[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 161 (2015), Part 11]
[Senate]
[Pages 14987-14989]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I rise today for my 113th ``Time to 
Wake Up'' speech on climate change. They say 13 is unlucky. I don't 
know what 113 is, but I do know what climate change is. It is very 
real. We shouldn't kid ourselves. And it is an urgent challenge for our 
country and our world. Our leading scientific organizations say so. Our 
national security leaders say so. All of our National Laboratories say 
so. Major American businesses say so. Religious leaders of all faiths 
say so. Pope Francis certainly said so last week. But the Senate is 
jammed by persistent, meretricious climate denial. The denial comes in 
many guises, but, like a compass, all the denial points in the same 
direction: whatever helps the fossil fuel industry keep polluting. That 
is the true north of climate denial--whatever helps the fossil fuel 
industry. Look at the fossil fuel money pouring into the Republican 
Party and tell me this is a coincidence.
  We have Senators who deny that anything is happening, who say it is a 
hoax. We have Senators who deny that we can solve this. We have 
Senators who deny their faith in the American economy to win if we 
innovate. We have Senators who simply shrug and say: I am not a 
scientist. A bunch of Senators say: Don't even worry about it; climate 
change has stopped. The junior Senator from Florida tells us, ``Despite 
17 years of dramatic increases in carbon production by humans, surface 
temperatures [on] the earth have stabilized.'' The junior Senator from 
Texas proclaims that ``satellite data demonstrate for the last 
seventeen years, there's been zero warming. None whatsoever.''
  Let's leave aside for a moment the cherry-picked data this conclusion 
is based on, which leaves out the oceans, which cover a mere 70 percent 
of the Earth's surface. I will get back to oceans in a minute. But even 
this cherry-picked data needs a trick to deny

