[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 15]
[Senate]
[Pages 19933-19944]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       SCIENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, the comments made by the Senator from 
Idaho are such a good prelude to work into what I am about to say. I am 
chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, and in this 
capacity I have a responsibility because the decisions the committee 
will reach impact and influence the health and security of America.
  What I am about to do--and it is for this reason that I am doing 
something that is politically stupid--I am going to expose the most 
powerful, most highly financed lobby in Washington, the far left 
environmental extremists.
  The Senator from Idaho talked about the fact that we have to have 
electricity. Right now, we are dependent upon fossil fuels for 52 
percent of our electricity in America. There are people trying to get 
us to do away with that. If that should happen, I think he has 
articulated very well what would happen to America if all of a sudden 
we had to go to natural gas. Already we are seeing some companies 
moving to Europe and other places because they are thinking that maybe 
we will buy on to this hoax that will stop us from being able to have 
fossil fuels. That is why when I became chairman of the committee, I 
established three guiding principles for that committee.
  No. 1, we are going to make our decisions not on a political agenda 
but on sound science. No. 2, we are going to have a cost-benefit 
analysis. At least let the American people know what types of costs are 
involved in some of these regulations that do not make any sense. No. 
3, to change the attitude, an attitudinal change on the various 
bureaucracies, so they will be there not to rule the people but to 
serve the people. Without these principles we cannot make effective 
public policy decisions. They are necessary to both improve the 
environment and encourage economic growth and prosperity.
  To the average person hearing, all you want is sound science, that 
sounds perfectly normal. Why would we not want sound science? Why 
predicate decisions on something that has nothing to do with sound 
science? But leftwing environmental communities insist sound science is 
outrageous. For them a pro-environment policy can only mean top-down 
command-and-control rules dictated by bureaucrats; science is 
irrelevant, instead for extremists. Politics and power are the 
motivating forces for making public policy. Sadly, that is true in the 
current debate over many environmental issues. Too often, emotions 
stoked by irresponsible rhetoric rather than facts based on objective 
science shape the contours of environmental policy.
  A rather telling example arose during President Bush's first days in 
office when emotionalism overwhelmed science in the debate over arsenic 
standards in drinking water. Environmentalist groups, including the 
Sierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, vilified 
President Bush for poisoning children because he questioned the 
scientific bases of the arsenic regulation implemented in the final 
days of the Clinton administration. The debate featured television ads 
financed by environmental extremist groups with children asking for 
another glass of arsenic-laced water. The science underlying the 
standard, which was flimsy, was hardly mentioned or held up to any 
scrutiny. In other words, millions of dollars were spent to make people 
think President Bush wanted to kill children. This is the kind of 
extremism we are facing on a daily basis.
  The Senate went through a similar exercise we all remember in 1992. I 
was serving in the other body, but I was here during debate. That year 
some Members seized on data from NASA suggesting that an ozone hole was 
developing in the Northern Hemisphere. The Senate then rushed into 
panic mode, ramming through by a vote of 96-0 an accelerated ban on 
certain chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants. Only 2 weeks later NASA 
produced new data showing that their initial finding was a gross 
exaggeration and the ozone hole never appeared.
  The issue of catastrophic global warming, which I will speak about 
today, fits perfectly this mode. Much of the debate over global warming 
is predicated on fear rather than science. Global-warming alarmists see 
a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, war, terrorism, economic 
dislocations, drought, crop failures, mosquito-borne diseases, and 
harsh weather, all caused by manmade greenhouse gas emissions. Hans 
Blix, the guy who could not find anything with both hands, chief of the 
U.S. weapons inspectors, sounded both ridiculous and alarmist when he 
said in March: I am more worried about global warming than I am of any 
major military conflict.
  It is no wonder he could not find any weapons of mass destruction.
  Science writer David Appell, who has written for such publications as 
the Scientist News and Scientific American, parroted Blix when he said 
global warming would ``threaten fundamental food and water resources, 
it would lead to displacement of billions of people in

[[Page 19934]]

huge waves of revenues, spawn terrorism, topple governments, spread 
disease across the globe.''
  Appell's next point deserves special emphasis because it demonstrates 
the sheer lunacy of the environmental extremists. He said global 
warming would be chaos by any measure, far greater even than the sum 
total of chaos of the global wars of the 20th century, and so in this 
sense, Blix is right to be concerned.
  Sounds like a weapon of mass destruction to me. And that is what we 
are hearing.
  No wonder the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called global 
warming alarmism the mother of all environmental scares.
  Appel and Blix sound very much like those who warned us in the 1970s 
that the planet was headed for a catastrophic global cooling.
  On April 28, 1975, Newsweek printed the article ``The Cooling World'' 
in which the magazine warned:

       There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns 
     have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may 
     portend a drastic decline in food protection--with serious 
     political implications for just about every nation on earth.

  Wait, these are the same guys who talk about global warming today.
  In a similar form, Time Magazine, June 24, 1974, declared ``Another 
Ice Age.''

       However widely the weather varies from place to place and 
     time to time, when meteorologists take an average of 
     temperatures around the globe, they find that the atmosphere 
     has been growing gradually cooler for the past 3 decades.

  Then we had the Science News article that talks of the same thing, 
and an article from Science Digest titled ``Earth's Cooling Climate.''

       Decline in temperatures since 1940 raises question of man's 
     role.

  In 1974, the National Science Board, the governing body of the 
National Science Foundation, stated: During the last 20 to 30 years, 
world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply 
over the last decade.
  Two years earlier, the board had observed

       judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the 
     present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end 
     . . . leading into the next glacial age.

  That was the same timeframe that the global-warming alarmists are 
concerned about global warming. How quickly things change. Fear of the 
coming ice age is old hat, but fear that manmade greenhouse gases are 
causing temperatures to rise to harmful levels is in vogue now. That is 
popular. Go in any establishment in Washington and the liberals are 
talking about global warming. They do not care about what is happening 
with other countries and the weapons of mass destruction. They are 
concerned about global warming. That is the in thing to talk about.
  Alarmists brazenly assert that this phenomenon is fact and the 
science of climate change is settled. In fact, it is far from settled. 
Indeed, it is seriously disputed.
  I ask unanimous consent to have printed at the end of my remarks a 
July 8th editorial of this year by former Carter administration Energy 
Secretary James Schlesinger on the science of climate change.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 1.)
  Mr. INHOFE. Dr. Schlesinger takes issue with alarmists who assert 
there is a scientific consensus supporting their views. He says, 
``There is an idea among the public that `the science is settled.' That 
remains far from the truth.''
  Keep in mind, this is not someone from a Republican administration.
  I refer to a chart demonstrating this is not really a partisan issue. 
There is no one more knowledgeable on energy than the former Secretary 
of Energy under the Carter administration. He has been saying there is 
scientific disagreement over global warming. It is controversial.
  But anyone who pays even cursory attention to the issue understands 
that scientists vigorously disagree over whether human activities are 
responsible for global warming or whether those activities will 
precipitate national disasters. Only the scaremongers agree. I submit, 
furthermore, that not only is there a debate but the debate is shifting 
away from those who subscribe to global-warming alarmism.
  After studying the issue over the last several years, I believe the 
balance of the evidence offers strong proof that natural variability, 
not manmade, is the overwhelming factor influencing climate, and that 
manmade gases are virtually irrelevant.
  It is also important to question whether global warming is even a 
problem for human existence. Thus far, no one has seriously 
demonstrated any scientific proof that increased global temperatures 
would lead to the catastrophic predictions by alarmists. In fact, it 
appears just the opposite is true, that increases in global temperature 
have a beneficial effect on how we live our lives.
  For these reasons, I will discuss an important body of scientific 
evidence and research that refutes the anthropogenic--which means 
manmade--theory of catastrophic global warmings. I believe this 
research offers compelling proof that human activities have little or 
no impact on climate. This research, well documented in scientific 
literature, directly challenges the environment world view of the 
media, so they typically do not receive proper attention and 
discussion.
  Certainly, members of the media would rather level personal attacks 
on scientists who question ``accepted'' global warming theories than 
engage on the science. So you have two groups at work here: The 
environmental extremists doling out to you the lies and the money to 
politicians and the liberal media that nests with them. This is an 
unfortunate artifact of the debate, a relentless increase in personal 
attacks on certain members of the scientific community who question so-
called conventional wisdom.
  I believe it is extremely important for the future of this country 
that the facts and the science get a fair hearing. Without proper 
knowledge and understanding, alarmists will scare the country into 
enacting its ultimate goal: Making energy suppression in the form of 
harmful mandatory restrictions on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse 
emissions the official policy of the United States of America.
  Such a policy would induce serious economic harm, especially for the 
low-income and minority populations. Energy suppression, as official 
Government and nonpartisan private analyses have amply confirmed, means 
higher prices for food, higher prices for medical care, and higher 
prices for electricity, as well as massive job losses and drastic 
reductions in gross domestic product, all the while providing virtually 
no environmental benefit. In other words, it is a raw deal for the 
American people but especially the poor.
  In a minute we are going to shift to the Kyoto Treaty. The issue of 
global warming garnered significant international attention through the 
Kyoto Treaty, which requires signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas 
emissions by considerable amounts below the 1990 levels. The Clinton 
administration, led by former Vice President Al Gore, signed the Kyoto 
Treaty on November 12, 1998, but never submitted it to the Senate for 
ratification. Let's remember what our Constitution says: If we want to 
join a treaty, the President takes the lead and then he submits it to 
be ratified by the U.S. Senate. It has never been submitted to us.
  The treaty explicitly acknowledges as true that manmade emissions, 
principally from the use of fossil fuels, are causing global 
temperatures to rise, eventually to catastrophic levels. Kyoto 
enthusiasts believe if we dramatically cut back or even eliminate the 
use of fossil fuels, the climate system will respond by sending global 
temperatures back to normal levels--whatever normal levels would be.
  In 1997, the Senate sent a powerful message that Kyoto was not 
acceptable. In this resolution that was passed, called the Byrd-Hagel 
resolution, they said it is the sense of the Senate--this is very 
significant--that:

       The United States should not be a signatory to any protocol 
     to, or other agreement regarding, the United Nations 
     framework

[[Page 19935]]

     convention on climate change of 1992, at negotiations in 
     Kyoto in December of 1997, or thereafter, which would--

  Would do what? No. 1:

     mandate new commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas 
     emissions for the Annex 1 parties, unless the protocol or 
     other agreement also mandates new specific scheduled 
     commitments to limit or reduce greenhouse gas emissions for 
     developing country parties within the same compliance period.

