[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 163 (2017), Part 4]
[Senate]
[Pages 4944-4946]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                             CLIMATE CHANGE

  Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I am here to give my weekly ``Time to 
Wake up'' speech. It is occurring on a day when the President has 
signed an Executive order that purports to be an effort to undo a good 
deal of work the American Government has done to address climate 
change. I have to say that it is a little bit hard to take this 
Executive order very seriously when the President is in trouble, which 
seems to be an everyday experience for him right now. The White House 
staff seems to entertain him and distract him by putting on these 
amateur theatricals in which they can give him a nice big folder that 
he can make a big signature on with a flourish and feel like he is 
doing something significant, when, in fact, these entertainments create 
little effect and mostly just confusion.
  The administrative agencies that he is purporting to direct to stop 
taking action on climate change have a couple of differences from this 
particular Oval Office. One is that they are obliged to follow the law 
and will be held to the law. The second is that under the 
Administrative Procedures Act, they have to follow real facts. They 
don't get to make up ``alternative facts'' in the fever swamp of the 
Breitbart imagination--at least not for long, because their record can 
be reviewed by courts. Finally, they can't make decisions that are, to 
use the standard of administrative law, ``arbitrary and capricious.'' 
This is an Oval Office that lives by ``arbitrary and capricious,'' but 
administrative agencies don't get to follow it there without having 
their rulings thrown out by courts.
  So ultimately this is going to come down to lawyers and to courts, 
and lawyers and courts are actually pretty good places for addressing 
climate change seriously because it is very hard for the lies that are 
at the heart of climate denial to withstand cross-examination and to 
stand up to the obligation of witnesses to actually testify truthfully 
and under oath in court proceedings or even in administrative 
proceedings.
  The inconsistencies of people's statements and behavior can be 
brought out through cross-examination, which has been described as 
``the greatest engine for the discovery of truth ever invented.''
  Discovery means that litigants get access to documents on the other 
side, and it also means that the court has a chance to look into 
conflicts of interest.
  Administrator Pruitt, thanks to the backing of the fossil fuel 
industry, which is well on its way in trying to turn America into a 
banana republic through its interests, actually got through the Senate 
without ever having to disclose who funded his dark money operation. 
That alone is a kind of preposterous statement, but it is true, because 
the Senate majority wouldn't insist that those questions be answered 
because they were so all-fired eager to shove this fossil fuel tool 
into the Administrator's seat at EPA. Those questions never got 
answered.
  Once there is a case brought against him in which he has to decide 
whether to recuse himself and that decision gets reviewed by a court, 
guess what. A court gets to have those questions answered. So there is 
going to be a lot more that gets discovered as this all goes forward.
  The President, with the Executive order today, has made himself 
ridiculous, which is no great achievement given his recent record. He 
has made his administration ridiculous, which is unfortunate but not 
unexpected given the climate-denying crowd who has been given positions 
of responsibility in this administration. Unfortunately, he has also 
made the United States of America ridiculous, at least until the checks 
and balances of government set aright the forces unleashed by this 
ridiculous Executive order. So let's go on to something that is a 
little bit more fact-based and serious.
  I take climate trips to various places. I went to Ohio back in 2015, 
and there I met two remarkable and very cool people: Ellen Mosley 
Thompson and her husband, Lonnie Thompson. They have been married for 
45 years, and that is also how long, more or less, they have been 
research partners. They do particularly amazing research. They are 
glaciologists. They study glaciers. They run the Byrd--as in Commander 
Byrd--Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State. They have spent 
years and years, decade after decade, studying the world's glaciers and 
leading expeditions to the far corners of the world to incredible 
places--to the North Pole, the South Pole, the Greenland ice cap, the 
high mountains of Peru, and glaciers in faraway China.
  They gave me this on my visit. This is a little piece of a plant. You 
can look closely at it, and you can see the little sticks and leaves 
that are in it. This plant has an interesting history. It grew about 
6,600 years ago, and when it grew and lived, woolly mammoths roamed the 
Earth. Woolly mammoths might have been eating neighboring plants. The 
human race was just entering the Bronze Age, and it began to snow. It 
snowed on this little plant. Snow piled on snow year after year, and 
this plant was buried under a glacier, preserved by the pressure and 
the cold. And there it stayed, so that now I can hold it up on the 
floor of the Senate 6,600-and-some years later.
  Climate change is what brought me this plant because as temperatures 
steadily rise, glaciers the world over are melting. The glacier that 
buried this little plant 6,000 years ago receded so fast that here it 
is now--6,000 years in a glacier and now here in my hand in the Senate.
  It is not just plants that are emerging from this great melting. We 
are actually seeing remains of our own long-dead ancestors emerge from 
melting glaciers. This is all becoming so common that a new field of 
study has been created--glacial archeology.
  For my 162nd ``Time to Wake up'' speech, I will share the story of 
the warming Arctic and our world's disappearing glaciers.
  The Thompsons, when they leave Ohio State and travel, drill down into 
the ice, and they take deep core samples out of the glacier, long tubes 
of ice

