[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 158 (2012), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 10765-10769]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]
GLOBAL WARMING AND AMERICAN FREEDOM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 5, 2011, the Chair recognizes the gentleman from California
(Mr. Rohrabacher) for 30 minutes.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, I have a policy in my office that every
time anyone from my district actually comes to the Capitol, they have a
right to see me and talk to me, especially young people. And I have,
over the years, seen hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of young
people from my home district in southern California. And I let them
talk to me and ask any questions that they would like to ask.
And I have a question that I always ask them, and I thought it would
be interesting for my colleagues and perhaps any of those who are
watching C-SPAN or reading this in the Congressional Record to know the
answer that I get when I ask a question of the young high school
students from my district.
Mr. Speaker, when our kids come in to my office and are talking to
me, I note that I was actually in high school in southern California 47
years ago. And I always ask the kids, is the air better quality today,
or is it worse today than when I was going to high school in southern
California 47 years ago?
And 90 percent of the students, over the years, whom I've asked that
question to have had exactly the wrong answer. Their answer is, oh, you
were so lucky to live at a time when the air quality in southern
California and around the Nation was so good, and it's so terrible that
we have to put up today with air quality that's killing us.
They've been told that the air quality when I was in high school was
so much better than it is today, which is 180 degrees wrong. But this
is a general attitude among today's young people because our young
people are being lied to. They are intentionally being given
misinformation.
Now, their teachers may not be intentionally lying to them, but their
teachers maybe are given information from scientists and other sources
that is an exact lie from people who know that, yes, the air quality
back when I went to school, and I go into description about how the air
quality was so bad at times we couldn't even go out on the playground.
They wouldn't even let us out of the classroom on to the sports field
because the air was so bad. Today that happens maybe once a year or
twice a year in southern California. Back then it happened once a week
at times during the summer and during the school year.
[[Page 10766]]
So our kids have this view that their generation is being poisoned,
and they're willing to accept stringent measures in order to protect
the environment that take away a great deal of the opportunity that
they should have in their lives in order to correct this horrible
problem that they're told that they've got.
Well, when I tell them it's just the opposite, they're so surprised.
Well, the truth is, our Nation's environment is no longer the disaster
that it was 50 years ago. And 50 years ago we did have a problem. Fifty
years ago I remember that when my dad was a Marine down in Quantico,
when I was a child I came up here several times and my dad would say,
whatever you do, don't put your finger in the Potomac River or your
finger will fall off. Well, it wasn't quite that bad, but it was really
bad.
We've made tremendous progress over the years on the Potomac River. I
can't help but notice there are people water-skiing and sailing and
fishing in the Potomac now.
Well, we don't live in the same time of 50 years ago. The air today
has never been cleaner than at any time in my lifetime. The water has
never been cleaner in any time in my lifetime than it is today. And I
am hopeful that my children will never have to experience the pollution
that was rampant when I was their age.
So, let's take a look and give credit where credit's due. That
progress is, in large part, because of the efforts of the government,
well, and the EPA, yes, which came in under President Nixon, and others
who have used science to fight for environmental reforms and to improve
the quality of life of our people.
And while I am thankful, I also would like to heed the warning that
President Eisenhower left with us in his farewell address. And I quote,
``that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific
technological elite.''
He was warning us about government-funded research becoming so
intertwined with public policy and the creation of regulations it would
compromise the integrity of both.
Well, in recent years, we've seen political agendas being driven by
scientific-sounding claims being used to frighten the general public
again and again and again.
{time} 1510
An unjustified fear has been used, for example, to ban DDT. I
remember when I was a kid, and I used to run through these clouds of
DDT--again, when my father was in the military down in North Carolina.
Yes, it was killing millions of mosquitos in North Carolina, but when
they banned that DDT, I seem to remember it had something to do with
the thickness of shells of certain birds. Well, they banned DDT, and
because of that we have had millions of deaths due to malaria in
Africa. Millions of young African children, because they don't have a
good diet, succumb to a disease like malaria and die because of it.
These children are dead--make no mistake about it--because we were
frightened into an irrational position on DDT, banning that and thus
destroying the lives of millions of children in the Third World.
We've seen alarmism with ``The Population Bomb.'' Do you remember
that in 1968? It was a book claiming that increasing populations and
decreasing agricultural yield would lead to cannibalism and global
warfare over scarce resources by the mid-1970s. Here we are a long way
from the 1970s, and I'm afraid Malthus, who 150 years ago started this
type of scarism, was wrong, wrong, wrong. Right now, there are a lot of
scientists, unfortunately, who are molding themselves after the Malthus
mistakes that were made 150 years ago.
