[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 92 (Tuesday, June 5, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2987-S2988]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Climate Change

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, 30 years ago this month, Dr. James 
Hansen testified before the U.S. Congress on the need to address 
climate change--30 years ago this month. He was a top NASA climate 
scientist. On a hot summer day in June of 1988, before the U.S. Senate 
Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Dr. Hansen testified that 
``global warming has reached a level such that we can ascribe with a 
high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship between the 
greenhouse effect and observed warming.'' He said, ``It is already 
happening now.''
  Thirty years have passed since then--30 years of added science, 30 
years of new science, 30 years of updated reports, and 30 years of 
mounting evidence of how right Hansen was. Yet, here we still are in 
Congress still willfully ignoring the unprecedented changes to the 
climate and the oceans--changes that threaten our planet and its rich 
array of plant and animal life, changes that put at risk homes, farms, 
forests, and coasts, changes that affect our very human health and 
well-being. These are not computer model projections of the distant 
future but changes we are seeing right before our very eyes now.
  Carbon-driven climate change is particularly acute in polar areas. 
Today, I want to focus on the melting and destabilization of the 
Antarctic polar ice cap.
  Rhode Island is a long way from Antarctica. Florida is a less long 
way from Antarctica--it is still a pretty long way--but we are coastal 
States. In Rhode Island, the sea level is already up 11 inches along 
our shores, and far more sea level rise, accelerating sea level rise, 
is expected. The coastal towns and cities in the Presiding Officer's 
State are seeing similar encroachments of the ocean into their 
territories.
  Here is how Antarctica is changing and what it means for our American 
shores.
  The Antarctic ice sheet spans the South Pole, extending almost 14 
million square kilometers--roughly the size of the contiguous United 
States and Mexico combined. The Antarctic ice sheet is the largest 
single mass of frozen water on planet Earth, containing 30 million 
cubic kilometers of ice. If the Antarctic ice sheet were to melt 
completely, you could actually do fairly simple math as to what would 
happen to that water. Sea levels could rise 200 feet above current 
levels, engulfing coastal regions worldwide.
  This map shows Florida if we lose the West Antarctic ice sheet. As 
the map shows, it would inundate much of coastal and southern Florida, 
putting Miami and other cities completely underwater. It looks about 
the same here, if you lose the Greenland ice sheet, with there being 
similar damage and loss to Florida. Yet, here, if you lose the East 
Antarctic ice sheet, you more or less wipe out the entire State of 
Florida. You wipe out a few little islands here, a little nub below 
Georgia there, but essentially Florida is gone.
  Imagine the entire population of Florida having to migrate to other 
States with its State now being uninhabitable. It seems like a crazy 
notion, but Kentucky's climate planning documents have included the 
prospect of climate refugees having to flee to Kentucky from America's 
inundated coasts. So it matters to understand how Antarctic ice sheets 
work and how they differ from ice shelves.
  Ice sheets form on land when more snow accumulates in winter than 
melts during the summer. Over thousands of years, layers of snow pile 
up, growing thicker and denser as the weight of new layers compacts the 
layers below into ice. Over time, that ice flows downhill to the coasts 
and then ultimately out to sea as glaciers and then ice shelves.
  Floating ice shelves surround Antarctica. These shelves physically 
brace the land-based ice sheet, slowing down its flow into the sea. A 
rough balance emerges as new snowfall on the ice sheets and the slow 
flow of the ice balance the melting of the ice shelf around the 
periphery where the ice shelf meets the ocean. We are now witnessing 
what appears to be an unraveling of this equilibrium. Climate change is 
what is causing this massive destabilization.
  Since 1950, on the Antarctic Peninsula, the air has warmed 2.5 
degrees Celsius. Warming ocean waters erode the West Antarctic ice 
sheets from below as the warming air melts them from above. Once the 
ice shelf melts back, you have the loss of the buttress

[[Page S2988]]

