[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 152 (2006), Part 18]
[Senate]
[Pages 23500-23501]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, the hearing we had 3 days ago in the 
Environment and Public Works Committee is one of the four hearings we 
have had on climate change. It is probably the most misunderstood of 
all issues out there today--and the most alarming to a lot of people. 
This hearing was totally different. This hearing was about how the 
media is skewing the results, how the media is hyping the anxiety of 
this thing and totally ignoring the science.
  It is kind of interesting. A lot of people are not aware that when 
you have a hearing, you will have Republicans and Democrats each 
bringing in experts. We had five experts; two of them were brought in 
by the Democrats and three by the Republicans.
  It was interesting because one of the Democrat witnesses, Dr. Daniel 
Schrag of Harvard, believes that manmade emissions are driving global 
warming. Let me clarify this because it is not understood by very many 
people.
  The issue is not that the world is getting warmer. Yes. It is. It is 
always either getting warmer or cooling. There is never any time when 
it is static.
  So we are going through a warming period. It increased to about 1998, 
and then it stopped pretty much at that time. But even their witness, 
who was a believer, said that the Kyoto Protocol is not the right 
approach to take and agreed it had almost no impact on the climate if 
all the nations complied.
  Probably one of the most major breakthroughs that we have had is the 
recognition by virtually all scientists that the Kyoto Protocol, which 
would be devastating to the United States, or any country--ask Great 
Britain. They will tell you. They signed onto the Kyoto Accord. In 
fact, if you look at some of the countries, such as Canada, 60 
scientists who were advisers to the Prime Minister of Canada are saying 
if we had known back in the late 1990s the science of today, we would 
never have done that. Now they are petitioning the Prime Minister to 
get out of the Kyoto Protocol.
  It was kind of interesting. Al Gore, who really believed this was his 
ticket to the White House back when he was the Vice President of the 
United States, went to a guy named Tom Quigley, a scientist, and said 
we would like to know if all the countries--this is back when they were 
trying to get us in the United States to ratify the Kyoto Protocol--
said if all the countries of the developed world were to do this, what 
effect would that have on the temperature over a 50-year period. He had 
a neat chart to hold up. He said if all the countries in the developed 
world, the United States of America and all the other developed nations 
did this, over 50 years it would reduce the temperature by 6/100ths of 
1 degree centigrade, which isn't even measurable.

[[Page 23501]]

  Now all these people agree with that--all of the scientists who used 
to be on the other side of the issue.
  One of the witnesses there was a paleoclimate researcher, Bob Carter 
from Australia, the James Cook University. He has gone back to 
Australia. Everyone recognizes him as being one of the outstanding--in 
fact, he has been on quite a few TV shows. He says there is a huge 
uncertainty in every aspect of climate change.
  David Deming, a geophysicist, said:

       Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked [by the 
     media] with global warming, no matter how tenuous or 
     impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become 
     vastly misinformed on this and other environmental issues.

  That is a significant thing. While we recognize that we are going 
through a natural period where the climate is getting warmer, it was 
actually warmer in the 1930s than it is today. It was warmer in the 
fifteenth century than today.
  But during this period of time, they are trying to say it is due to 
man-emitted gases. They are called antigeometric gases, methane, 
CO2. Now they are all realizing that CO2 has 
virtually nothing to do with it, and that is why you are seeing so much 
of the panic in the media. Dan Gainor was one of the only nonscience 
witnesses. He approached it from an ethical perspective, talking about 
the one-sided climate coverage, saying it violates the ethical code of 
the Society of Professional Journalists which urges the media to 
``support the open exchange of views. Even views they find repugnant.'' 
That code calls for reporters to distinguish between advocacy and news 
reporting which, he says, they have not been doing.
  One of those individuals who is a strong supporter of human gases 
causing climate change, Mike Hulme, the director of the UK-based 
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, is on the other side of 
this thing and has now--talking about the media--chastised the media 
and environmentalists for choosing the ``language of fear and terror'' 
to scare the public. Hulme noted he has found himself ``increasingly 
chastised'' by global warming activists because his public statements 
``have not satisfied the [activist] thirst for environmental drama and 
search for exaggerated rhetoric.''
  A report in August of 2006 from the UK labor-leaning Institute for 
Public Policy talked about the way the media is handling it:

       A quasireligious register of doom, death, heaven and hell 
     using words such as ``catastrophe,'' ``chaos'' and ``havoc.''

  The report also compared the media's coverage of global warming to 
``the unreality of Hollywood films.''
  Another individual who was a supporter at one time, David Bellamy 
from Britain, has come around talking about this. The one I am going to 
talk about in January at some length is a man named Claude Allegre, the 
French geophysicist and a former Socialist Party leader. He is the only 
one I know who is a member of both the French and the United States 
Academies of Science. Allegre now says the cause of warming remains 
unknown and the alarmism ``has become a very lucrative business for 
some people.'' In short, their motive is money. And he is right, it is 
about money.
  One by one, the people, scientists are coming around. This hearing 
has had more response throughout the Nation. I have lists of newspapers 
that have editorialized as a result of this. That awakening is taking 
place, but that is not why I am here today.

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