Today's environmental alarmists use faulty and, in some cases,
deceitful computer models to ``prove'' that the world is being
destroyed one way or the other, quite often, in the ones they've been
using in the last 10 years, of course, was that the world was being
destroyed by manmade carbon emissions. This is proven by their computer
models, even though the Earth has seen significantly higher atmospheric
carbon levels many times before. Those were not necessarily bad times
for this planet, but those computer models were suggesting, because of
carbon emissions, we were going to face a catastrophe. In fact, I
remember very well the predictions of 10 and 15 years ago that, by now,
we would have reached a tipping point in the temperature of the world--
that we'd have reached a temperature of about now--and then it would go
up 5 to 10 degrees, which is a big jump, but we haven't seen that big
jump.
The alarmists, of course, are not interested when they make mistakes,
and they're not really interested in solving real problems. They are
part of a coalition that wants to change our way of life--that's their
goal--with their computerizations showing that just horrible times are
ahead of us unless we change. The idea isn't to stop those horrible
times, because those horrible times are just a product of what they put
into their computers. Of course we all know what ``garbage in, garbage
out'' means. If you put into a computer that you're going to have some
kind of disaster, that's what you're going to get out of your computer,
but what they have in mind, of course, and what they want to do is to
change the way of life--our life--which requires us to acquiesce, or
better yet, they frighten us into submission.
Make no mistake: manmade global warming, as a theory, is being pushed
by people who believe in global government. They have been looking for
an excuse for an incredible freedom-busting centralization of power,
and this global warming is just the latest in a long line of such
scares.
This was recently acknowledged by the godfather of the global warming
theory, a man who over the years has been given such credit for laying
the intellectual foundation and the scientific foundation for the
theory of manmade global warming. His name is James Lovelock. James
Lovelock, however, has changed his mind. James Lovelock now concedes--
and after a longtime dialogue with Burt Rutan, one of the great
engineers of our day--has come around to understand that he was not
being totally honest about things when he was accepting information
that bolstered his position, and was rejecting the consideration of
other information. He has changed his mind about the real threat that
global warming poses to the Earth--not that there wouldn't be any
global warming but that it has been totally exaggerated by the
scientific community, and that he, himself, played a major role in that
exaggeration.
Dr. James Lovelock is in an article in the Toronto Sun, which is
entitled, ``Green 'drivel' exposed: The godfather of global warming
lowers the boom on climate change hysteria,'' which is what we have
been hearing over these last few years.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce for the Record this article
that was just recently in the Toronto Sun, and I would like to put this
in the Record at this point.
[From the Toronto Sun, June 23, 2012]
Green `Drivel' Exposed
The godfather of global warming lowers the boom on climate change
hysteria
(By Lorrie Goldstein)
Two months ago, James Lovelock, the godfather of global
warming, gave a startling interview to msnbc.com in which he
acknowledged he had been unduly ``alarmist'' about climate
change.
The implications were extraordinary.
Lovelock is a world-renowned scientist and environmentalist
whose Gaia theory--that the Earth operates as a single,
living organism--has had a profound impact on the development
of global warming theory.
Unlike many ``environmentalists,'' who have degrees in
political science, Lovelock, until his recent retirement at
age 92, was a much-honoured working scientist and academic.
His inventions have been used by NASA, among many other
scientific organizations.
Lovelock's invention of the electron capture detector in
1957 first enabled scientists to measure CFCs
(chlorofluorocarbons) and other pollutants in the atmosphere,
leading, in many ways, to the birth of the modern
environmental movement.
Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of
the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based
climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, ``the
problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We
thought we knew 20 years
[[Page 10767]]
ago.'' Now, Lovelock has given a follow-up interview to the
UK's Guardian newspaper in which he delivers more bombshells
sure to anger the global green movement, which for years
worshipped his Gaia theory and apocalyptic predictions that
billions would die from man-made climate change by the end of
this century.
Lovelock still believes anthropogenic global warming is
occurring and that mankind must lower its greenhouse gas
emissions, but says it's now clear the doomsday predictions,
including his own (and Al Gore's) were incorrect.
He responds to attacks on his revised views by noting that,
unlike many climate scientists who fear a loss of government
funding if they admit error, as a freelance scientist, he's
never been afraid to revise his theories in the face of new
evidence. Indeed, that's how science advances.