  What they are saying, and what we voted on here right in this room, 
in this body, is that we are not going to ratify anything that does not 
impose the same regulations on developing countries as it does 
developed nations.
  And second:

     that it would result in serious harm to the economy of the 
     United States.

  Obviously, that is very significant at this time. The treaty would 
have required the United States to reduce its emissions 31 percent 
below the level otherwise predicted for 2010. Put another way, the 
United States would have had to cut 552 million metric tons of 
CO2 per year by the year 2008 through 2012.
  As the Business Roundtable pointed out:

       [That target is] the equivalent of having to eliminate all 
     current emissions from either the United States 
     transportation sector--

  That is everything that is moving out there in transportation--

     or the utilities sector, [that would be] residential and 
     commercial, or industry.

  In other words, you have to eliminate everything in order to reach 
that.
  The most widely cited and definitive study came from Wharton 
Econometric Forecasting Associates. According to Wharton Econometric 
Forecasting Associates' economists, Kyoto would cost 2.4 million U.S. 
jobs and reduce GDP by 3.2 percent, or about $300 billion annually, an 
amount greater than the total expenditure on primary and secondary 
education in America. Certainly that would result in the serious harm 
to the economy of the United States that was voted on by this body 
without one dissenting vote.
  Because of Kyoto, American consumers would face higher food, medical, 
and housing costs. For food, an increase of 11 percent; for medicine, 
an increase of 14 percent; and for housing, an increase of 7 percent. 
At the same time, an average household of four would see its real 
income drop by $2,700 in 2010, and each year thereafter.
  Under Kyoto, energy and electricity prices would nearly double and 
the gasoline prices would go up an additional 65 cents a gallon.
  I hope somebody is listening out there.
  Some of the environmental community have dismissed the Wharton report 
as a tainted product. I point them to the 1998 analysis of the Clinton 
Energy Information Administration, the statistical arm of the 
Department of Energy, which largely confirmed Wharton's analysis. Keep 
in mind, all these disastrous results of Kyoto are predicted by the 
Wharton Econometric Forecasting Associates, a private consulting 
company founded by professors from the University of Pennsylvania's 
Wharton Business School.
  This month the Congressional Budget Office provided further proof 
that Kyoto-like carbon regulatory schemes are regressive and harmful to 
economic growth and prosperity.
  As the CBO--that is, the Congressional Budget Office--found:

       The price increases resulting from a carbon cap would be 
     regressive--that is, they would place a greater burden on 
     lower-income households than higher-income households.

  As to the broader macroeconomic effects of the carbon cap and trade 
schemes, the CBO said:

       A cap-and-trade program for carbon emissions could impose 
     significant costs on the economy in the form of welfare 
     losses. Welfare losses are real costs to the economy in that 
     they would not be recovered anywhere else in the form of 
     higher income. Those losses would be borne by people in their 
     role as shareholders, consumers and workers.

  Some might respond that the Government can simply redistribute the 
wealth, redistribute the income, in a form of welfare programs to 
mitigate the impact, but the CBO found otherwise. The CBO said:

       The Government could use the allowance value to partly 
     redistribute the costs of a carbon cap-and-trade program, but 
     it could not cover these costs entirely. [And, further,] 
     Available research indicates that providing compensation 
     could actually raise the cost to the economy of a carbon cap.

  That is what CBO said just this month.
  Despite these facts, groups such as Greenpeace blindly assert that 
Kyoto ``will not impose significant costs'' and ``will not be an 
economic burden.''
  Among the many questions this provokes, one may ask: Won't be a 
burden on whom exactly? Greenpeace doesn't elaborate. But according to 
a recent study by the Center for Energy and Economic Development 
sponsored by the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. 
Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, if the U.S. ratifies the Kyoto or passes 
domestic climate policies effectively implementing the treaty, the 
result would be to:

     disproportionately harm America's minority communities and 
     place the economic advancement of millions of U.S. Blacks and 
     Hispanics at risk.

  This was the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Hispanic 
Chamber of Commerce.
  Among the study's key findings--and this is one that is very 
significant here, too, when we talk about unemployment rates--this line 
would be unemployment rates without Kyoto. It goes straight across. We 
can see it starting at about 10.5 percent, going across from the 
current time to 2012.
  This line down here is the line for Hispanics. This is unemployment 
rates.
  The study concluded, if we should have to comply with Kyoto 
regulations, it would go up, unemployment would go up at that 
particular rate and, for Hispanics, at this particular rate.
  It also affects the poverty rates for Blacks and Hispanics. Again, 
for Blacks, the poverty rate, if you take this as a baseline and take 
it straight across from the year 2000 to 2012, this being a little over 
26 percent, then you follow with Kyoto, look at what happens to the 
poverty rate--the same thing happening down here for Hispanics. In 
other words, it is discriminatory against these particular individuals.
  Among the study's key findings--again, let me remind you, this is not 
some organization that should be questioned; this is the National Black 
Chamber of Commerce and the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and 
among their findings: Kyoto will cost 511,000 jobs held by Hispanic 
workers and 864,000 jobs held by Black workers. Poverty rates for 
minority families will increase dramatically, and because Kyoto will 
bring about higher energy prices, many minority businesses will be 
lost.
  This is not Senator Jim Inhofe talking, this is the National Black 
Chamber of Commerce and U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.
  It is interesting to note, the environmental left purports to 
advocate policies based on their alleged good for humanity, especially 
the most vulnerable.

 Kyoto is no exception. Yet Kyoto and Kyoto-like policies developed in 
this body would cause the greatest harm to the very poorest of 
  Americans.Environmental alarmists, as an article of faith, peddled 
the notion that climate change, as Green Peace put it, is ``the biggest 
environmental threat facing . . . developing countries.''
  Such thinking runs totally contrary to the public declaration of the 
2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, a program sponsored by 
the United Nations, which found that poverty is the No. 1 one threat to 
developing countries.
  I would like at this point to talk a little bit about John Christy. 
Dr. John Christy is director of the Earth System Science Center at the 
University of Alabama, Huntsville, who passionately reiterated the 
point about poverty in the May 22 letter to the House Resources 
Committee Chairman, Richard Pombo of California. As an addendum to his 
testimony during the committee's hearing on the Kyoto Protocol, Dr. 
Christy, an Alabama State climatologist, talked eloquently about his 
service as a missionary in Africa.
  I am going to dwell a little on this because I have had a mission in 
west Africa for quite a number of years and

[[Page 19936]]

I have been there and have seen what he is about to describe as a 
reality. We talked about the poverty in America. We talked about what 
is going to happen to minorities--Blacks and Hispanics--in America.
  Let us look at where the poverty is the worst. Dr. Christy said, 
``Poverty is the worst polluter.'' As he noted, bringing modern, 
inexpensive electricity to developing countries would raise living 
standards and lead to a cleaner environment. Kyoto, he said, would be 
counterproductive, and, as I interpret him, immoral, for Kyoto would 
divert precious resources away from helping those truly in need to a 
problem that doesn't exist and a solution that would have no 
environmental benefit.
  The following is an excerpt of a letter worth quoting at length. This 
is Dr. Christy talking about his experience in Africa:

       The typical home was a mud-walled, thatched-roof structure. 
     Smoke from the cooking fire fueled by undried wood was 
     especially irritating to breathe as one entered the home. The 
     fine particles and toxic emissions from these in-house, open 
     fires assured serious lung and eye diseases for a lifetime. 
     And, keeping such fires fueled and burning required a major 
     amount of time, preventing the people from engaging in other 
     less environmentally damaging pursuits.
       I've always believed that establishing a series of coal-
     fired power plants in countries such as Kenya (with simple 
     electrification to the villages) would be the best 
     advancement for the African people and the African 
     environment. An electric light bulb, a microwave oven and a 
     small heater in each home would make a dramatic difference in 
     the overall standard of living. No longer would a major 
     portion of time be spent on gathering inefficient and toxic 
     fuel. The serious health problems of hauling heavy loads and 
     lung poisoning would be much reduced. Women would be freed to 
     engage in activities of greater productivity and advancement. 
     Light on demand would allow for more learning to take place 
     and other activities to be completed. Electricity would also 
     foster a more efficient transfer of important information 
     from radio or television. And finally, the preservation of 
     some of the most beautiful and diverse habitats on the planet 
     would be possible if wood were eliminated as a source of 
     energy.
       Providing energy from sources other than biomass (wood and 
     dung), such as coal-produced electricity, would bring longer 
     and better lives to the people of the developing world and 
     greater opportunity for the preservation of their natural 
     ecosystems. Let me assure you, notwithstanding the views of 
     extreme environmentalists, that Africans do indeed want a 
     higher standard of living. They want to live longer and 
     healthier with less burden bearing and with more 
     opportunities to advance. New sources of affordable, 
     accessible energy would set them down the road of achieving 
     such aspirations.
       These experiences made it clear to me that affordable, 
     accessible energy was desperately needed in African 
     countries.
       As in Africa, ideas for limiting energy use, as embodied in 
     the Kyoto protocol, create the greatest hardships for the 
     poorest among us. As I mentioned in the Hearing, enacting any 
     of these noble-sounding initiatives to deal with climate 
     change through increased energy costs, might make a wealthy 
     urbanite or politician feel good about themselves, but they 
     would not improve the environment and would most certainly 
     degrade the lives of those who need help now.

  Some in this body have introduced Kyoto-like legislation that would 
seriously hurt low-income and minority populations.
  Last year, Tom Mullen, president of the Cleveland Catholic Charities, 
testified against S. 556, the Clean Power Act of last year, which would 
have had a lot of Kyoto-type implications; that it would impose onerous 
and unrealistic restrictions, including a Kyoto cap on carbon monoxide 
emissions by electricity.
  That was Tom Mullen before the committee which I chaired. He is the 
president of Catholic Charities in Cleveland. He has devoted his whole 
life to helping poor people.
  He noted that this regime would mean higher electricity prices for 
the poorest citizens of Cleveland.
  For those on fixed incomes, as Mr. Mullen pointed out, higher 
electricity prices present a choice between eating and staying warm in 
the winter. As Mr. Mullen said:

       The overall impact on the economy in Northeast Ohio would 
     be overwhelming, and the needs that we address at Catholic 
     Charities in Ohio with the elderly and poor would be well 
     beyond our capacity and that of our current partners in 
     government and the private sector.