[[Page 4945]]

from the glacier. For Ellen and Lonnie, that means long trips and some 
challenging logistics, making sure that packed-down ice and snow 
containing hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated snow and ice 
doesn't melt along the way back to their lab at Ohio State because in 
those hundreds of thousands of years of accumulated snow and ice are 
hundreds of thousands of years of data.
  I remember going to visit them. They store the core samples from 
these glaciers around the world in a huge walk-in freezer. It is like a 
library with metal shelving, except instead of having books on the 
shelves, it has these tubes, and they are marked as to where they were 
drilled out. You can pull the tubes off the shelf and take them to a 
viewer, and they have a light underneath it, and you can look at the 
light coming through it. You can see bubbles in the glass that captured 
the atmosphere from thousands of years ago, and you can draw the air 
out of those ancient bubbles and learn what the atmosphere was like 
back then.
  There was a line through the core that they showed me, and I asked 
them: What is this line in the core? They said: Well, that was a really 
bad sandstorm. It is actually written about in ancient Egyptian 
hieroglyphs, and we can connect the timing of those ancient Egyptian 
hieroglyphs talking about this terrific sandstorm and going back 
through time, the date. And we know that this dark line in the core 
reflects that big storm that ancient Egyptians wrote about thousands of 
years ago.
  There are other researchers doing similar things. France and Italy 
have researchers creating a separate ice core repository, and they have 
dubbed their project ``Protecting Ice Memory.'' Their bunker for these 
cores is going to be 33 feet under Antarctica's surface, where they 
hope to be able to keep the cores cold for posterity because given the 
rate of climate change, these carefully preserved, packed-away, and 
frozen ice core samples are probably going to be the last record we 
have of all the information that was left in and lost in melting 
glaciers.
  This photo depicts Grinnell Glacier in Montana in what is now called 
Glacier National Park. This was a picture that was taken in 1940. You 
can see the glacier here pushing up into the mountain. In this photo, 
you can now see the glacier as it is here. If it is not clear, all of 
this is not glacier; it is lake, it is water.
  The U.S. Geological Survey described what was going on as Grinnell 
Glacier lost 90 percent of its ice in this last century. Here is what 
the U.S. Geological Survey said:

       Glacier recession is underway, and many glaciers have 
     already disappeared. The retreat of these small alpine 
     glaciers reflects changes in recent climate as glaciers 
     respond to altered temperature and precipitation. It has been 
     estimated that there were approximately 150 glaciers present 
     in 1850, and most glaciers were still present in 1910 when 
     the park was established. In 2010, we consider there to be 
     only 25 glaciers larger than 25 acres remaining in Glacier 
     National Park.