Among his observations to the Guardian:
(1) A long-time supporter of nuclear power as a way to
lower greenhouse gas emissions, which has made him unpopular
with environmentalists, Lovelock has now come out in favour
of natural gas fracking (which environmentalists also
oppose), as a low-polluting alternative to coal.
As Lovelock observes, ``Gas is almost a give-away in the
U.S. at the moment. They've gone for fracking in a big way.
This is what makes me very cross with the greens for trying
to knock it . . . Let's be pragmatic and sensible and get
Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going
mad on it.'' (Kandeh Yumkella, co-head of a major United
Nations program on sustainable energy, made similar arguments
last week at a UN environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro,
advocating the development of conventional and unconventional
natural gas resources as a way to reduce deforestation and
save millions of lives in the Third World.)
(2) Lovelock blasted greens for treating global warming
like a religion.
``It just so happens that the green religion is now taking
over from the Christian religion,'' Lovelock observed. ``I
don't think people have noticed that, but it's got all the
sort of terms that religions use . . . The greens use guilt.
That just shows how religious greens are. You can't win
people round by saying they are guilty for putting (carbon
dioxide) in the air.''
(3) Lovelock mocks the idea modern economies can be powered
by wind turbines.
As he puts it, ``so-called 'sustainable development' . . .
is meaningless drivel . . . We rushed into renewable energy
without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly
inefficient and unpleasant. I personally can't stand
windmills at any price.''
(4) Finally, about claims ``the science is settled'' on
global warming: ``One thing that being a scientist has taught
me is that you can never be certain about anything. You never
know the truth. You can only approach it and hope to get a
bit nearer to it each time. You iterate towards the truth.
You don't know it.''
For those who are listening or who are reading this specifically in
the Congressional Record, I would like to quote from that article now.
That article reads:
Having observed that global temperatures since the turn of
the millennium have not gone up in the way computer-based
climate models predicted, Lovelock acknowledged, ``The
problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We
thought we knew 20 years ago.''
The sign of a very intelligent person, really, is to admit the things
that he doesn't know. I mean I've always said I'm not the smartest guy
on the block, but I know what I don't know. Thus, when I'm talking to
people, I can have an honest discussion to try to expand my knowledge.
We've had too many people claiming that they know it all and that we
have to give up our freedom because they know it, and they don't even
have to engage in a debate with us over the details of something like
global warming.
Let me know who has heard the words ``case closed.'' I mean, 3 years
ago, that's what they were saying here. What does that mean? When you
hear people in government and when you hear scientists saying, ``the
case is closed,'' well, that must mean there is going to be no further
debate on this issue.
I've been here as a Member of Congress for 24 years. Before that, I
served in the White House for 7 years under President Reagan. I have
never seen a time when there was such an effort made to cut off debate
on an important subject than has been done on global warming. Never
have I heard over and over again people being told to shut up and that
the case is closed. Never have I seen so many research projects
canceled because they in some way challenged the theory of global
warming. Never have I seen so many scientists fired from their
positions because they believe that the global warming theory may not
be accurate.
So what we need to do is to make sure that we have an honest
discussion of the issue, when even some of the promoters--some of the
people who have been the strongest advocates, like the individual, the
doctor, I just quoted--have changed their positions, if not totally
reversed them. At least they've been open to have said, We really don't
know what we've been advocating for these last few years.
Mr. Speaker, I would like to introduce into the Record a letter from
an esteemed physicist, Gordon Fulks. This is a letter and some
communication between this physicist and aerospace pioneer legend Burt
Rutan. I would like to put that into the Record at this point.
June 23, 2012.
Re Bravo on your courage!
Dear Burt: I think you deserve much of the credit for
helping James Lovelock understand the AGW phenomenon. You
patiently provided him with the pertinent data and logic. As
with most of us, it took some time to digest the enormity of
the necessary shift in perspective. He had to give up a faith
in the honesty of government agencies and most of the
scientists they are supporting.
For Jim Lovelock the transition apparently involved two
steps. That lessened the need for a complete about face. He
first figured out the Chlorofluorocarbon-Ozone Hole scam by
discovering that some scientists were cheating on the data,
apparently to further their careers. He probably also knew
that the chemists who received the Nobel Prize for their work
had overestimated the effect by a large factor. It was not
such a huge step to then realize that climate scientists
might be doing the same. But Lovelock, to his credit, wanted
to be sure and took his time examining the information that
you and others sent to him.
