June 8, 2001 CONGRESSIONAL RECORD-SENATE of days in space, is not Florida or America but home becomes the planet, this beautiful blue and white ball suspended in the middle of nothing-and space is nothing. Space goes on and on. It is an airless vacuum that goes on and on for billions of light-years. There in its midst, suspended, is this wonderfal creation called planet Earth, our home. As I would look at the rim of the Earth, I could see what sustains all of our life. I could see the atmosphere. As I would look further, I would start to see how we are messing it up. For example, in a ground track coming across South America, I could look out the window of the spacecraft to the west and, because of the color contrast, even from that altitude I could see the destruction of the rain forest in the upper Amazon region. Then, in the same window of the spacecraft, I could look to the east at the mouth of the Amazon River and could see the result of the destruction of the trees for the waters of the Atlantic which were discolored from the silt for hundreds of miles from the mouth of the Amazon. That was a result of the destruction of the trees hundreds of miles upriver. I came away from that experience becoming more of an environmentalist. I came away from that axperience with a profound sense of obligation to become a better steward for our planet Earth. The legislation that the Senator has offered is another step in attempting to get this Nation and this planet to recognize that something is changing: that we best use the best minds, the best science, and the best technology to address how we can stop what seems to be the inevitable march of warming the temperature of this planet to the point at which it could cause great destruction. I thank the President for his recognition. I thank the Senator from West Virginia for his statement today. and for offering this legislation. I thank him for his very kind indulgence to listen to my remarks, which are complimentary to him for what he was offered here today. Thank you. Mr. President, I yield the floor. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from West Virginia is recognized. Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I seek recognition for only a brief statement. I thank the distinguished Senator from Florida for his observations today. He comes to the Senate as one who is different from the rest of us different in that his experiences inclade that of being a formor astronaut. My name is BYRD, B-Y-R-D. I don't have the wings of a bird. But I have the Imagination that can fly uninhibited through the unlimited bounds of space. As the Senator from Florida spɔke, I found myself traveling with him and looking out of the windows of his spacecraft in wonder at what has hap pened to planet Earth, the planet that we call home. I thank him for talking the floor about his experiences in that regard. I I look forward to hearing from Sen- $6003 shown by Senator BYRD and Senator STEVENS with their introduction of the Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001. Senator BYRD has shown great courage by taking action to address global warming in such a forthright and courageous manner. As Livy once wrote of the great general Hannibal, Senator BYRD is preferred "in any action which called for vigor and courage, and under his leadership the men" or in this case his colleagues in the Senate "invariably showed the best advantage of both dash Mr. President, I send to the desk the bill and ask for its referral. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The bill and confidence." Senator BYRD's vigor and wisdom in introducing this bill are will be appropriately referred. on historio parallel with the acts of Hannibal. Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, I yield the floor. Mr. STEVENS. Mr. President, the Climate Change Strategy and Technology Innovation Act of 2001 asks for a commitment of the 107th Congress to Develop bold, innovative technologies to better understand global climate change. I thank my friend Senator BYRD for introducing this Bill and I am proud to be an original co-sponsor. On May 29, I chaired an Appropria tions Committee field hearing in Fairbanks, AK on the impact of global climate change on the arctic environment. Witnesses included Dan Goldin, the Head of the National Aeronautic Space and Administration; Scott Gudes, the acting head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; Dr. Rita Colwell, the Director of the National Science Foundation, Charles Grost, the Director of the U.S. Geological Survey; and experts from the International Arctic Research Center and the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute. Many of the Wit nesses noted that recent climate change activity likely atoms from a number of factors, including natural variances and human activity. The degree to which any particular phenomenon or activity is contributing to climate change is not well understood. However, regardless of cause, there has been a dramatic warming trend in the arotic areas of Alaska. Paok ice that usually insulates our coastal villages from winter storms has shrunk by 3 percent a year since the 1970's. Increased storm activity has caused significant beach erosion that may displace extire communities. Sea ice is also thinner than it was 30 years ago. The northwest passage has been Ice free for the last three years. Forests appear to moving farther north and west as the permafrost melts. We need better research capabilities to understand global olimate change, better planning capabilities to react to climate change impact, and better anergy technology infrastructure to keep pace with America's growing energy needs. Senator BYRD's bill will create a process for the United States to seriously and responsibly address. the climate change issue. I look forward to working closely with him to pass this important legislation. Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I I have been informed that the bill will likely be referred to the Government Affairs Committee, and as chairman of that committee, I look forward to reviewing it in detail. As I under stand it, this legislation will create an aggressive comprehensive effort within the executive branch that will provide the scrutiny and creative thought that global warming requires. I hope that it will be the tree off of which other oliSenator BYRD has said, it is meant to complement, not replace, other mitigation measures-measures that must inClude binding targets for emissions rcductions. mate change measures will branch. As The timing for the introduction of this bill could not be better. On Wednesday, the National Academy of Sciences released their latest report on climate change at the request of the White House. The White House asked the questions, and the answer was clear: global warming is "real," is caused by human activity, and has potentially disastrous consequences. Now, as President Bush prepares to go to Europe next week, he must heed these disturbing findings and propose meaningful, binding measures to address climate change. The mandate is clear, we must take action and take action now to stop the overheating of our planet. We must be aggressive and we must be creative. We must harness one of our great American traditions, which is an unparalleled capacity for innovation, and lead the world in doing so. We must use flexible market structures in order to allow that innovation to flourish, we must set the strict caps on emissions that are necessary to drive that innovation. As I understand their bill, Senators STEVENS and BYRD have laid out a program that will provide the framework for the United States to address the dire problem of climate change. We must accept this challenge and begin to take serious measures to reverse this troubling trend, or future generations will suffer the consequences and remember us with disappointment. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Seu 6/11/01 WSJ A22 6/11/01 Wall St. J. A22 2001 WL-WSJ 2866069 The Wall Street Journal Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc. Monday, June 11, 2001 Scientists' Report Doesn't Support The Kyoto Treaty By Richard S. Lindzen Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a report on climate change, prepared in response to a request from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol. CNN's Michelle Mitchell was typical of the coverage when she declared that the report represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room." As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This the full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them. As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary began with a zinger that greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc., before following with the necessary qualifications. For example, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long-term trends, but the summary forgot to mention this. Our primary conciusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, the most important being water vapor and clouds). We simply do not know what relation, if any, exists between global climate changes and water vapor, clouds, storms, hurricanes, and other factors, including regional climate changes, which are generally much larger than global changes and not correlated with them. Nor do we know how to predict changes in greenhouse gases. This is because we cannot forecast economic and technological change over the next century, and also because there are many man-made substances whose properties and levels are not well known, but which could be comparable in importance to carbon dioxide. What we do is know that a doubling of carbon dioxide by itself would produce only a modest temperature increase of one degree Celsius. Larger projected increases depend on "amplification" of the carbon dioxide by more important, but poorly modeled, greenhouse gases, clouds and water vapor. The press has frequently tied the existence of climate change to a need for Kyoto. The NAS panel did not address this question. My own view, consistent with the panel's work, is that the Kyoto Protocol would not result in a substantial reduction in global warming. Given the difficulties in significantly limiting levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, a more effective policy might well focus on other greenhouse Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. This is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions. A fairer view of the science will show that there is still a vast amount of uncertainty far more than advocates of Kyoto would like to acknowledge -- and that the NAS report has hardly ended the debate. Nor was it meant to. Word Count: 977 6/11/01 WSJ A22 END OF DOCUMENT Statement of Richard Lindzen, May 2, 2001 Page 1 of 5 Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 2 May 2001. I wish to thank Senator Voinovich, Senator Smith and the Environment and Public Works Committee for the opportunity to clarify the nature of consensus and skepticism in the Climate Debate. I have been involved in climate and climate related research for over thirty years during which time I have held professorships at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. I am a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and the author or coauthor of over 200 papers and books. I have also been a participant in the proceedings of the IPCC (the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). The questions I wish to address are the following: What can we agree on and what are the implications of this agreement? What are the critical areas of disagreement? What is the origin of popular perceptions? I hope it will become clear that the designation, 'skeptic,' simply confuses an issue where popular perceptions are based in significant measure on misuse of language as well as misunderstanding of science. Indeed, the identification of some scientists as 'skeptics' permits others to appear 'mainstream' while denying views held by the so-called 'skeptics' even when these views represent the predominant views of the field. Climate change is a complex issue where simplification tends to lead to confusion, and where understanding requires thought and effort. Judging from treatments of this issue in the press, the public has difficulty dealing with numerical magnitudes and focuses instead on signs (increasing v. decreasing); science places crucial emphasis on both signs and magnitudes. To quote the great 19th Century English scientist, Lord