  There were 150 glaciers 100 years ago and 25 now. I wonder what they 
will call Glacier Park when all the glaciers are gone.
  This was--is or was, depending on what you look at--Lillian Glacier 
up in the State of Washington in Olympic National Park. On the top, we 
see the healthy glacier in 1905. In 2010, it is virtually all gone. 
There are just little bits of snow in exposed mountain.
  Glacier loss is not just happening in our parks in the United States; 
it is happening all over the world. A man named Christian Aslund has 
been documenting this recently, and National Geographic has printed his 
work. What he did was go to the archives of the Norwegian Polar 
Institute, and he found pictures of glaciers in Svalbard, Norway, back 
from the 1920s--old black and white pictures. Then he went back to the 
exact same spot from which the old picture was taken, and he took a 
picture. Most of these are from 2003, so some time has gone by since he 
took the picture, and the situation has actually gotten worse.
  You will see here that these two mountaintops that are sticking above 
this glacier are these two mountaintops right there, but, of course, 
the glacier is no longer there. You just see a bit of snow back there 
behind the shore.
  Here you see this vast wall of ice and the glacier pushing back up 
into these mountains behind it.
  Here the wall of ice is essentially gone. You see this whole mountain 
front that has opened up, and the glacier is now simply back up in the 
valley behind it.
  You can see the glacier here from the 1920s filling up this valley 
and the streams coming off the base of it down there.
  Here you see the glaciers completely gone. The rock is exposed, and 
there is a lake at the bottom, and you have to actually look over the 
top of the mountain to this faraway peak to even see any snow in the 
photograph.
  It is the same story elsewhere in the Arctic. The Greenland ice sheet 
is the world's second largest glacier landmass.
  A study last year from the journal Science Advances found that we 
might have underestimated the current rate of mass loss of the 
Greenland ice sheet by about 20 billion tons per year.
  As ``Science'' magazine recently highlighted, the accelerating 
surface melt of ice and snow off the Greenland ice sheet, since 2011, 
has doubled--Greenland's contribution to global sea level rise. It is a 
phenomenon that the Presiding Officer sees and hears about in his home 
State of Florida all the time. All told, the melting Greenland ice 
sheet holds the equivalent of more than 23 feet of sea level rise in 
its ice. That would be a lot in Miami. That would be a lot in 
Providence. That would change the map of the United States of America.
  Why are these glaciers changing and shrinking? Obviously because the 
Earth is warming and ice melts. Over the last 150 years, industrial 
activities of modern civilization have caused the burning of fossil 
fuels like coal and oil. Their emissions have increased the 
concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and we have known 
since Abraham Lincoln was President that that traps heat in the 
atmosphere, warming the planet.
  What we are learning more and more is how much the warming of the 
planet accelerates at the Poles. The distribution of the warming is not 
even across the Earth. Things are warming much faster at the Poles. The 
Norwegian Polar Institute found that the rate of warming in the Arctic 
is about twice as high as the global average. For one thing, when snow 
and ice melt, they can expose darker surfaces underneath, whether it is 
water or Earth or rock, and a darker surface will absorb more solar 
energy than reflective snow and ice, and that warms the region even 
faster. So climate change has this compounding effect in the high 
latitudes.
  Temperatures in the Arctic were the highest in recorded history for 
the period between December 2016 and February 2017. The World 
Meteorological Organization noted that ``at least three times so far 
this winter, the Arctic has witnessed the polar equivalent of a heat 
wave.'' What this means in layman's terms is that when the ice in the 
Arctic should have been freezing in the deep midwinter, it was actually 
melting. More warming and more melting mean more sea level rise.
  Last year, researchers published in ``Nature'' an updated estimate of 
global sea level rise as this phenomenon accelerates. The prediction is 
not pretty. This new study doubles the previous estimate, putting 
global sea level rise over 6 feet by the end of this century.
  This led to the January NOAA report that I discussed last week which 
updated global sea level rise region-specific assessments for our U.S. 
coastline. The report raised the previous upper range or extreme 
scenario for average global sea level rise in the year 2100 by 20 
inches, to a total of 8.2 feet.
  NOAA and its partners' findings were particularly harsh for the 
western Gulf of Mexico--the back side of Florida, if you will--and the 
northeast Atlantic coast; that is, Virginia through Maine, including my 
home State of Rhode Island. Coastal managers, like Rhode Island's 
Coastal Resources Management Council, or CRMC, are taking these

[[Page 4946]]

new estimates very seriously and incorporating the ``high'' scenario 
into their planning, with the local high scenario now projected for 
Rhode Island by our CRMC at between 9 and 12 vertical feet of sea level 
rise. And, of course, when you go up 9 feet or 12 feet, you go back 
many hundreds of feet in many places. And all of this, whether it is 
happening in Florida or whether it is happening in Rhode Island or 
whether it is happening in other coastal States, it all starts with 
warming seas and melting glaciers.
  When National Geographic caught up with Aslund a few weeks ago, he 
said something striking: ``What's happening in the Arctic is spreading 
around the whole globe.'' These pictures he had taken 14 years ago 
now--back in 2003--were just the beginning.
  Kiribati, an island nation, has to face the real consequences of 
climate change and sea level rise. It is preparing to become a modern-
day Atlantis--lost forever to the waves. Aslund describes a meeting 
with Kiribati's President: ``He knows climate change is just a fact . . 
. they're buying upland in Fiji so they can evacuate in the future.''
  I will end with one final quote from Mr. Aslund. When asked about the 
devastating effects of climate change that he had seen firsthand, he 
responded: ``It is the biggest challenge we face and we must act now 
before it is too late.''
  Do one man's photographs stand any chance against the massive 
deception apparatus orchestrated by the fossil fuel industry, when they 
can call in a President of the United States for as ridiculous and 
preposterous an Executive order as he signed today? It is hard to know.
  I hope this body will rise to its best traditions and meet the needs 
of its constituents, whether they are coastal constituents threatened 
by sea level rise or farm constituents threatened by changes in weather 
or forest constituents who are seeing the pine beetle destroy western 
forests by the millions of acres. I hope we wake up before it becomes 
too late.
  I yield the floor.

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