My own recognition of what was going on was likewise a two
step process. During the ``Nuclear Winter'' scare about 25
years ago, we redid Carl Sagan's original calculations to
discover that he had carefully chosen the inputs to his
climate code to produce the result he wanted. When we
realized that a highly respected physicist would prostitute
himself to support his politics, his stature, and his income,
we, in principle, understood all the other scams of the post
World War Two era.
From 1946 Nobel Laureate Hermann Joseph Muller hiding
evidence of a threshold phenomenon in human radiation
exposure to Rachael Carson promoting half truths about DDT,
to unfounded scares about Acid Rain, Ozone Depletion,
Magnetic Fields, Global Warming, Ocean Acidification, Diesel
Particulates, and more, we have been victimized by continuous
hysteria that has led to disastrous public policies. Far too
many scientists and their fellow travelers have supported a
grand bilking of American taxpayers for their own selfish and
political interests.
Many thanks for your efforts to convince one very important
individual to re-examine the logic and evidence. Now we need
to figure out how to avoid falling victim to these scams in
the first place. As you know, that must involve fundamental
reform of the reward process that funnels vast amounts of
money to those who play along.
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics),
Corbett, Oregon USA.
Now let me read, in part, what that letter says:
During the ``Nuclear Winter'' scare about 25 years ago, we
redid Carl Sagan's original calculations to discover that he
had carefully chosen the inputs to his climate code to
produce the result he wanted. When we realized that a highly
respected physicist would prostitute himself to support his
politics, his stature and his income, we, in principle,
understood all the other scams of the post World War II era.
{time} 1520
Whoever looked up to Carl Sagan, and when they realized he was
cheating on the information and the analysis, they realized that this
was so widespread it was something to be concerned about. And I
continue:
From 1946 Nobel Laureate Hermann Joseph Muller hiding
evidence of a threshold phenomenon in human radiation
exposure to Rachel Carson promoting half-truths about DDT, to
unfounded scares about acid rain, ozone depletion, magnetic
fields, global warming, ocean acidification, diesel
particulates, and more, we have been victimized by continuous
hysteria that has led to disastrous public policies. Far too
many scientists and their fellow travelers have supported a
grand bilking of American taxpayers for their own selfish and
political interests.
That is the end of that quotation from that letter to Burt Rutan from
this world famous physicist.
It's clear that our current system, fueled by the horrific waste of
borrowed money, isn't working. Perhaps
[[Page 10768]]
it's time that we acted on President Eisenhower's warning and find a
better way to separate research and the creation of regulations.
Otherwise, we will find ourselves held truly captive with no access to
inexpensive energy, reduced access to food and water, and we might find
ourselves also with none of our basic freedoms because we've given them
away because someone has frightened us into giving away our freedom and
giving away the opportunity for a better life for our children.
Mr. Speaker, I am someone who is very optimistic about the future. We
have great possibilities. There are other people who look to the future
and think that the technological revolutions that we have faced are
actually a detriment to humankind. People did not live good lives 100
years ago. As I mentioned, my father was a marine. Before that, he grew
up on a dirt-poor farm in North Dakota, as did my mother. In those
days, ordinary Americans did not live well. It was a struggle. The
longevity of these people was not that long because of the struggle
they were in.
We need to make sure that we continue our technological development
so that we can have, yes, a clean environment, which I have indicated
was a product of the good technology and, yes, the research that came
from honest and hardworking scientists and engineers, quite often on a
government contract. But we need to make sure that we don't back off,
because we know there is a group of people in our society, and perhaps
around the world, who for some reason believe that back before the
industrial age that people lived better than they live today. Some of
them have tried their best to fight modernism. They have declared war,
for example, on the internal combustion engine. This global warming
thing, that was the motive here. The internal combustion engine is
supposedly putting out carbon dioxide, and carbon dioxide they believe
is changing the climate of the planet.
I told you what I have asked young students who come into my office.
I asked: Is the air better or worse than it was 50 years ago? I even
ask Members of Congress and I ask people all the time, the ones who buy
into global warming, who are saying they're advocates of global warming
caused by mankind--basically the internal combustion engine--what
percentage of the Earth's atmosphere is carbon dioxide, is
CO2. I hope that everyone who is focusing on these comments
now ask themselves how much CO2 there is, because
CO2 is being blamed for changing the entire climate of the
planet. It would be an enormous undertaking to change the climate of
the whole planet, so it must be a pretty good part of our atmosphere.