  That is the sworn testimony of Mr. Mullen before my committee.
  I see that Senator Voinovich from Ohio has approached the floor. He 
remembers very well when Tom Mullen of Catholic Charities of Ohio was 
in testifying. Senator Voinovich made several comments as to the 
seriousness that he believed this would impose upon the poor people of 
Ohio. There is no one more concerned about the poor people in Ohio than 
Senator Voinovich.
  In addition to its negative economic impacts, Kyoto still does not 
satisfy Byrd-Hagel's concerns about developing countries. Though such 
countries as China, India, Brazil, South Korea, and Mexico are all 
signatories to Kyoto, they are not required to reduce their emissions 
even though they emit nearly 30 percent of the world's greenhouse 
gases.
  It says we have to treat the developing nations the same as these 
countries that have signed onto the protocol. But they don't have to do 
it. Within a generation, they will be the largest emitters of carbon, 
methane, and other such greenhouse gases.
  Despite the fact that neither of Byrd-Hagel's conditions has been 
met, environmentalists echoed by the liberal media have bitterly 
criticized President Bush for abandoning Kyoto. But one wonders why. 
Why don't they assail the 95 Senators--both Democrats and Republicans--
who, according to Byrd-Hagel, presumably oppose ratification if the 
treaty came up on the Senate floor?
  Why don't they assail former President Clinton or Vice President Gore 
who signed the treaty but never submitted it for ratification?
  To repeat, it was a unanimous vote saying we cannot ratify Kyoto--the 
Kyoto Treaty that the President had signed--unless they would take care 
of these needs; that is, treating developing countries the same as 
other countries and if it would provide for any kind of damaging 
economic effect.
  So when you look at it, you see it was 95 to 0. You have Senators who 
are of the liberal persuasion--fine people but certainly a different 
philosophy than mine; Senators Boxer, Collins, Feingold, Dorgan, 
Graham, Jeffords, Kennedy, Kerry, Lieberman, Moseley-Braun, 
Rockefeller, and many others--who are really sincerely talking in favor 
of this Kyoto Treaty, but they cast their vote against it. They said: 
We don't want to ratify this treaty, and we are not going to ratify 
this treaty unless it treats the developing countries the same as it 
does the developed nations and unless it doesn't perform any kind of 
damage to the economy.
  If Byrd-Hagel would not ratify Kyoto if it caused substantial harm 
and if the developing countries were not required to participate in the 
same timetable, now it brings us to a very significant question: If the 
Byrd-Hagel conditions are ever satisfied, should the United States 
ratify Kyoto? Answering that question depends on several factors, 
including whether Kyoto would provide significant needed environmental 
benefits.
  First, we should ask what Kyoto is designed to accomplish. According 
to the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Kyoto will 
achieve ``stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the 
atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic 
interference with the climate system.''
  What does this statement mean? The IPCC offers no elaboration and 
doesn't provide any scientific explanation about what that level would 
be. Why? The answer is simple: thus far no one has found a definitive 
scientific answer.
  Recently scientists have answered that question.
  Dr. Fred Singer, an atmospheric scientist at the University of 
Virginia, who served as the first Director of the U.S. Weather 
Satellite Service, which is now part of the Department of Commerce, and 
more recently has served as a member and vice chairman of the National 
Advisory Committee on Oceans and Atmosphere, said:

       No one knows what constitutes a ``dangerous'' 
     concentration. There exists, as yet, no scientific basis for 
     defining such a concentration, or even of knowing whether it 
     is

[[Page 19937]]

     more or less than current levels of carbon dioxide.

  One might pose the question: If we had the ability to set the global 
thermostat, what temperature would we pick? Would we set it colder or 
warmer than it is today? What would the optimal temperature be? The 
actual dawn of civilization occurred in a period climatologists call 
the ``climatic optimum,'' when the mean surface temperature was about 1 
to 2 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today. If we could choose, what 
would we choose? Why not go 1 degree or 2 degrees higher, or 1 degree 
or 2 degrees cooler, for that matter?
  The Kyoto emissions reduction targets are arbitrary, lacking any real 
scientific basis. Kyoto, therefore, will have no impact on global 
temperatures. This is not just my opinion but the conclusion that is 
reached by the country's top climate scientists.
  Dr. Tom Wigley, a senior scientist at the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research, found that if the Kyoto protocol were fully 
implemented by all signatories--now, I will note this next point 
assumes that the alarmist science is correct, which, of course, it is 
not--if the Kyoto protocol were fully implemented, it would reduce 
temperatures by a mere .07 degrees Celsius by 2050 and .13 degrees 
Celsius by 2100.
  What does this mean? Such an amount is so small that ground-based 
thermometers cannot even measure it. If you look at this chart, this 
shows the difference all the way from 2000 to 2050. You can see, while 
we have ups and downs, it is not measurable. We do not have equipment 
that could measure that precisely.
  Dr. Richard Lindzen, an MIT scientist and member of the National 
Academy of Sciences, who has specialized in climate issues for over 30 
years, told the Committee on Environment and Public Works--the 
committee I chair--on May 2, 2001, that there is a ``definitive 
disconnect between Kyoto and science. Should a catastrophic scenario 
prove correct, Kyoto would not prevent it.''
  Similarly, Dr. James Hansen of NASA, considered the father of global 
warming--he is the guy who thought of all this stuff--said the Kyoto 
protocol--keep in mind, he is the father of this concept--``will have 
little effect'' on global temperature in the 21st century. In a rather 
stunning followup, Hansen said it would take 30 Kyotos--let me repeat 
that--30 Kyotos to reduce warming to an acceptable level. If 1 Kyoto 
devastates the American economy, what would 30 Kyotos do?
  So this leads to another question: If the provisions in the protocol 
do little or nothing measurable to influence global temperatures, what 
does this tell us about the scientific basis for Kyoto?
  Answering that question requires a thorough examination of the 
scientific work conducted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change. I am going to refer to this as the IPCC. It is the 
U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which provides the 
scientific basis for Kyoto. In other words, that is what everything is 
based on. So I want to talk about that for a few minutes. The 
international climate negotiations and substance of claims were made by 
alarmists.
  In 1992, several nations from around the world gathered in Rio de 
Janeiro for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. 
This meeting was premised on the concern that global warming was 
becoming a problem. The United States, along with many other countries, 
signed the Framework Convention, committing them to making voluntary 
reductions in greenhouse gases. OK. That was 11 years ago.
  Over time, it became clear that signatories were not going to reach 
their reduction targets as stipulated under Rio. This realization led 
to the Kyoto protocol of 1997, which was an amendment to the Framework 
Convention and which prescribed mandatory reductions only for developed 
nations; that is, the United States. Of course, you know that is 
another violation of Byrd-Hagel, that it would just affect the 
developed nations, not the developing nations.
  The science of Kyoto is based on the assessment reports conducted by 
the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. Over the last 
13 years, the IPCC has published three assessments, with each one, over 
time, growing more and more alarmist.
  The first IPCC assessment report, in 1990, found that the climate 
record of the past century was ``broadly consistent'' with the changes 
in the Earth's surface temperature, as calculated by climate models 
that incorporated the observed increase in greenhouse gases.
  This conclusion is absurd, considering the climate cooled between 
1940 and 1975, just as industrial activity grew rapidly after World War 
II. It has been difficult to reconcile this cooling with the observed 
increases in greenhouse gases.
  Let's be sure we understand what is happening. In 1940, and then 
after the war, is when we had the huge increase in CO2 and 
the greenhouse gases. Yet that precipitated a cooling period, not a 
warming period, totally contradicting the science.
  After its initial publication, the IPCC's second assessment report, 
in 1995, attracted widespread international attention, particularly 
among scientists who believed that human activities were causing global 
warming. In their view, the report provided the proverbial smoking gun.
  The most widely cited phrase from that report--which actually came 
from the report summary, as few in the media actually read the entire 
report--was that ``the balance of the evidence suggests a discernible 
human influence on global climate.'' This, of course, is so vague that 
it is essentially meaningless.
  What do they mean by ``suggests''? For that matter, what do they mean 
by ``discernible''? How much human influence is discernible? Is it a 
positive or negative influence? Where is the precise scientific 
quantification?
  Unfortunately, the media created the impression that man-induced 
global warming was fact. On August 10, 1995, the New York Times 
published an article titled ``Experts Confirm Human Role in Global 
Warming''--not just inaccurate but just an outrageous lie. According to 
the Times account, the IPCC showed that global warming ``is unlikely to 
be entirely due to natural causes.'' That is what they said.
  Of course, when parsed, this account means fairly little. Not 
entirely due to natural causes? Well, how much then? One percent? 
Twenty percent? Eighty-five percent?
  The IPCC report was replete with caveats and qualifications, 
providing little evidence to support anthropogenic theories--and 
``anthropogenic'' means manmade--of global warming. The preceding 
paragraph in which the ``balance of evidence'' appears makes exactly 
that point. It reads:

       Our ability to quantify the human influence on global 
     climate is currently limited because the expected signal is 
     still emerging from the noise of natural variability, and 
     because there are uncertainties in key factors.

  That is the IPCC. Those are their words which totally refute the case 
they are trying to make. Moreover, the IPCC report was quite explicit 
about the uncertainties surrounding the link between human actions and 
global warming.

       Although these global mean results suggest that there is 
     some anthropogenic component in the observed temperature 
     record, they cannot be considered compelling evidence of a 
     clear cause-and-effect link between anthropogenic forcing and 
     changes in the Earth's surface temperature.

