, when I'm talking to 
people, I can have an honest discussion to try to expand my knowledge. 
We've had too many people claiming that they know it all and that we 
have to give up our freedom because they know it, and they don't even 
have to engage in a debate with us over the details of something like 
global warming.
  Let me know who has heard the words ``case closed.'' I mean, 3 years 
ago, that's what they were saying here. What does that mean? When you 
hear people in government and when you hear scientists saying, ``the 
case is closed,'' well, that must mean there is going to be no further 
debate on this issue.
  I've been here as a Member of Congress for 24 years. Before that, I 
served in the White House for 7 years under President Reagan. I have 
never seen a time when there was such an effort made to cut off debate 
on an important subject than has been done on global warming. Never 
have I heard over and over again people being told to shut up and that 
the case is closed. Never have I seen so many research projects 
canceled because they in some way challenged the theory of global 
warming. Never have I seen so many scientists fired from their 
positions because they believe that the global warming theory may not 
be accurate.
  So what we need to do is to make sure that we have an honest 
discussion of the issue, when even some of the promoters--some of the 
people who have been the strongest advocates, like the individual, the 
doctor, I just quoted--have changed their positions, if not totally 
reversed them. At least they've been open to have said, We really don't 
know what we've been advocating for these last few years.
  Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce into the Record a letter from 
an esteemed physicist, Gordon Fulks. This is a letter and some 
communication between this physicist and aerospace pioneer legend Burt 
Rutan. I would like to put that into the Record at this point.

                                                    June 23, 2012.
     Re Bravo on your courage!

       Dear Burt: I think you deserve much of the credit for 
     helping James Lovelock understand the AGW phenomenon. You 
     patiently provided him with the pertinent data and logic. As 
     with most of us, it took some time to digest the enormity of 
     the necessary shift in perspective. He had to give up a faith 
     in the honesty of government agencies and most of the 
     scientists they are supporting.
       For Jim Lovelock the transition apparently involved two 
     steps. That lessened the need for a complete about face. He 
     first figured out the Chlorofluorocarbon-Ozone Hole scam by 
     discovering that some scientists were cheating on the data, 
     apparently to further their careers. He probably also knew 
     that the chemists who received the Nobel Prize for their work 
     had overestimated the effect by a large factor. It was not 
     such a huge step to then realize that climate scientists 
     might be doing the same. But

[[Page H4651]]

     Lovelock, to his credit, wanted to be sure and took his time 
     examining the information that you and others sent to him.
       My own recognition of what was going on was likewise a two 
     step process. During the ``Nuclear Winter'' scare about 25 
     years ago, we redid Carl Sagan's original calculations to 
     discover that he had carefully chosen the inputs to his 
     climate code to produce the result he wanted. When we 
     realized that a highly respected physicist would prostitute 
     himself to support his politics, his stature, and his income, 
     we, in principle, understood all the other scams of the post 
     World War Two era.
       From 1946 Nobel Laureate Hermann Joseph Muller hiding 
     evidence of a threshold phenomenon in human radiation 
     exposure to Rachael Carson promoting half truths about DDT, 
     to unfounded scares about Acid Rain, Ozone Depletion, 
     Magnetic Fields, Global Warming, Ocean Acidification, Diesel 
     Particulates, and more, we have been victimized by continuous 
     hysteria that has led to disastrous public policies. Far too 
     many scientists and their fellow travelers have supported a 
     grand bilking of American taxpayers for their own selfish and 
     political interests.
       Many thanks for your efforts to convince one very important 
     individual to re-examine the logic and evidence. Now we need 
     to figure out how to avoid falling victim to these scams in 
     the first place. As you know, that must involve fundamental 
     reform of the reward process that funnels vast amounts of 
     money to those who play along.
                                   Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics),
                                              Corbett, Oregon USA.