Kelvin, "When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind." As it turns out, much of what informed scientists agree upon is barely quantitative at all: that global mean temperature has probably increased over the past century, that CO2 in the atmosphere has increased over the same period, that the added CO2 is more likely to have caused global mean temperature to increase rather than decrease, and that man, like the butterfly, has some impact on climate. Such statements have little relevance to policy, unless quantification shows significance. The media and advocacy groups have, however, taken this agreement to mean that the same scientists must also agree that global warming "will lead to rising sea waters, droughts and agriculture disasters in the future if unchecked" (CNN). According to Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters, "Science clearly shows that we are experiencing devastating impacts because of carbon dioxide pollution." (Carbon dioxide, as a 'pollutant' is rather singular in that it is a natural product of respiration, non-toxic, and essential for life.) The accompanying cartoon suggests implications for severe weather, the ecosystem, and presumably plague, floods and droughts (as well as the profound politicization of the issue). Scientists who do not agree with the catastrophe scenarios are assumed to disagree with the basic statements. This is not only untrue, but absurdly stupid. Indeed, the whole issue of consensus and skeptics is a bit of a red herring. If, as the news media regularly report, global warming is the increase in temperature caused by man's emissions of CO2 that will give rise to rising sea levels, floods, droughts, weather extremes of all sorts, plagues, species elimination, and so on, then it is safe to say that global warming consists in so many aspects, that widespread agreement on all of them would be suspect ab initio. If it truly existed, it would be evidence of a thoroughly debased field. In truth, neither the full text of the IPCC documents nor even the summaries claim any such agreement. Those who insist that the science is settled should be Statement of Richard Lindzen, May 2, 2001 Page 2 of 5 something trivial and without policy implications except to those who bizarrely subscribe to the socalled precautionary principle a matter I will return to later. (Ian Bowles, former senior science advisor on environmental issues at the NSC, published such a remark on 22 April in the Boston Globe: "the basic link between carbon emissions, accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and the phenomenon of climate change is not seriously disputed in the scientific community." I think it is fair to say that statements concerning matters of such complexity that are not disputed are also likely to be lacking in policy relevant content. However, some policymakers apparently think otherwise in a cultural split that may be worthy of the late C.P. Snow's attention.) The thought that there might be a central question, whose resolution would settle matters, is, of course, inviting, and there might, in fact, be some basis for optimism. While determining whether temperature has increased or not is not such a question, the determination of climate sensitivity might be. Rather little serious attention has been given to this matter (though I will mention some in the course of this testimony). However, even ignoring this central question, there actually is much that can be learned simply by sticking to matters where there is widespread agreement. For example, there is widespread agreement that CO2 levels have increased from about 280ppm to 360ppm over the past century, and, that combined with increases in other greenhouse gases, this brings us about half way to the radiative forcing associated with a doubling of CO2 without any evidence of enhanced human misery. that the increase in global mean temperature over the past century is about 1F which is smaller than the normal interannual variability for smaller regions like North America and Europe, and comparable to the interannual variability for the globe. Which is to say that temperature is always changing, which is why it has proven so difficult to demonstrate human agency. that doubling CO2 alone will only lead to about a 2F increase in global mean temperature. Predictions of greater warming due to doubling CO2 are based on positive feedbacks from poorly handled water vapor and clouds (the atmosphere's main greenhouse substances) in current computer models. Such positive feedbacks have neither empirical nor theoretical foundations. Their existence, however, suggests a poorly designed earth which responds to perturbations by making things worse. that the most important energy source for extratropical storms is the temperature difference between the tropics and the poles which is predicted by computer models to decrease with global warming. This also implies reduced temperature variation associated with weather since such variations result from air moving from one latitude to another. Consistent with this, even the IPCC Policymakers Summary notes that no significant trends have been identified in tropical or extratropical storm intensity and frequence. Nor have trends been found in tornados, hail events or thunder days. that warming is likely to be concentrated in winters and at night. This is an empirical result based on data from the past century. It represents what is on the whole a beneficial pattern. that temperature increases observed thus far are less than what models have suggested should have occurred even if they were totally due to increasing greenhouse emissions. The invocation of very uncertain (and unmeasured) aerosol effects is frequently used to disguise this. Such an invocation makes it impossible to check models. Rather, one is reduced to the claim that it is possible that models are correct. that claims that man has contributed any of the observed warming (ie attribution) are based on the assumption that models correctly predict natural variability. Such claims, therefore, do not constitute independent verifications of models. Note that natural variability does not require any external forcing natural or anthropogenic. that large computer climate models are unable to even simulate major features of past climate such |