With that question, Members of Congress tell me that they believe
it's 25 percent. Some people say 10 percent. Others say 20 percent. I
have never had a Member of Congress come anywhere close to what it
really is. It's not 10 percent or 20 percent. It's not 5 percent. It's
not 1 percent. It's less than one-half of one-tenth of 1 percent. Have
you got that? It's not just 1 percent. It's less than one-half of one-
tenth of 1 percent. Of that, humankind is only responsible for 10
percent of that CO2. That makes it so minuscule that it
would be like putting a string across a football field and believing
that was going to create changes in the entire football field.
The fact that people are unaware, even at this level, of how small
the CO2 impact is causes them to buy onto these scare
tactics. This is a challenge for those of us here because that
threatens our freedom. It threatens us and our children in being able
to have the opportunities that we had and that we hope that all
Americans and all people throughout the world will have.
Let us go back on one thing. I am planning a trip this year across
the country, even though the gas prices are pretty high. I'm hopefully
going to drive across the country with my children. It's a wonderful
thing. What a wonderful vacation. We're going to have 2 weeks to do it.
I'm really looking forward to that. We're going to go in an automobile,
and it will cost us. The price of gas is up and I'm not a wealthy man,
but we do have this opportunity, and it's a wonderful thing.
What about 150 years ago? Did people have an opportunity like this?
No. What was the biggest challenge that we faced to the health and
safety of the people of this country 150 years ago? Or, let's say just
at the beginning of the last century, when we turned from the 19th to
the 20th century. Do you know what it was? It was horse manure. Horse
manure and horse urine was enveloping our cities and the water and
created health hazards for people. And the flies and the stench and the
internal combustion engine came along, and it has been a great factor
in providing health for human beings. All over the world we got rid of
the massive animal droppings that were a threat to our health.
Also, there is the fact that we couldn't produce a lot of wealth
based on animal strength and we couldn't go on long trips with our
families and we didn't have a good quality of life, but the internal
combustion engine provided that for people of the United States and
humankind. There is no doubt that we have needed to improve the
efficiency of the internal combustion engine, and we have.
Here's the thought we'll leave with. In southern California, when I
was a kid, there was so much pollution--although our young people don't
know about that today. But today, when they think the air is polluted
in southern California, we have twice as many cars on the road and
we've reduced pollution into the 90s. It's probably 95 percent. This is
a tremendous accomplishment. And yes, some of the regulations that we
have had from the Federal Government have motivated this change. We
need to accept that. But we need to also accept that it is our
technological advances, and it has been not cancelling out technology
for fear of things like CO2, which are not a threat to our
health. That's how we have kept America on an upward course, even
though we've been dragged down scare after scare after scare.
{time} 1530
I remember when we had Meryl Streep come to this Congress and testify
about Alar in apples. What happened was, for 2 years apple farmers went
broke throughout the United States. There were thousands of families
who suffered because their product was not being bought because they
were afraid of Alar. What happened to that? Alar, it was found 2 years
later that it was all a scare. There was nothing to it. The same thing
with cranberries. When I was a kid, we couldn't eat cranberries for
Thanksgiving.
The gentleman that I quoted here, that I mentioned, who is the
godfather of the global warming theory, James Lovelock, he is also the
man who discovered fluoro hydrocarbons, which gave people the analysis
of the ozone hole. Well, guess what? The ozone hole, as we have found
out--and as it was mentioned in passing there--the ozone hole was
overrated as a threat. In fact, it went away, and it's a natural cycle.
What we have had on this planet is a natural cycle of weather, of
temperatures, and that will continue. But what's happened is, we've had
people step forward, trying to create hysteria for their own political
ends, trying to frighten people into accepting policies they otherwise
would never accept.
So today, I'm hoping that as we celebrate the Fourth of July, we,
again, reaffirm that we will never give up our liberty. We will never
be frightened out of our liberty by foreigners who threaten us with
weapons, and we will not be frightened out of our liberty by people who
do not believe in the same type of freedom that we believe in but are
using scare tactics to create hysteria among our people that are phony
scare tactics to try to frighten us into giving up our freedom.
So on this Fourth of July, I hope we all reconfirm that guarantee of
our commitment in this Nation to freedom, to opportunity for ordinary
people so that ordinary people can live decent lives with liberty and
justice, prosperity for all.
I yield back the balance of my time.
[[Page 10769]]
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