  Now let me read, in part, what that letter says:

       During the ``Nuclear Winter'' scare about 25 years ago, we 
     redid Carl Sagan's original calculations to discover that he 
     had carefully chosen the inputs to his climate code to 
     produce the result he wanted. When we realized that a highly 
     respected physicist would prostitute himself to support his 
     politics, his stature and his income, we, in principle, 
     understood all the other scams of the post World War II era.

                              {time}  1520

  Whoever looked up to Carl Sagan, and when they realized he was 
cheating on the information and the analysis, they realized that this 
was so widespread it was something to be concerned about. And I 
continue:

       From 1946 Nobel Laureate Hermann Joseph Muller hiding 
     evidence of a threshold phenomenon in human radiation 
     exposure to Rachel Carson promoting half-truths about DDT, to 
     unfounded scares about acid rain, ozone depletion, magnetic 
     fields, global warming, ocean acidification, diesel 
     particulates, and more, we have been victimized by continuous 
     hysteria that has led to disastrous public policies. Far too 
     many scientists and their fellow travelers have supported a 
     grand bilking of American taxpayers for their own selfish and 
     political interests.

  That is the end of that quotation from that letter to Burt Rutan from 
this world famous physicist.
  It's clear that our current system, fueled by the horrific waste of 
borrowed money, isn't working. Perhaps it's time that we acted on 
President Eisenhower's warning and find a better way to separate 
research and the creation of regulations. Otherwise, we will find 
ourselves held truly captive with no access to inexpensive energy, 
reduced access to food and water, and we might find ourselves also with 
none of our basic freedoms because we've given them away because 
someone has frightened us into giving away our freedom and giving away 
the opportunity for a better life for our children.
  Mr. Speaker, I am someone who is very optimistic about the future. We 
have great possibilities. There are other people who look to the future 
and think that the technological revolutions that we have faced are 
actually a detriment to humankind. People did not live good lives 100 
years ago. As I mentioned, my father was a marine. Before that, he grew 
up on a dirt-poor farm in North Dakota, as did my mother. In those 
days, ordinary Americans did not live well. It was a struggle. The 
longevity of these people was not that long because of the struggle 
they were in.
  We need to make sure that we continue our technological development 
so that we can have, yes, a clean environment, which I have indicated 
was a product of the good technology and, yes, the research that came 
from honest and hardworking scientists and engineers, quite often on a 
government contract. But we need to make sure that we don't back off, 
because we know there is a group of people in our society, and perhaps 
around the world, who for some reason believe that back before the 
industrial age that people lived better than they live today. Some of 
them have tried their best to fight modernism. They have declared war, 
for example, on the internal combustion engine. This global warming 
thing, that was the motive here. The internal combustion engine is 
supposedly putting out carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide they believe 
is changing the climate of the planet.
  I told you what I have asked young students who come into my office. 
I asked: Is the air better or worse than it was 50 years ago? I even 
ask Members of Congress and I ask people all the time, the ones who buy 
into global warming, who are saying they're advocates of global warming 
caused by mankind--basically the internal combustion engine--what 
percentage of the Earth's atmosphere is carbon dioxide, is 
CO2. I hope that everyone who is focusing on these comments 
now ask themselves how much CO2 there is, because 
CO2 is being blamed for changing the entire climate of the 
planet. It would be an enormous undertaking to change the climate of 
the whole planet, so it must be a pretty good part of our atmosphere.
  With that question, Members of Congress tell me that they believe 
it's 25 percent. Some people say 10 percent. Others say 20 percent. I 
have never had a Member of Congress come anywhere close to what it 
really is. It's not 10 percent or 20 percent. It's not 5 percent. It's 
not 1 percent. It's less than one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent. Have 
you got that? It's not just 1 percent. It's less than one-half of one-
tenth of 1 percent. Of that, humankind is only responsible for 10 
percent of that CO2. That makes it so minuscule that it 
would be like putting a string across a football field and believing 
that was going to create changes in the entire football field.
  The fact that people are unaware, even at this level, of how small 
the CO2 impact is causes them to buy onto these scare 
tactics. This is a challenge for those of us here because that 
threatens our freedom. It threatens us and our children in being able 
to have the opportunities that we had and that we hope that all 
Americans and all people throughout the world will have.
  Let us go back on one thing. I am planning a trip this year across 
the country, even though the gas prices are pretty high. I'm hopefully 
going to drive across the country with my children. It's a wonderful 
thing. What a wonderful vacation. We're going to have 2 weeks to do it. 
I'm really looking forward to that. We're going to go in an automobile, 
and it will cost us. The price of gas is up and I'm not a wealthy man, 
but we do have this opportunity, and it's a wonderful thing.
  What about 150 years ago? Did people have an opportunity like this? 
No. What was the biggest challenge that we faced to the health and 
safety of the people of this country 150 years ago? Or, let's say just 
at the beginning of the last century, when we turned from the 19th to 
the 20th century. Do you know what it was? It was horse manure. Horse 
manure and horse urine was enveloping our cities and the water and 
created health hazards for people. And the flies and the stench and the 
internal combustion engine came along, and it has been a great factor 
in providing health for human beings. All over the world we got rid of 
the massive animal droppings that were a threat to our health.
  Also, there is the fact that we couldn't produce a lot of wealth 
based on animal strength and we couldn't go on long trips with our 
families and we didn't have a good quality of life, but the internal 
combustion engine provided that for people of the United States and 
humankind. There is no doubt that we have needed to improve the 
efficiency of the internal combustion engine, and we have.
  Here's the thought we'll leave with. In southern California, when I 
was a kid, there was so much pollution--although our young people don't 
know about that today. But today, when they think the air is polluted 
in southern California, we have twice as many cars on the road and 
we've reduced pollution into the 90s. It's probably 95 percent. This is 
a tremendous accomplishment. And yes, some of the regulations that we 
have had from the Federal Government have motivated this change. We 
need to accept that. But we need to also accept that it is our 
technological advances, and it has been not cancelling out technology 
for fear of