  Remember the IPCC provides the scientific basis for the alarmists' 
conclusion about global warming. But even the IPCC is saying their own 
science cannot be considered compelling evidence.
  Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science and director of 
the Earth Systems Science Center at the University of Alabama, a key 
contributor to the 1995 IPCC report, participated with the lead authors 
in drafting the sections in the detailed review of the scientific text. 
He wrote--this isn't the IPCC; this is Dr. John Christy--in the 
Montgomery Advertiser, February 22, 1998, that much of what passes for 
common knowledge in the press regarding climate change is ``inaccurate, 
incomplete, or viewed out of context.''

[[Page 19938]]

  Many of the misconceptions about climate change originated from the 
IPCC's six-page executive summary. It was the most widely read and 
quoted of the three documents published by the IPCC working group but--
and this point is crucial--it had the least input from scientists and 
the greatest input from nonscientists.
  Let me go to the third assessment. Five years later, the IPCC was 
back again, this time with the Third Assessment Report on Climate 
Change. In October of 2000, the IPCC ``Summary for Policymakers''--that 
is not what the scientists said; that is what the politicians said--was 
leaked to the media which, once again, accepted the IPCC's conclusions 
as fact. Based on the summary, the Washington Post wrote on October 30:

       The consensus on global warming keeps strengthening.

  In a similar vein, the New York Times competently declared on October 
28:

       The international panel of climate scientists, considered 
     the most authoritative voice on global warming, is now 
     concluding that mankind's contribution to the problem is 
     greater than originally believed.

  Look at how these accounts are couched. They are worded to maximize 
the fear factor. But upon closer inspection, it is clear that such 
statements have no compelling intellectual content. ``Greater than 
originally believed,'' what is the baseline from which the Times makes 
that judgment? Is it .01 percent or 25 percent? And how much greater? 
Double? Triple? An order of magnitude greater?
  Such reporting prompted testimony by Dr. Richard Lindzen before the 
Committee on Environment and Public Works, the committee I now chair. 
This was in May of 2001.
  Dr. Lindzen said:

       Nearly all reading and coverage of the IPCC is restricted 
     to the highly publicized Summaries for Policymakers, which 
     are written by representatives of government, NGO's, and 
     business; the full reports, written by participating 
     scientists, are largely ignored.

  That is what Dr. Lindzen, who is one of the contributing scientists 
to the IPCC, has said. As it turned out, the policymakers' summary was 
politicized and radically different from the earlier draft. For 
example, the draft concluded the following concerning the driving case 
for climate change:

       From the body of the evidence since IPCC (1996), we 
     conclude there has been a discernible human influence on 
     global climate. Studies are beginning to separate the 
     contributions to observed climate change attributable to 
     individual external influences, both anthropogenic and 
     natural. This work suggests that anthropogenic greenhouse 
     gases are a substantial contributor to the observed warming, 
     especially over the past 30 years.

  Keep in mind their conclusion:

       However, the accuracy of these estimates continues to be 
     limited by uncertainties in estimates of internal 
     variability, natural and anthropogenic forcing, and the 
     climate response to external forces.

  In other words, they go all the way through the IPCC, the document on 
which all the extremists are basing their conclusions that 
anthropogenic actually contributes to global warming. Yet then they 
have a disclaimer at the very end.
  The final version looks quite different and concluded instead:

       In light of new evidence taking into account the remaining 
     uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 
     years is likely to have been due to increases in greenhouse 
     gas concentrations.

  Keep in mind ``warming over the last 50 years.'' Remember we showed 
you those charts going back 25 years. These same people were yelling 
and screaming and complaining that there is a cooling period coming. 
They had all these fearful statements made about what is going to 
happen. Now they are saying over the past 50 years, when they 
themselves said 25 years ago that the concern was cooling.
  This kind of distortion was not unintentional, as Dr. Lindzen 
explained for the Environment and Public Works Committee. Dr. Lindzen 
said:

       I personally witnessed coauthors forced to assert their 
     ``green'' credentials in defense of their statements.

  This is testimony before our committee. This is from Dr. Lindzen, one 
of the contributors to the IPCC on which they base this premise.
  In short, some parts of the IPCC process resemble a Soviet-style 
trial in which the facts are predetermined and ideological purity 
trumps technical and scientific examinations. The predictions in this 
summary went far beyond those in the IPCC's 1995 report.
  The second assessment of the IPCC predicted that the Earth could warm 
by 1 to 3.5 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. The best estimate was a 
2-degree Celsius warming by 2100. Both are highly questionable at best. 
That was the 1995 report.
  In the third assessment, the IPCC dramatically increased that 
estimate to a range between 1.4 percent and 5.8 degrees Celsius, even 
though no new evidence had come to light to justify a dramatic change. 
In fact, the IPCC's median projected warming actually declined from 
1990 to 1995. IPCC's 1990 initial estimate was 3.2 degrees Celsius. 
Then the IPCC revised 1992--2 years later--estimate was 2.6 degrees 
Celsius, followed by the IPCC revised 1995 estimate of 2.0 degrees 
Celsius. What changed?
  As it turned out, the new prediction was based on faulty, politically 
charged assumptions about trends in population growth, economic growth, 
and fossil fuel use. The extreme case scenario of a 5.8-degree warming, 
for instance, rests upon an assumption that the whole world will raise 
its level of economic activity and per capita energy use to that in the 
United States. That is what it is based on. That energy use will be 
carbon intensive. This scenario is simply ludicrous. This essentially 
contradicts the experience of the industrialized world over the past 30 
years. Yet the 5.8 degree figure featured prominently in news stories 
because it produced the biggest fear effect.
  Moreover, when regional climate models of the kind relied upon by the 
IPCC attempt to incorporate such factors as population growth, ``the 
details of future climate recede toward unintelligibility,'' according 
to Jerry Mahlman, Director of NOAA's Geophysical Fluid Dynamics 
Laboratory.
  Even Dr. Stephen Schneider, an outspoken believer in catastrophic 
global warming, criticized the IPCC's assumptions in the journal Nature 
on May 3, 2001. In his article--this is the promoter of the 
catastrophic global warming fear mongers--Schneider asks:

       How likely is it that the world would get 6 degrees 
     [centigrade] hotter by 2100? [That] depends on the likelihood 
     of the assumptions underlying the projections.

  Keep in mind that Schneider is on the side of the alarmists. 
Schneider's own calculations, which cast serious doubt on the IPCC's 
extreme prediction, broadly agree with an MIT study published in April 
of 2001.
  It found that there is a ``far less'' than one percent chance that 
temperatures would rise to 5.8 degrees C or higher, while there is a 17 
percent chance the temperature rise would be lower than 1.4 degrees.
  That point bears repeating: even global warming alarmists think the 
lower number is 17 times more likely to be right than the higher 
number. Moreover, even if the earth's temperature increases by 1.4 
degrees Celsius, does it really matter? The IPCC doesn't offer any 
credible science to explain what would happen.
  Gerald North of Texas A&M University in College Station, agrees that 
the IPCC's predictions are baseless, in part because climate models are 
highly imperfect instruments. As he said after the IPCC report came 
out: ``It's extremely hard to tell whether the models have improved'' 
since the last IPCC report. ``The uncertainties are large.'' Similarly, 
Peter Stone, an MIT climate modeler, said in reference to the IPCC, 
``The major [climate prediction] uncertainties have not been reduced at 
all.''
  Dr. David Wojick, an expert in climate science, recently wrote in 
Canada's National Post:

       The computer models cannot . . . decide among the variable 
     drivers, like solar versus lunar change, or chaos versus 
     ocean circulation versus greenhouse gas increases. Unless and 
     until they can explain these things, the models cannot be 
     taken seriously as a basis for public policy.

  In short, these general circulation models, or GCMs as they're known, 
create simulations that must track over 5

[[Page 19939]]

