[Congressional Record Volume 162, Number 43 (Thursday, March 17, 2016)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1557-S1559]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Madam President, I come to this Chamber for the 131st 
time to urge this body to break free and wake up to what carbon 
pollution is doing to our atmosphere and our oceans.
  Last week, scientists at NOAA reported that carbon dioxide levels at 
their Mauna Loa Observatory jumped in 2015 by the largest year-to-year 
increase in 56 years of research.
  Pieter Tans, lead scientist at NOAA, said:

       Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have 
     in hundreds of thousands of years. It's explosive compared to 
     natural processes.

  We see the effects of this runaway carbon pollution everywhere, in 
ever-climbing temperatures, in ever-changing weather patterns, and in 
ever-rising, warming, and acidifying seas. But the Republican-
controlled Congress refuses to take responsible action. They put their 
climate effort elsewhere, such as attacking former Vice President Al 
Gore for raising awareness of the real and looming climate crisis.
  One Republican colleague has railed against Mr. Gore, calling him 
``the

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world's first climate billionaire,'' claiming that he is ``drowning in 
a sea of his own global warming illusions'' and faulting him for 
``desperately trying to keep global warming alarmism alive today.''
  Another prominent Republican, this one running for President, 
suggested ``the Nobel committee should take the Nobel Prize back from 
Al Gore.''
  Others claim that cold or snowy weather proves Mr. Gore wrong. After 
one snow in DC a few years ago, a prominent Republican TV personality 
claimed the storm ``would seem to contradict Al Gore's hysterical 
global warming theories.'' A Senator gloated after that storm, 
``Where's Al Gore now?''
  Another Senate colleague said while campaigning for President in 
Iowa:

       I have to admit, I was really confused. Al Gore told us 
     this wasn't going to happen, but it was cold there.

  These are all profoundly ignorant comments if you know anything about 
climate change, but they cannot resist. They inhabit what Politico's 
Daniel Lippman and Mike Allen this week called ``a political reality 
indifferent to the exigencies of climate change.''
  So let's catch up on what Al Gore is up to on climate change. He has 
a TED talk on the ted.com Web site, and I highly recommend it. Mr. 
Gore's presentation opens with the fact that our atmosphere is not as 
big as most people think. He shows this picture taken from the 
International Space Station to remind us that the atmosphere 
surrounding our planet is really just a thin shell. It is into this 
thin shell that we continue to spew megatons of heat-trapping carbon 
pollution day in and day out. Mr. Gore explains that this thin 
atmosphere ``right now is the open sewer for our industrial 
civilization as it's currently organized.''
  Here is how he shows our carbon dioxide emission rates through time. 
You can see the amount of carbon emissions really started to increase 
here after World War II. Vice President Gore explains: ``[T]he 
accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution that is up in 
the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released 
by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 
days a year.''
  He continues:

       [T]hat is a lot of energy. . . . And all that extra heat 
     energy is heating up . . . the whole earth system.

  The Vice President didn't mention it, but the Associated Press has 
used a similar analogy about the heat from climate change that is going 
into our oceans, a piece that said: ``Since 1997, Earth's oceans have 
absorbed man-made heat energy equivalent to a Hiroshima-style bomb 
being exploded every second for 75 straight years.''
  Mr. Gore showed this depiction of average temperatures between 1951 
and 1980. The blue is cooler-than-average days, the white is average 
days, and the red is warmer-than-average days. Now we are going to look 
at what happened in the next three decades after this 1951 to 1980 
period. What is going to stay the same is this green line. That will be 
the constant against which you can see the change. Let's go to the next 
chart.
  This is 1983 to 1993. You will notice that everything has moved 
against the constant. You will also notice down here that a new 
category has emerged. This category is extremely hot days.
  The next chart is 1994 to 2004. Again, the average continues to move 
against this green line which is a constant, and now you see that new 
category of extremely hot days growing even more.
  Here is our last decade, 2005 to 2015. What we experience in this 
last decade has moved completely away from the historic norm indicated 
by that green line, and this extreme temperature, the extremely hot 
days category, is now bigger than the cooler-than-average category. 
Remember, 1950 to 1980, this category didn't even exist. Now it is 
bigger. Well, it might have existed, but it wasn't visible on the 
graphs; let me put it that way. Now it is bigger than the cooler-than-
average category. Mr. Gore points out that these extremely hot days in 
the last 10 years ``are 150 times more common on the surface of the 
earth than they were just 30 years ago.'' By the way, we measure this 
stuff. This is not a theory.