effect, and the ice sheet on land can then accelerate, with that 
buttress effect diminished, more rapidly into the sea, causing a more 
rapid rise in sea level.
  The effect of this is actually measurable, and we measure it. 
Observations from the NASA and German Aerospace Center's twin Gravity 
Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites measure these losses to be 
around 125 gigatons of ice per year. What is a gigaton of ice? A 
gigaton is 1 billion tons. Meredith Nettles of the Lamont-Doherty Earth 
Observatory at Columbia University described a gigaton-sized piece of 
ice this way: ``If you took the whole National Mall''--here we are in 
Washington--``and covered it up with ice to a height about four times 
as high as the [Washington] monument. . . . `'
  Imagine walking out onto the Capitol steps, looking out all the way 
down the National Mall to the Washington Monument and imagining that 
not only to the top of the Washington Monument but four times as high 
is a single, giant mass of ice--as she said, ``all the way down from 
the Capitol steps to the Lincoln Memorial'' and four times as high as 
the Washington Monument. Then imagine 125 times that--every year.
  The destabilization of the ice shelves is most dire in West 
Antarctica, where research shows the massive Thwaites Glacier 
retreating at 300 to 400 meters per year along a 125-mile segment. 
Larger than Pennsylvania, the Thwaites Glacier has discharged more than 
100 gigatons of ice per year in recent years. That is the flood of 100 
of those blocks that are four times the height of the Washington 
Monument and running from here all the way to the Lincoln Memorial 100 
times every 3 days--another one into the ocean, piling up, piling up. 
If we lost the Thwaites Glacier, that alone would contribute several 
meters to global sea level rise.
  So far, in Rhode Island, remember, we are dealing with less than 1 
foot of sea level rise that we have experienced--6 to 12 feet is 
predicted--but add this in and the situation of our coastal States 
become quite dire.
  These images were created with NASA satellite data. They show changes 
in Antarctic ice mass just since 2002. This data does not measure the 
floating ice shelves which are shown here in gray. On the ice sheets, 
dark orange and red colors indicate losses of ice sheet mass and light-
blue shades indicate gains. Climate deniers focus on the gains in 
actually a fraudulent abuse of the data and the public's trust, but 
that is what they do; but, overall, during the past 15 years, the West 
Antarctic ice sheet experienced major ice mass loss. The darkest red, 
representing the biggest loss, is at the Thwaites Glacier.
  Of course, when glaciers melt, the seas rise. In April, a U.S. 
Geological Survey study, funded by the Pentagon, found that our 
military bases on low-elevation islands may become uninhabitable within 
mere decades. The recommendation is, we have to start planning to 
relocate them because they will no longer be useful. Just 2 weeks ago, 
our National Park Service released a report showing sea level rise 
damaging park sites like Jamestown and Assateague Island in Virginia 
and Jean Lafitte National Historical Park in Louisiana. NASA is 
concerned enough about this Antarctic ice situation that it is 
launching new satellites to monitor it.
  Fossil fuel industry front groups continue to deny and disparage the 
work of scientists at NOAA, NASA, and other Federal scientific 
agencies. The polluters have an obedient mouthpiece in the Wall Street 
Journal editorial page, which just last month ran climate denier Fred 
Singer denying that rising sea levels observed around the globe are the 
result of global warming, and of course saying it is not the result of 
carbon pollution or fossil fuels. The Journal page, of course, neglects 
to mention this denier's deep connections to the fossil fuel industry, 
the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the CATO Institute, 
and other climate denial front groups bankrolled by ExxonMobil and the 
oil industry and the Koch political apparatus.
  We even heard a Republican Congressman claim that erosion and rocks 
falling into the sea are what is driving sea level rise--anything but 
fossil fuel. He said, ``Every time you have that soil or rock or 
whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea 
levels to rise, because now you have less space in those oceans, 
because the bottom is moving up.''
  It is laughable. Phil Duffy, president of the Woods Hole Research 
Center and former adviser to the U.S. Global Change Research Program 
responded: ``On human time scales, those are miniscule effects.''
  Once again, anything for the fossil fuel industry. Complete 
subservience to the fossil fuel industry seems to be the rule around 
Congress.
  About this sordid political equation, retired U.S. Navy RADM Dr. 
David Titley probably said it best. He said:

       The ice doesn't care. The ice doesn't care who is in the 
     White House. It doesn't care which party controls your 
     Congress. It doesn't care which party controls your 
     Parliament. It just melts.

  Of course, in addition to the melt, a warming ocean expands, 
following the law of thermal expansion, and our coasts, as a result, 
face new and serious dangers.
  Republicans in Congress can continue to ignore all of the evidence, 
but that doesn't change what our carbon pollution does in the 
atmosphere and the oceans. Our carbon pollution will still trap heat in 
the atmosphere. It will still acidify the oceans. The laws of chemistry 
don't suspend because we can't pass sensible laws to solve this 
problem. The chemistry and the physics of these effects of our carbon 
pollution don't care what we do. The polar icecaps melting don't care 
that fossil fuel flunkies deny it. Denial of these facts doesn't 
protect our coasts and doesn't protect our coastal communities from 
looming danger. One day soon, we are going to have to wake up. Fossil 
fuel influence or no fossil fuel influence, we are going to have to 
wake up.
  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. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that 
notwithstanding the provisions of rule XXII, the confirmation vote on 
the Axon nomination occur at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, June 6; that if 
confirmed, the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon 
the table and the President be immediately notified of the Senate's 
action.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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