million parameters. These simulations require accurate information on 
two natural greenhouse gas factors--water vapor and clouds--whose 
effects scientists still do not understand.
  Because of these and other uncertainties, climate modelers from four 
separate climate modeling centers wrote in the October 2000 edition of 
Nature that, ``Forecasts of climate change are inevitably uncertain.'' 
They go on to explain that, ``A basic problem with all such predictions 
to date has been the difficulty of providing any systematic estimate of 
uncertainty,'' a problem that stems from the fact that ``these 
[climate] models do not necessarily span the full range of known 
climate system behavior.''
  Again, to reiterate in plain English, this means the models do not 
account for key variables that influence the climate system.
  Despite this, the alarmists continue to use these models and all the 
other flimsy evidence I've cited to support their theories of man-made 
global warming--theories they so desperately want to believe.
  Before I get into another subject, I see the Senator from Ohio, 
Senator Voinovich. I have been talking a little about the committee 
hearing we had. I believe it was at your invitation that Tom Mullins 
came and testified. I ask you if I am accurately portraying the 
comments he made concerning the poor people of your State of Ohio.
  Mr. VOINOVICH. Mr. President, the Senator portrayed Tom Mullins' 
comments accurately. In the statement I am going to be making, I will 
refer to those remarks--the indication that many of the people who are 
promoting capping carbon at the altar of responding to the climate 
change promotion are not seeking to affect the impact that capping 
carbon would have on natural gas questions and on those people in our 
country who are least able to pay their energy costs.
  Mr. INHOFE. I thank the Senator. I recall that he almost had tears in 
his eyes when he talked about the poor people of Ohio and the fact they 
have to make decisions about eating and heating their homes. It is a 
very serious thing.
  Mr. VOINOVICH. I think the main purpose of his testimony was that in 
decisions we make in the Senate regarding environmental legislation, we 
ought to take into consideration the impact it is having on those who 
have to pay the energy costs that are increased as a result of those 
initiatives. There seems to be some type of disconnect between our 
environmental policy and our energy policy. What we are hoping to do 
here is to harmonize our environmental and energy policies so we can 
put together a policy that will reduce emissions and at the same time 
not destroy our economy and impact on the least of our brethren who pay 
a large percentage of what they have toward the cost of energy.
  Mr. INHOFE. What Tom Mullins said is totally consistent with what I 
talked about earlier. In the National Black Chamber of Commerce and the 
U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce they talked about the unemployment 
rate and how it hurts poor people. I think that to be very true.
  Now I want to turn to temperature trends in the 20th Century. GCMs 
predict that rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations will 
cause temperatures in the troposphere, the layer from 5,000 to 30,000 
feet, to rise faster than surface temperatures--a critical fact 
supporting the alarmist hypothesis.
  But in fact, there is no meaningful warming trend in the troposphere, 
and weather satellites, widely considered the most accurate measure of 
global temperatures, have confirmed this.
  To illustrate this point, just think about a greenhouse. The glass 
panes let sunlight in but prevent it from escaping. The greenhouse then 
warms from the top down. As is clear from the science, this simply is 
not happening in the atmosphere.
  Satellite measurements are validated independently by measurements 
from NOAA balloon radiosonde instruments, with records extending back 
over 40 years. This is very critical. The extremists will tell you 
warming is occurring.
  If you look at this chart of balloon data, extremists will tell you 
that warming is occurring, but if you look more closely you see that 
temperature in 1955 was higher than temperature in 2000.
  A recent detailed comparison of atmospheric temperature data gathered 
by satellites with widely-used data gathered by weather balloons 
corroborates both the accuracy of the satellite data and the rate of 
global warming seen in that data.
  To reiterate, the best data collected from satellites validated by 
balloons to test the hypothesis of a human-induced global warming from 
the release of CO2 into the atmosphere shows no meaningful 
trend of increasing temperatures, even as the climate models 
exaggerated the warmth that ought to have occurred from a build-up in 
CO2.
  Some critics of satellite measurements contend that they don't square 
with the ground-based temperature record. But some of this difference 
is due to the so-called ``urban heat island effect.'' This occurs when 
concrete and asphalt in cities absorb--rather than reflect--the sun's 
heat, causing surface temperatures and overall ambient temperatures to 
rise. Scientists have shown that this strongly influences the surface-
based temperature record.
  In a paper published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological 
Society in 1989, Dr. Thomas R. Karl, senior scientist at the National 
Climate Data Center, corrected the U.S. surface temperatures for the 
urban heat-island effect and found that there has been a downward 
temperature trend since 1940. This suggests a strong warming bias in 
the surface-based temperature record.
  Even the IPCC finds that the urban heat island effect is significant. 
According to the IPCC's calculations, the effect could account for up 
to 0.12 degrees Celsius of the 20th century temperature rise, one-fifth 
of the total observed.
  When we look at the 20th century as a whole, we see some distinct 
phases that question anthropogenic theories of global warming. First, a 
strong warming trend of about 0.5 C began in the late 19th century and 
peaked around 1940. Next, the temperature decreased from 1940 until the 
late 1970s.
  Why is that decrease significant? Because about 80% of the carbon 
dioxide from human activities was added to the air after 1940, meaning 
the early 20th century warming trend had to be largely natural.
  Scientists from the Scripps Institution for Oceanography confirmed 
this phenomenon in the March 12, 1999 issue of the journal Science. 
They addressed the proverbial ``chicken-and-egg'' question of climate 
science, namely: when the Earth shifts from glacial to warm periods, 
which comes first: an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, or 
an increase in global temperature?
  The team concluded that the temperature rise comes first followed by 
a carbon dioxide boost about 400 to 1,000 years later. This contradicts 
everything alarmists have been saying about manmade global warming in 
the 20th century. Repeat: The temperature precipitates the carbon 
dioxide increase.
  We can go even further back, some 400,000 years, and see this 
phenomenon occurring, as the chart clearly shows. Yet the doomsayers, 
undeterred by these facts, will not quit. In February and March of 
2002, the New York Times and the Washington Post, among others, 
reported on the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf in the Antarctic 
Peninsula, causing quite a stir in the media, and providing alarmists 
with more propaganda to scare the public.
  When we look at this chart, we can see this goes back 400,000 years. 
No one is going to refute this, but the Earth's natural 12,000-year 
cycle of increases and decreases in temperatures is followed by an 
increase and decrease in CO2. We can see the trends going 
all the way back. It has not really made a major change.
  Although there was no link to global warming, the Times could not 
help but make a suggestion in its March 20 edition:

       While it is too soon to say whether the changes there are 
     related to a buildup of ``greenhouse'' gas emissions that 
     scientists believe are warming the planet, many experts said 
     it was getting harder to find any other explanation.


[[Page 19940]]


  The Times, however, simply ignored a recent study in the Journal of 
Nature which found the Antarctic has been cooling since 1966.
  Another study in Science recently found the West Antarctic ice sheet 
to be thickening rather than thinning. University of Illinois 
researchers also reported a net cooling on the Antarctic Continent 
between 1966 and 2000. In some regions, such as the McMurdo dry 
valleys, temperatures cooled between 1986 and 1999 by as much as 2 
degrees during that timeframe.
  In perhaps the most devastating critique of glacial alarmism, the 
American Geophysical Union found the Arctic was warmer in 1935 than it 
is today.
  That bears repeating. Eighty percent of the carbon dioxide from human 
activities was added to the air after 1940. Yet the Arctic was warmer 
in 1935 than it is today.
  So not only is glacial alarmism flawed, there is no evidence, as 
shown by measurements from satellites and weather balloons, of any 
meaningful warming trends in the 20th century.
  I will now talk about health risks. The subject I am going to talk 
about is probably the most significant, so I hope people will not go 
away.
  Even as we discuss whether temperatures will go up or down, we should 
ask whether global warming will actually produce the catastrophic 
effects the alarmists confidently predict.
  What gets obscured in the global warming debate is the fact that 
carbon dioxide is not a pollutant. It is necessary for life. Numerous 
studies have shown that global warming can actually be beneficial to 
mankind.
  Most plants, especially wheat and rice, grow considerably better when 
there is more CO2 in the atmosphere. CO2 works 
like a fertilizer; higher temperatures further enhance the 
CO2 fertilizer effect.
  In fact, the average crop, according to Dr. John Reilly of the MIT 
Joint Program on Science and Policy of Global Change, is 30 percent 
higher in a CO2-enhanced world. I repeat that: 30 percent 
higher in a CO2-enhanced world. This is not just a matter of 
opinion but a well-established phenomenon.
  With regard to the impact of global warming on human health, it is 
assumed that higher temperatures will induce more deaths and massive 
outbreaks of deadly diseases. In particular, a frequent scare tactic by 
alarmists is that warmer temperatures will spark malaria outbreaks. Dr. 
Paul Reiter convincingly debunks this claim in a 2000 study for the 
Centers for Disease Control. As Reiter found:

       Until the second half of the 20th century, malaria was 
     endemic and widespread in many temperature regions--

  This next point is critical--

     with major epidemics as far north as the Arctic Circle.

  Reiter also published a second study in the March 2001 issue of 
Environmental Health Perspectives showing that ``despite spectacular 
cooling, malaria persisted throughout Europe.''
  Another myth is that warming increases morbidity rates. This is not 
the case, according to Dr. Mendelsohn, environmental economist from 
Yale University. Mendelsohn argues that heat stress deaths are caused 
by a temporary variability and not warming. In other words, you do not 
die of heat because of heat temperature; you die as a result of the 
variable change.
  I wish to now go back to the IPCC's third assessment. In addition to 
trying to predict the future, the third assessment report looked into 
the past. The IPCC released a graph depicting global temperatures 
trending slightly downward over the last 10 centuries and then rather 
dramatically increasing beginning around 1900. The cause for such a 
shift, of course, is attributed to industrialization and manmade 
greenhouse gas emissions.
  The now infamous ``hockey stick'' graph was enthusiastically embraced 
by IPCC which used it as a basis for the third assessment. Dr. Michael 
Mann at the University of Virginia was its principal authority. The 
study, which Mann and others conducted, examined climate trends over 
the past 1,000 years. As many scientists have pointed out since its 
publication, it contains many flaws.
  Stay with me. First, Mann's study focuses on temperate trends only in 
the northern hemisphere. Mann extrapolated that data to reach the 
conclusion that global temperatures remained relatively stable and then 
dramatically increased at the beginning of the 20th century. That leads 
to Mann's conclusion that the 20th century has been the warmest in the 
last 1,000 years. As is obvious, however, such an extrapolation cannot 
provide a reliable global perspective of long-term climate changes.
  Moreover, Mann's conclusions were drawn mainly from 12 sets of 
climate proxy data, of which 9 were tree rings, while the remaining 3 
came from ice cores. Notably, some of the ice core data was drawn from 
the southern hemisphere--one from Greenland and two from Peru. What is 
left is a picture of the northern hemisphere based on eight sets of 
tree ring data--again, hardly a convincing global picture for the last 
1,000 years.
  Mann's hockey stick dismisses both the Medieval Warm Period--and that 
was roughly 800 A.D. to about 1300, 1350 A.D.--and the Little Ice Age 
which was from 1350 to 1850, two climatic events that are fairly widely 
recognized in the scientific literature to be accurate.
  Mann believes that the 20th century is ``nominally the warmest'' of 
the past millennium and that the decade of the 1990s was the warmest 
decade on record.
  The Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age are replaced by a largely 
benign and slightly cooling linear trend in climate until 1900. But as 
is clear from a close analysis of Mann's methods, the hockey stick is 
formed by crudely grafting the surface temperature record of the 20th 
century into a pre-1900 tree ring record.
  This is a highly controversial and scientifically flawed approach. As 
is widely recognized in the scientific community, two data series 
representing radically different variables--temperature and tree 
rings--cannot be grafted together credibly to create a single series. 
In simple terms, as Dr. Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia 
explained, this is like comparing apples to oranges.
  Even Mann and his coauthors admit that if the tree ring data set were 
removed from their climate reconstruction, the calibration and 
verification procedures they used would undermine their conclusions.
  A new study from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, 
which I will comment on shortly, strongly disputes Mann's methods and 
hypotheses. As coauthor Dr. David Legates wrote:

       Although [Mann's work] is now widely used as proof of 
     anthropogenic global warming, we've become concerned that 
     such an analysis is in direct contradiction to most of the 
     research and written histories available.
       Our paper shows this contradiction and argues that the 
     results of Mann . . . are out of step with the preponderance 
     of the evidence.