[[Page H4652]]

things like CO2, which are not a threat to our health. 
That's how we have kept America on an upward course, even though we've 
been dragged down scare after scare after scare.

                              {time}  1530

  I remember when we had Meryl Streep come to this Congress and testify 
about Alar in apples. What happened was, for 2 years apple farmers went 
broke throughout the United States. There were thousands of families 
who suffered because their product was not being bought because they 
were afraid of Alar. What happened to that? Alar, it was found 2 years 
later that it was all a scare. There was nothing to it. The same thing 
with cranberries. When I was a kid, we couldn't eat cranberries for 
Thanksgiving.
  The gentleman that I quoted here, that I mentioned, who is the 
godfather of the global warming theory, James Lovelock, he is also the 
man who discovered fluoro hydrocarbons, which gave people the analysis 
of the ozone hole. Well, guess what? The ozone hole, as we have found 
out--and as it was mentioned in passing there--the ozone hole was 
overrated as a threat. In fact, it went away, and it's a natural cycle.
  What we have had on this planet is a natural cycle of weather, of 
temperatures, and that will continue. But what's happened is, we've had 
people step forward, trying to create hysteria for their own political 
ends, trying to frighten people into accepting policies they otherwise 
would never accept.
  So today, I'm hoping that as we celebrate the Fourth of July, we, 
again, reaffirm that we will never give up our liberty. We will never 
be frightened out of our liberty by foreigners who threaten us with 
weapons, and we will not be frightened out of our liberty by people who 
do not believe in the same type of freedom that we believe in but are 
using scare tactics to create hysteria among our people that are phony 
scare tactics to try to frighten us into giving up our freedom.
  So on this Fourth of July, I hope we all reconfirm that guarantee of 
our commitment in this Nation to freedom, to opportunity for ordinary 
people so that ordinary people can live decent lives with liberty and 
justice, prosperity for all.
  I yield back the balance of my time.

                          ____________________