  Worldwide, 2015 was the hottest year since we began keeping records 
in 1880, according to NOAA and NASA. That Republican colleague who went 
to Iowa and thought that the cold disproved climate change dismissed 
that finding as ``pseudo-scientific theory.'' You know what. NASA is 
driving a rover around on the surface of Mars right now, so I will go 
with them knowing what they are talking about.
  The last 5 years have been the warmest 5-year period on record, 
according to the World Meteorological Organization, and 14 of the 15 
hottest years ever measured have been in this young century. We are a 
terrestrial species. We live on the land, so naturally we pay more 
attention to the land and not so much to what is happening in our 
warming and acidifying oceans. This chart shows the oceans absorbing 
over 90 percent of the excess heat trapped in the atmosphere by 
greenhouse gas emissions. This is the effect of those Hiroshima bomb 
equivalents warming up the oceans that the Associated Press used as 
their example.
  What does all that extra heat mean for the oceans? Well, unless you 
are going to dispute the law of thermal expansion, it means that 
warming things expand.
  Last month, a study of tidal flood days along my east coast came out. 
The author's conclusion? I will quote him:

       It's not the tide. It's not the wind. It's us.

  There is one industry, the insurance industry, that pays serious 
attention to climate change as their losses have been mounting. This is 
insurance company data from the Insurance Information Institute in 
January of 2006 showing the climate rate of worldwide extreme weather 
catastrophes. Why? Well, Dr. Kevin Trenberth works at the National 
Center for Atmospheric Research. He says:

       All storms are different now.

  Do you hear that?

       All storms are different now. There's so much extra energy 
     in the atmosphere, there's so much extra water vapor. Every 
     storm is different now.

  Well, the challenge of climate change is urgent, but Mr. Gore points 
out that we have the understanding and engineering prowess to generate 
energy from new sources, and we are doing unexpectedly well. Vice 
President Gore says:

       The best projections in the world 16 years ago were that by 
     2010, the world would be able to install 30 gigawatts of wind 
     capacity. We beat that mark by 14 and a half times over.

  It is the same story for solar capacity, which is taking off even 
more quickly than wind. Again quoting Vice President Gore: ``The best 
projections 14 years ago were that we would install one gigawatt [of 
solar] per year by 2010.''
  The Vice President continues:

       When 2010 came around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. 
     Last year, we beat it by 58 times over. This year, we're on 
     track to beat it 68 times over.

  Look at that curve. These innovations helped renewable energy costs 
become comparable with fossil fuel power even though, as Vice President 
Gore points out, ``fossil energy is now still subsidized at a rate 40 
times larger than renewables.''
  If you look at what the International Monetary Fund has said about 
the ``effective subsidy'' of fossil fuel, the subsidy for fossil is 
actually way bigger than that.
  Most importantly, society is moving. More than 150 major U.S. 
companies signed onto the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, 
supporting a strong outcome in the Paris climate negotiations. Fifty-
three percent of young Republican voters--that is, young Republican 
voters under the age of 35--have said they would describe a climate 
change denier as ``ignorant,'' ``out-of-touch'' or ``crazy.'' Those are 
not my words; these are the words in the poll that the young 
Republicans chose.
  Despite the recent stay of the administration's Clean Power Plan, 19 
States are continuing with EPA to develop compliance strategies for 
their economies and their energy sectors. Roughly 6 in 10 Republicans 
and GOP-leaning Independents under age 50 think the government should 
limit greenhouse gases even if it causes a $20 increase in their 
monthly bill. So people are moving.
  Mr. Gore uses a line from the great American poet Wallace 
Stevens: ``After the final no, there comes a yes, and on that yes the 
future world depends.''

  Well, Al Gore has faced a lot of ``no.'' The fossil fuel industry and 
its minions

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have mocked and derided him. The climate denial machine keeps working 
its poison. In fact, we just learned that Arch Coal's bankruptcy filing 
shows they were funding an extremist group dedicated to harassing and 
threatening scientists.
  As the evidence comes in, as every major science agency and 
organization lines up with all our National Labs and military services 
and our home State universities across the country, it turns out the 
mockers and the deniers were wrong. In fact, in all decency, Al Gore 
deserves an apology, as do the countless men and women who scrutinize 
these data, who labor in the real science, and who call us to action. 
If we continue sleepwalking in Congress, we will need to apologize not 
just to Al Gore but to future generations. We will need to apologize to 
our own grandchildren for our negligence when we knew better.
  So let us wake up from our fossil fuel-funded make-believe and meet 
our moral obligation.
  Madam President, I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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