  The scientific evidence. That is worth repeating: Mann's theory of 
global warming is out of step with most scientific thinking on the 
subject.
  What we are talking about in plain English is the science news by the 
environmental alarmist is not just flawed; it is just not there. But 
there is more.
  Based in part on the data supporting the IPCC's key reports, 
thousands of scientists have rejected the scientific basis of Kyoto. 
Recently, 46 climate experts wrote an open letter to Canada's National 
Post on June 3 of this year claiming that the Kyoto Protocol lacks 
credible science. This is 46 leading climate experts.
  I ask that the entire text of the letter from these 46 leading 
climate experts be printed in the Record at the conclusion of my 
remarks.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (See exhibit 2.)
  Mr. INHOFE. The scientists wrote that the Canadian Prime Minister 
essentially ignored an earlier letter they drafted in 2001. In it, they 
wrote:

       Many climate science experts from Canada and around the 
     world, while still strongly supporting environmental 
     protection, equally strongly disagree with the scientific 
     rationale for the Kyoto Accord.

  In their June 3 letter, the group wrote to Paul Martin, a Canadian 
member of Parliament, urging him to

[[Page 19941]]

consider the consequences of a Kyoto ratification. This is the country 
of Canada. Quoting now from that letter:

       Although ratification has already taken place, we believe 
     that the government of Canada needs a far more comprehensive 
     understanding of what climate science really says if 
     environmental policy is to be developed that will truly 
     benefit the environment while maintaining the economic 
     prosperity so essential to social progress.

  Many scientists share the same view. I mentioned several other 
countries' leading climate scientists earlier in this speech. In 
addition, over 4,000 scientists, 70 of whom are Nobel Prize winners, 
signed the Heidelberg Appeal, which says that no compelling evidence 
exists to justify controls of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions; 
that is, manmade emissions.
  Let me repeat that. Over 4,000 scientists, 70 of whom are Nobel Prize 
winners, signed the Heidelberg Appeal which says that no compelling 
evidence exists to justify controls of greenhouse gas emissions, 
manmade greenhouse gas emissions. They agree it is a hoax.
  Now, I also want to point to a 1998 survey of State climatologists, 
which reveals that a majority of respondents have serious doubts about 
whether anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases present a serious 
threat to climate stability.
  Then there is Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past president of the National 
Academy of Sciences and a professor emeritus at Rockefeller University, 
who compiled the Oregon Petition, and it reads as follows:

       We urge the United States Government to reject the global 
     warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in 
     December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed 
     limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder 
     the advance of science and technology, and damage the health 
     and welfare of mankind.
       There is no convincing scientific evidence that human 
     release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases 
     is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause 
     catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption 
     of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial 
     scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon 
     dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural 
     plant and animal environments of the earth.

  That is Dr. Frederick Seitz, former president of the National Academy 
of Sciences.
  The petition has 17,800 independently verified signatures, and for 
those signers who hold a Ph.D., 95 percent have now been independently 
verified. Environmental groups have attacked the credibility of this 
petition based on one false name sent in by some green pranksters. 
Several names are still on the list even though biased press reports 
have ridiculed their identity with the names of famous personalities. 
They are actual signers.
  A guy named Perry Mason, for example, is a Ph.D. chemist. He was one 
of the signers.
  The most significant thing that just recently came out is the Harvard 
Smithsonian 1,000-year climate study. Let me turn to an important new 
study by the researchers. The study entitled ``Proxy Climatic and 
Environmental Changes of the Past 1,000 Years'' offers a devastating 
critique of Mann's hypothesis calling into question the IPCC's Third 
Assessment, and indeed the entire intellectual foundation of the 
alarmists' views. It draws on extensive evidence showing that major 
changes in global temperatures result not from manmade emissions but 
from natural causes.
  Smithsonian scientists, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, with 
coauthors Craig Idso, Sherwood Idso, and David Legates, compiled and 
examined results from more than 240 peer-reviewed papers published by 
thousands of researchers over the past four decades. In contrast to 
Mann's flawed, limited research, the Harvard-Smithsonian study covers a 
multitude of geophysical and biological climate indicators. While 
Mann's analysis relied mostly on tree-ring data from the Northern 
Hemisphere, the researchers offer a detailed look at climate changes 
that occurred in different regions around the world over the last 1,000 
years.
  The range of the climate proxies--now, keep in mind, we are talking 
about one of them that was just primarily looking at tree rings, but 
these 240 studies that were analyzed in the Smithsonian-Harvard report 
looked at borehole data, cultural data, glacier advances or retreats, 
geomorphology, isotopic analysis from lake sediments or ice cores, tree 
or peat celluloses, corals, stalagmite or biological fossils, net ice 
accumulation rate, including dust or chemical counts, lake fossils and 
sediments, river sediments, melt layers in ice cores, phenological and 
paleontological fossils, pollen, seafloor sediments, luminescent 
analysis, everything that fit every kind of proxy that could be known 
to science.
  Based on this proxy data drawn from the 240 peer-reviewed studies, 
the authors offered highly convincing evidence to support the Little 
Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. As coauthor Dr. Sallie Baliunas 
explained:

       For a long time, researchers have possessed anecdotal 
     evidence supporting the existence of these climate extremes.

  What happened during these periods? We remember what happened during 
these periods. Baliunas notes that, during the Medieval Warm Period:

       The Vikings established colonies in Greenland at the 
     beginning of the second millennium that died out several 
     hundred years later when the climate turned colder.

  In England, she found that:

       Vineyards had flourished during the medieval warmth.

  In their study, the authors accumulated reams of objective data to 
back up these cultural indicators.
  The Medieval Warm Period, or Medieval Optimum, occurred between 800 
to 1300. Among the studies surveyed by the authors, 112 contained 
information about the warm period. Of these, 103 showed evidence for 
the Medieval Warm Period; two did not; seven had equivocal answers.
  Looking just at the Southern Hemisphere, the authors found 22 
studies, 21 of which confirmed the warm period and only one that did 
not.
  The authors also looked at the 20th century and examined 102 studies 
to determine whether it was the warmest on record. Three studies said 
yes, 16 had equivocal answers, and of the remaining 83, 79 showed 
periods of at least 50 years that were warmer than any 50-year period 
in the 20th century.
  I must say, to any reasonable person, these ratios appear very 
convincing and undoubtedly rest on a solid scientific foundation. 
Again, remember, the conclusions of this study are based on 240 peer-
reviewed studies, and this chart shows what the Harvard-Smithsonian 
researchers concluded.
  Peer review means they were rigorously reviewed and critiqued by 
other scientists before they were published. This climate study, 
published in March of 2003, is the most comprehensive of its kind in 
history. According to the authors, some of the global warming during 
the 20th century is attributable to the climate system recovering from 
the Little Ice Age. Global warming alarmists, however, vehemently 
disagree, and pull a scientific sleight of hand by pointing to the 140-
year direct temperature record as evidence of warming caused by humans. 
But as the authors note:

       The direct temperature measurement record is too short . . 
     . to provide good measures of natural variability in its full 
     dynamic range.

  This research begs an obvious question: If the Earth was warmer 
during the Middle Ages than the age of coal-fired powerplants and SUVs, 
what role do manmade emissions play in influencing climate? I think any 
person with a modicum of common sense would say, not much and maybe 
none.
  How did the media report on the Harvard-Smithsonian study? The big 
dailies, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, basically 
ignored it. I was impressed by a fair and balanced piece in the Boston 
Globe. Unfortunately, some of the media could not resist playing 
politics of personal destruction.
  Before I move on, I add another point about climate history. For the 
last several minutes, I have talked about natural climate variability 
over the past 1,000 years. We can go back even further in history to 
see dramatic changes in climate that had nothing to do with SUVs or 
powerplants. During the last few hundred thousand years, the Earth has 
seen multiple repeated periods of

[[Page 19942]]