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the long-term trend. Using their trick, you could convince yourself 
climate change has stopped six times in the history of this increase 
from 1970. It is easy to do. You pick a spot here and you pick a spot 
there, and in the variability you make it a flat line and you say: 
There, you see a pause. The problem is that these manufactured pauses 
keep climbing.
  When this bogus climate pause idea was trotted out in an op-ed in the 
Providence Journal, my home State paper, PolitiFact quickly determined 
that it uses ``cherry-picked numbers and leaves out important details 
that would give a very different impression.''
  When we look at the linear trend for this whole data set, from 1970 
to 2013, no one can deny that the Earth is warming. Research shows that 
climate change is marching on. The past decade was warmer than the one 
before that, which was warmer than the one before that. Seventeen of 
the 18 hottest years in the historical record have occurred in the last 
18 years. NOAA and NASA count 2014 as the hottest year on record, and 
so far 2015 is on track to be even hotter than 2014. Fluctuations do 
not statistically alter the trend.
  It is a disservice to the truth and to this Senate to suggest that 
this heralds the end of climate change. As noted UC Berkeley physics 
professor Richard Muller put it, ``When walking up stairs in a tall 
building, it is a mistake to interpret a landing as the end of the 
climb.''
  Plus, for what reason would it have stopped? There is no basis for 
the pause. We know why it is happening. Global warming is caused by 
carbon pollution. We have known that science since Abraham Lincoln wore 
a top hat around this town. That is not news. And our carbon pollution 
sure hasn't stopped. We just broke 400 parts per million of carbon in 
the atmosphere for the first time in the history of the human species.
  There is no intellectual basis behind the pause theory. These claims 
of a climate change pause have been debunked. Just a couple of weeks 
ago, researchers from Stanford University published a study: ``There is 
no hiatus in the increase in the global mean temperature, no 
statistically significant difference in trends, no stalling of the 
global mean temperature, and no change in year-to-year temperature 
increases.'' In other words, there is no pause.
  A different study prepared for the U.S. Climate Variability and 
Predictability Program reviewed this so-called pause data and said 
this: It ``not only failed to establish a trend change with statistical 
significance, it failed by a wide margin. [A]ny argument that global 
warming stopped 18 or 20 years ago is just hogwash,'' said one of that 
report's authors--just hogwash. When legitimate scientists and 
statisticians examine the data for global mean temperature, they don't 
find any so-called pause.
  This chart I have in the Chamber shows global average temperatures 
since the late 1800s, which is about the time we began burning fossil 
fuels in the Industrial Revolution. In yet another study out this 
month, researchers did a little test. They showed this chart to 25 
economists, but instead of temperature they told the economists that 
the chart showed world agricultural output. That stripped the data of 
any political baggage of climate change. It made this a simple 
statistical question: Does this chart show that the measured 
phenomenon--climate change, temperature, world agricultural output--
does this chart show whatever the measured phenomenon is stopped in 
1998? The economists looked, and they flatout rejected that conclusion. 
What they agreed was that claiming the phenomenon had stopped would be 
misleading and ill-informed.
  So why did this pause theory appear that is a mistake, that is 
hogwash, that is based on cherry-picked numbers all toward a conclusion 
that is misleading and ill-informed? Why? Because the big carbon 
polluters and their allies in Congress don't want us to act. So we keep 
getting this mischief fed to us.
  The enterprise that performs that evil task of feeding mischief into 
this debate is perhaps the biggest and the most complex racket in 
American history. It is phony. They cherry-pick a handful of 
statistically insignificant data points and tell us the whole problem 
went away on its own. Then the real scientists take a look at it and 
say that is bunk. But in the meantime, the polluter enterprise notched 
a public relations victory. It bought some time to keep polluting for 
free, and sadly it got some of our colleagues to be party to it.
  Telling the American people there is a pause in global warming may 
lull the gullible to sleep, but it is phony, it is inaccurate, and it 
is wrong. It ignores the truth. It ignores the science. Basically what 
it is, is cheesy fossil fuel PR dressed up in a lab coat to look like 
science, just enough to fool people that little bit.
  Now let's turn back to the oceans--that 70 percent of the Earth's 
surface the other data left out. These data show the decades-long 
warming of the surface oceans--1960 to 2010. No pause. Remember, the 
deniers conveniently left all this data out when they cherry-picked 
their pause data--70 percent of the Earth's surface left out.
  The first law of thermodynamics, conservation of energy, decrees that 
all of that heat in the ocean had to come from somewhere. Research 
shows that greenhouse gases trap excess heat in the atmosphere and that 
over 90 percent of that excess heat went into the oceans, was absorbed 
by our oceans. People who insist that the climate has not warmed in 
recent decades ignore this one little thing--the oceans, which cover 70 
percent of the surface of the Earth. The oceans don't lie. This warming 
is changing the oceans and our fisheries. Water expands when it warms. 
That is the law of thermal expansion--unless somebody wants to come and 
deny that. The seas are rising across the globe. In Rhode Island, we 
measure it at the Newport Naval Station tide gauge. Basically it is a 
glorified yardstick. It is not complicated. There is no theory 
involved. It is a measurement. It says we are up nearly 10 inches since 
the 1930s. That may be funny to landlocked States, but when there are 
10 more inches of sea to be thrown against your shores by a big ocean 
storm, coastal States take that stuff very seriously. NASA measures it 
around the world with satellites; it is not just the coastal stations 
that take these measures. NASA measures from satellites. We measure the 
exploding acidity of the seas. The exploding acidities of the sea are 
directly related to CO2 absorption--unless people want to 
deny chemistry. You can put CO2 seawater in a high school 
lab and you can make the pH change. That is what we are doing on a 
global scale, and we don't get to repeal laws of chemistry around here, 
no matter how powerful the special interests.
  Last week, His Holiness Pope Francis called on us to work together to 
protect our common home. He warned us in his recent encyclical: ``Those 
who will have to suffer the consequences of what we are trying to hide 
will not forget this failure of conscience and responsibility.'' But 
first we have to want to protect our common home. If what we want to 
protect is the fossil fuel industry, at all costs, at any cost, we need 
a priority adjustment.
  In our rotten, post-Citizens United, billionaire special interests 
politics, perhaps the Pope would have had more effect if he had a super 
Pac, but it shouldn't take a super Pac for us to heed the Pope's 
warning or to heed the science or to heed our national security leaders 
or to heed everyone else who has lined up to try to wake us up.
  Pope Francis also said ``to avert the most serious effects of the 
environmental deterioration caused by human activity,'' now is the time 
for courageous actions and strategies.
  Today's New York Times has this headline: ``Many Conservative 
Republicans Believe Climate Change Is a Real Threat.'' Once you get 
away from this building and the pernicious influence of the fossil-fuel 
industry and its relentless money and threats, it is not a question of 
ideology, it is a question of special interest influence, and 
conservative Republicans increasingly understand that this is real. 
Eleven of them just broke rank in the House.

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  It is time to come together in good faith to tackle this real and 
persistent threat--the threat of climate change.
  It is time for us to wake up.
  I yield the floor.

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