glaciation. Each ice age has ended because of dramatic increases in 
global temperatures which had nothing to do with fossil fuel emissions.
  In fact, the last major glacier retreat, marking the end of the Wurm 
Glaciation, was only 12,000 years ago. At the end, the temperature was 
14 degrees Celsius lower than today and climbed rapidly to present day 
temperature--and did so in as little as 50 years. Thus began our 
current Holocene Age of warm climates and glacier retreat.
  These cycles of warming and cooling have been found so frequent and 
are so often so much more dramatic than the fractional degree changes 
measured over the last century that one wonders if the alarmists are 
simply ignorant of geological and meteorological history or simply 
ignoring it to advance their agenda.
  What is the real story behind Kyoto? As I pointed out, the science 
underlying the Kyoto Protocol has been thoroughly discredited. But for 
some reason the drive to implement Kyoto continues apace in the United 
States and more fervently in Europe. What is going on here?
  The Europeans continue to insist that the United States should honor 
its international responsibilities and ratify Kyoto. In June of 2001 
Germany released a statement declaring the world needs Kyoto because 
its greenhouse gas reduction targets are indispensable.
  Similarly, Swedish Prime Minister Goeran Persson, in June of 2001, 
said flatly and without explanation that ``Kyoto is necessary.'' The 
question is, indispensable and necessary for what?
  Certainly not for further reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, as 
Europe has proven. According to news reports earlier this year, the 
European Union has failed to meet its Kyoto targets. As we know, 
according to the best scientific evidence, Kyoto will do nothing to 
reduce global temperatures.
  As it turns out, Kyoto's objective has nothing to do with saving the 
globe. In fact, it is purely political. The case in point, French 
President Jacques Chirac said during a speech at The Hague in November 
of 2002 that Kyoto represents ``the first component of an authentic 
global governance.'' Keep in mind who we are talking about--Jacques 
Chirac of France. He wants the authentic global governance. You have to 
ask if we are going to let the French dictate our United States policy.
  Margot Wallstrom, EU environment commissioner, takes a different view 
but one instructive about the real motives of Kyoto proponents. She 
asserts that Kyoto is about ``the economy, about leveling the playing 
field for big businesses worldwide.'' In other words, we in this 
country should level the playing field so we are equal with the 
European Union. That is very significant in terms of what the real 
motives are.
  Chirac and Wallstrom's comments mean two things: Kyoto represents an 
attempt by certain elements within the international community to 
restrain United States interests; second, Kyoto is an economic weapon 
designed to undermine the global competitiveness and economic 
superiority of the United States.
  I am mystified that some in this body and in the media blithely 
assert that the science of global warming is settled; that is, fossil 
fuel emissions are the principal, driving cause of global warming.
  In a letter to me concerning the next EPA administrator, two Senators 
wrote, ``The pressing problem of global warming'' is now ``established 
scientific fact,'' and demanded that the new administrator commit to 
addressing it.
  With all due respect, this statement is baseless for several reasons, 
as I outlined in detail above. The evidence is overwhelmingly in favor 
of those who do not see global warming proposing harm to the planet and 
who do not think human beings have an insignificant influence on the 
climate system.
  This leads to another question: Why would this body subject the 
United States to Kyoto-like measures that have no environmental 
benefits and cause serious harm to the economy? There are several 
pieces of legislation, including several that have been referred to my 
committee, that effectively implement Kyoto without ratifying the 
treaty. From a cursory read of the Senate politics, it is my 
understanding some of these bills enjoy more than a modicum of support.
  I urge my colleagues to reject them and follow the science to the 
facts. Reject approaches designed not to solve an environmental problem 
but to satisfy the ever-growing demand of environmental groups for 
money and for power and other extremists who simply do not like 
capitalism, free markets, and freedom.
  Climate alarmists see an opportunity here to tax the American people. 
Consider the July 11 Op-ed by J.W. Anderson of the Washington Post. 
Anderson, a former editorial writer of the Post and now a journalist in 
residence with Resources for the Future, concedes that climate science 
still confronts uncertainties, but his solution is a field tax to 
prepare for a potentially catastrophic future. Based on the case I have 
outlined today, such a course of action fits a particularly ideological 
agenda but is entirely unwarranted.
  It is my fervent hope Congress will reject prophets of doom who 
peddle propaganda masquerading as science in the name of saving the 
planet. I urge my colleagues to put stock in scientists who rely on the 
best, most objective scientific data and reject fear as a motivating 
basis for making public policy decisions.
  Let me be very clear: Alarmists are attempting to enact an agenda of 
energy suppression that is inconsistent with American values, freedom, 
prosperity, and environmental problems.
  Over the past hour and a half I have offered compelling evidence that 
catastrophic global warming is a hoax. That conclusion is supported by 
painstaking work of the Nation's top planet scientists. We have those 
scientists who concluded that the Kyoto protocol has no environmental 
benefits; natural variability, not fossil fuel emissions, is an 
overwhelming factor influencing climate change; satellite data, 
confirmed by NOAA, confirms that no meaningful warming has occurred 
over the last century; and climate models predicting dramatic 
temperature increases over the next 100 years are flawed and highly 
imperfect.
  These scientists include Dr. Fred Singer, from the University of 
Virginia; Dr. Tom Wigley, senior scientist at the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research; Dr. Richard Lindzen from the National Academy of 
Science. Everyone listed is someone whose credentials cannot be 
questioned.
  If you study that, you will come to the same conclusions. These are 
objective scientists, not fundraisers for some far-left environmental 
extremist groups.
  Finally, I return to the words of Dr. Frederick Seitz, a past 
president of the National Academy of Sciences, a professor emeritus at 
Rockefeller University, who compiled the Oregon Petition. He said:

       There is no convincing scientific evidence that human 
     release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse 
     gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause 
     catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption 
     of the Earth's climate. Moreover, there is substantial 
     scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon 
     dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural 
     plant and animal environments of the Earth.

  These are sobering words which the extremists have chosen to ignore. 
So what could possibly be the motivation for global warming alarmism? 
Since I have become the chairman of the Environment and Public Works 
Committee, it has become pretty clear. It is fundraising. Environmental 
extremists rake in millions of dollars, not to solve environmental 
problems but to fuel their ever-growing fundraising machines, part of 
which are financed by the Federal taxpayers.
  So what have we learned from the scientists and economists I talked 
about today? Five things, briefly:
  No. 1, the claim that global warming is caused by manmade emissions 
is simply untrue and not based on sound science.
  No. 2, CO2 does not cause catastrophic disasters. 
Actually, it would be beneficial to our environment and the economy.

[[Page 19943]]

  No. 3, Kyoto would impose huge cost on Americans, especially the 
poor.
  No. 4, the same environmentalists who are hysterical over global 
warming today were just as hysterical in the 1970s over global cooling.
  And, No. 5, the motives for Kyoto are economic, not environmental; 
that is, proponents favor handicapping the American economy through 
carbon taxes and more regulations.
  So I will just conclude by saying: Wake up, America. With all the 
hysteria, all the fear, all the phony science, could it be that manmade 
global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American 
people? I believe it is.
  And if we allow these detractors of everything that has made America 
great, those ranging from the liberal Hollywood elitists to those who 
are in it for the money, if we allow them to destroy the foundation, 
the greatness of the most highly industrialized nation in the history 
of the world, then we don't deserve to live in this one nation under 
God. So I say to the real people: Wake up, make your voice heard. My 11 
grandchildren and yours are depending on you.

                               Exhibit 1

                [From the Washington Post, July 7, 2003]

               Climate Change: The Science Isn't Settled

                         (By James Schlesinger)

       Despite the certainty many seem to feel about the causes, 
     effects and extent of climate change, we are in fact making 
     only slow progress in our understanding of the underlying 
     science. My old professor at Harvard, the great economist 
     Joseph Schumpeter, used to insist that a principal tool of 
     economic science was history--which served to temper the 
     enthusiasms of the here and now. This must be even more so in 
     climatological science. In recent years the inclination has 
     been to attribute the warming we have lately experienced to a 
     single dominant cause--the increase in greenhouse gases. Yet 
     climate has always been changing--and sometimes the swings 
     have been rapid.
       At the time the U.S. Department of Energy was created in 
     1977, there was widespread concern about the cooling trend 
     that had been observed for the previous quarter-century. 
     After 1940 the temperature, at least in the Northern 
     Hemisphere, had dropped about one-half degree Fahrenheit--and 
     more in the higher latitudes. In 1974 the National Science 
     Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation, 
     stated: ``During the last 20 to 30 years, world temperature 
     has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the 
     last decade.'' Two years earlier, the board had observed: 
     ``Judging from the record of the past interglacial ages, the 
     present time of high temperatures should be drawing to an end 
     . . . leading into the next glacial age.'' And in 1975 the 
     National Academy of Sciences stated: ``The climates of the 
     earth have always been changing, and they will doubtless 
     continue to do so in the future. How large these future 
     changes will be, and where and how rapidly they will occur, 
     we do not know.''
       These statements--just a quarter-century old--should 
     provide us with a dose of humility as we look into the more 
     distant future. A touch of that humility might help temper 
     the current raging controversies over global warming. What 
     has concerned me in recent years is that belief in the 
     greenhouse effect, persuasive as it is, has been transmuted 
     into the dominant forcing mechanism affecting climate 
     change--more or less to the exclusion of other forcing 
     mechanisms. The CO2/climate-change relationship 
     has hardened into orthodoxy--always a worrisome sign--an 
     orthodoxy that searches out heretics and seeks to punish 
     them.
       We are in command of certain essential facts. First, since 
     the start of the 20th century, the mean temperature at the 
     earth's surface has risen about 1 degree Fahrenheit. Second, 
     the level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been 
     increasing for more than 150 years. Third, CO2 is 
     a greenhouse gas--and increases in it, other things being 
     equal, are likely to lead to further warming. Beyond these 
     few facts, science remains unable either to attribute past 
     climate changes to changes in CO2 or to forecast 
     with any degree of precision how climate will change in the 
     future.
       Of the rise in temperature during the 20th century, the 
     bulk occurred from 1900 to 1940. It was followed by the 
     aforementioned cooling trend from 1940 to around 1975. Yet 
     the concentration of greenhouse gases was measurably higher 
     in that later period than in the former. That drop in 
     temperature came after what was described in the National 
     Geographic as ``six decades of abnormal warmth.''
       In recent years much attention has been paid in the press 
     to longer growing seasons and shrinking glaciers. Yet in the 
     earlier period up to 1975, the annual growing season in 
     England had shrunk by some nine or 10 days, summer frosts in 
     the upper Midwest occasionally damaged crops, the glaciers in 
     Switzerland had begun to advance again, and sea ice had 
     returned to Iceland's coasts after more than 40 years of its 
     near absence.
       When we look back over the past millennium, the questions 
     that arise are even more perplexing. The so-called Climatic 
     Optimum of the early Middle Ages, when the earth temperatures 
     were 1 to 2 degrees warmer than today and the Vikings 
     established their flourishing colonies in Greenland, was 
     succeeded by the Little Ice Age, lasting down to the early 
     19th century. Neither can be explained by concentrations of 
     greenhouse gases. Moreover, through much of the earth's 
     history, increases in CO2 have followed global 
     warming, rather than the other way around.
       We cannot tell how much of the recent warming trend can be 
     attributed to the greenhouse effect and how much to other 
     factors. In climate change, we have only a limited grasp of 
     the overall forces at work. Uncertainties have continued to 
     abound--and must be reduced. Any approach to policy formation 
     under conditions of such uncertainty should be taken only on 
     an exploratory and sequential basis. A premature commitment 
     to a fixed policy can only proceed with fear and trembling.
       In the Third Assessment by the International Panel on 
     Climate Change, recent climate change is attributed primarily 
     to human causes, with the usual caveats regarding 
     uncertainties. The record of the past 150 years is scanned, 
     and three forcing mechanisms are highlighted: anthropogenic 
     (human-caused) greenhouse gases, volcanoes and the 11-year 
     sunspot cycle. Other phenomena are represented poorly, if at 
     all, and generally are ignored in these models. Because only 
     the past 150 years are captured, the vast swings of the 
     previous thousand years are not analyzed. The upshot is that 
     any natural variations, other than volcanic eruptions, are 
     overshadowed by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.
       Most significant: The possibility of long-term cycles in 
     solar activity is neglected because there is a scarcity of 
     direct measurement. Nonetheless, solar irradiance and its 
     variation seem highly likely to be a principal cause of long-
     term climatic change. Their role in longer-term weather 
     cycles needs to be better understood.
       There is an idea among the public that ``the science is 
     settled.'' Aside from the limited facts I cited earlier, that 
     remains far from the truth. Today we have far better 
     instruments, better measurements and better time series than 
     we have ever had. Still, we are in danger of prematurely 
     embracing certitudes and losing open-mindedness. We need to 
     be more modest.
                                  ____


                               Exhibit 2

     The Hon. Paul Martin, P.C.,
     Member of Parliament, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario.
       Dear Mr. Martin: We understand from media reports that you 
     believe that more consultation with the provinces should have 
     taken place before moving forward with ratification of the 
     Kyoto Accord. We would like to alert you to the fact that the 
     current government neglected to conduct comprehensive science 
     consultations as well. The statements by current Minister of 
     the Environment David Anderson that Prime Minister Jean 
     Chretien's decision to ratify the Kyoto accord was based 
     merely on a ``gut feeling,'' not an understanding of the 
     issue, clearly illustrates that a more thorough examination 
     of the science should have taken place before a ratification 
     decision was made.
       If you are to lead the next government, we believe that a 
     high priority should be placed on correcting this situation 
     and conducting wide ranging consultations with non-
     governmental climate scientists as soon as possible in order 
     to properly consider the range of informed opinion pertaining 
     to the science of Kyoto.
       Many of us made the same suggestion to the Prime Minister 
     in an open letter on Nov. 25, 2002, in which we alerted Mr. 
     Chretien to the fact that Kyoto was not justified from a 
     scientific perspective. That letter called on the government 
     of Canada ``to delay a decision on the ratification of the 
     Kyoto Accord until after a thorough and comprehensive 
     consultation is conducted with non-governmental climate 
     specialists.'' It was explained to the Prime Minister that, 
     ``Many climate science experts from Canada and around the 
     world, while still strongly supporting environmental 
     protection, equally strongly disagree with the scientific 
     rationale for the Kyoto Accord.''
       Unfortunately, the Prime Minister took no action on the 
     issue and proceeded to ratify the accord without the 
     government and the public having had the benefit of hearing a 
     proper science debate on an issue that is sure to affect 
     Canadians for generations to come.
       We strongly believe that important environmental policy 
     should be based on a strong foundation of environmental 
     science. Censoring credible science out of the debate because 
     it does not conform to a pre-determined political agenda is 
     clearly not a responsible course of action for any 
     government. Your openness to re-examining the recent approach 
     to the Kyoto file encourages us to believe that you may also 
     be open to reconsidering the way in which the scientific

[[Page 19944]]

     debate was suppressed as well. We certainly hope so. Although 
     ratification has already taken place, we believe that the 
     government of Canada needs a far more comprehensive 
     understanding of what climate science really says if 
     environmental policy is to be developed that will truly 
     benefit the environment while maintaining the economic 
     prosperity so essential to social progress.
       In the meantime, we would be happy to provide you with more 
     information on this important topic and, for those of us who 
     are able, we would like to offer to meet with you personally 
     to discuss the issue further in the near future.
       Above letter signed by:
       Dr. Tim Ball, Environmental Consultant, 28 years Professor 
     of Climatology, University of Winnipeg.
       Dr. Madhav Khandekar, Environmental Consultant, former 
     Research Scientist with Environment Canada. 45-year career in 
     the fields of climatology, meteorology and oceanography.
       Dr. Tad Murty, private sector climate researcher. 
     Previously Senior Research Scientist for Fisheries and 
     Oceans; conducted official DFO climate change/sea level 
     review; Former Director of the National Tidal Facility of 
     Australia; Current editor--``Natural Hazards''.
       Dr. Chris de Freitas (Canadian), Climate Scientist and 
     Professor--School of Geography and Environmental Science, The 
     University of Auckland, NZ.
       Dr. Vaclav Smil, FRSC, Distinguished Professor of 
     Geography; specialization in climate and CO2, 
     University of Manitoba.
       Dr. I.D. Clarke, Professor, Isotope Hydrogeology and 
     Paleoclimatology, Department of Earth Sciences (arctic 
     specialist), University of Ottawa.
       Dr./Cdr. M. R. Morgan, FRMS, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia. 
     Climate Consultant, Past Meteorology Advisor to the World 
     Meteorological Organization and other scientific bodies in 
     Marine Meteorology. Recent Research Scientist in Climatology 
     at University of Exeter, UK.
       Dr. Chris Essex, Professor of Applied Mathematics, 
     University of Western Ontario--focuses on underlying physics/
     math to complex climate systems.
       Dr. Keith D. Hage, climate consultant and Professor 
     Emeritus of Meteorology, University of Alberta, specialized 
     in micrometeorology, specifically western prairie weather 
     patterns.
       Dr. Kenneth Green, Chief Scientist, Fraser Institute, 
     Vancouver, BC--expert reviewer for the IPCC 2001 Working 
     Group I science report.
       Dr. Petr Chylek, Professor of Physics and Atmospheric 
     Science, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia.
       Dr. Tim Patterson, Professor, Department of Earth Sciences 
     (Paleoclimatology), Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario.
       David Nowell, M.Sc. (Meteorology), Fellow of the Royal 
     Meteorological Society, Canadian member and Past Chairman of 
     the NATO Meteorological Group, Ottawa.
       Dr. Fred Michel, Professor, Department of Earth Sciences 
     (Paleoclimatology), Carleton University, arctic regions 
     specialist, Ottawa.
       Dr. Roger Pocklington, Ocean/Climate Consultant, F.C.I.C., 
     Researcher--Bedford Institute of Oceanography, Nova Scotia.
       Rob Scagel, M.Sc., Forest microclimate specialist, 
     Principal Consultant, Pacific Phytometric Consultants, 
     Surrey, B.C.
       Dr. David Wojick, P.E., Climate specialist and President, 
     Climatechangedebate.org, Sioux Lookout, Ontario/Star Tannery, 
     VA.
       Dr. S. Fred Singer, Distinguished Research Professor at 
     George Mason University and Professor Emeritus of 
     Environmental Science at the University of Virginia.
       Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of 
     Meteorology, Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary 
     Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
       George Taylor, State Climatologist, Oregon Climate Service, 
     Oregon State University, Past President--American Association 
     of State Climatologists.
       Doctorandus Hans Erren, Geophysicist/climate specialist, 
     Sittard, The Netherlands.
       Dr. Hans Jelbring--Wind/Climate specialist, Paleogeophysics 
     & Geodynamics Unit, Stockholm University, Sweden. Currently, 
     Manager Inventex Aqua Research Institute, Stockholm.
       Dr. Theodor Landscheidt, solar/climate specialist, 
     Schroeter Institute for Research in Cycles of Solar Activity, 
     Waldmuenchen, Germany.
       Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, Climate expert, Chairman of the 
     scientific council of CLOR, Central Laboratory for 
     Radiological Protection, Warsaw, Poland.
       Dr. Art Robinson, Founder--Oregon Institute of Science and 
     Medicine--focus on climate change and CO2, Cave 
     Junction, Oregon.
       Dr. Craig D. Idso, Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon 
     Dioxide and Global Change, Tempe, Arizona.
       Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, President, Center for the Study of 
     Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Tempe, Arizona.
       Dr. Pat Michaels, Professor of Environmental Sciences, 
     University of Virginia; past president of the American 
     Association of State Climatologists and a contributing author 
     and reviewer of the IPCC science reports.
       Dr. Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, Reader, Department of 
     Geography, University of Hull, UK, Editor, Energy & 
     Environment.
       Dr. Robert C. Balling, Jr., Director--Office of 
     Climatology, Arizona State University.
       Dr. Fred Seitz, Past President, U.S. National Academy of 
     Sciences, President Emeritus, Rockefeller University, New 
     York, NY.
       Dr. Vincent Gray, Climate specialist, expert reviewer for 
     the IPCC and author of ``The Greenhouse Delusion; a Critique 
     of `Climate Change 2001''', Wellington, NZ.
       Dipl.-Ing. Peter Dietze, energy and climate consultant, 
     official scientific IPCC TAR Reviewer, Langensendelbach, 
     Germany.
       Dr. Roy W. Spencer, Principal Research Scientist, Earth 
     System Science Center, The University of Alabama in 
     Huntsville.
       Dr. Hugh W. Ellsaesser, Atmospheric Consultant--four 
     decades experience as a USAF weather officer and climate 
     consultant at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, CA.
       Dr. Asmunn Moene, Former head of the National Forecasting 
     Center, Meteorological Institute, Oslo, Norway.
       Dr. Freeman J. Dyson, Emeritus Professor of Physics, 
     Institute for Advanced Studies, Princeton, New Jersey.
       Dr. James J. O'Brien, Professor of Meteorology and 
     Oceanography, Center for Ocean-Atmospheric Prediction 
     Studies, Florida State University. Co-chaired the Regional 
     Climate Change Study for the Southeast USA.
       Dr. Douglas V. Hoyt, climate consultant, previously Senior 
     Scientist with Raytheon/ITSS; Broadly published author of 
     ``The Role of the Sun in Climate Change''.
       Dr. Gary D. Sharp, Scientific Director, Center for Climate/
     Ocean Resources Study, Salinas, California.
       Prof. Dr. Kirill Ya. Kondratyev, Academician, Counsellor 
     RAS, Research Centre for Ecological Safety, Russian Academy 
     of Sciences and Nansen International Environmental and Remote 
     Sensing Centre, St. Petersburg, Russia.
       Dr. Paal Brekke--Solar Physicist, specialist in sun/UV 
     radiation/Sun-Earth Connection, affiliated with the 
     University of Oslo, Norway.
       Dr. Richard S. Courtney, climate consultant, expert IPCC 
     peer reviewer, Founding Member of the European Science and 
     Environment Forum, UK.
       William Kininmonth, Managing Director, Australasian Climate 
     Research. Formerly head of Australia's National Climate 
     Centre and a member of Australia's delegations to the Second 
     World Climate Conference and the UN Intergovernmental 
     Negotiating Committee for a Framework Convention on Climate 
     Change.
       Dr. Jarl R. Ahlbeck, Docent in environmental technology/
     science, Process Design Laboratory, the Swedish University of 
     Finland, Biskopsgatan, Finland.
       Dr. Lee C. Gerhard, Principal Geologist, Kansas Geological 
     Survey; Adjunct Professor, Colorado School of Mines; Noted 
     author and geological expert on climate history.

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, 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. HARKIN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent the order for the 
quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  (The remarks of Mr. Harkin are printed in today's Record under 
``Morning Business.'')

                          ____________________