you agree or disagree on the overall implications of the models, how does that give the scientific community the ability to do this? Dr. MICHAELS. You are pushing me out of my area of expertise unfortunately.

And all I know, when I do not know something, is I have to read the fine print. I have not seen the fine print. In Washington, there is a lot of fine print that spends a lot of money.

So the only answer I can give to you is, if I saw the fine print, I would give you an opinion, which would not be a professionally balanced opinion.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. The fine print in the EPA, if I could add, talks about things that were under that I mean, I am taking a look at some of the things that EPA's money for global climate research, if I could, Mr. Roemer

Mr. ROEMER. As long as this is not taking up my time.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. This is not taking up your time.

Just, you know, I am taking a look here out of $111 million contract for global climate research EPA, and their account was used for brochures, posters, program logos, design for product awards, promotional pens, pencils, buttons, banners, displays, billboards, bus and train placards, that is the fine print that you are talking about, Dr. Michaels.

Go right ahead, Mr. Roemer.

Mr. ROEMER. Well, Mr. Chairman, again, not coming out of my time because I am responding to your question, but

[Laughter.]

Mr. ROEMER. [continuing] -when we are looking at, you know, from the '95 levels, we are looking at a 25 percent cut in the NASA budget on these satellites, 23 percent cut in NOAA, 17 percent cut in DOE in the environmental resources, 35 percent cut on the CO2 resources, a 40 percent cut in the solar and renewable resources, and a 55 percent cut in the energy and conservation resources.

We are talking a little bit more about than just cutting posters and pens. We are talking about cutting out satellites that Dr. Michaels says are important to study this.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, having gone through the budgets and understanding where the money's coming from, I remember the debate on the floor that we had in which promotional and commercial programs in the solar energy program were labeled "energy research." And promotional activities and commercialization have nothing to do with energy research.

And this Chairman went out of his way to make sure that that research was not cut.

But go right ahead.

Mr. ROEMER. Well, let me ask Dr. Mahlman if you think this is somehow a petty program or something that does things that are not directly related to the kind of research that you need to study this problem.

Are you familiar with the computer hardware, the advanced mathematics and model physics program within DOE to upgrade climate models?

Dr. MAHLMAN. Yes, I am. I am a participant, in fact.

Mr. ROEMER. Are those the kind of programs that you know are putting out posters and promotional activities? Or are these things

that are helpful in terms of determining if and to what degree we have a problem?

Dr. MAHLMAN. By the way, I am a non-funded participant in that program, working collaboratively with them on mathematical modeling techniques.

I am an employee of NOAA. I do not speak for NOAA here today. I am Chair of the Mission to Planet Earth NASA Scientific Advisory Committee. I do not speak for NASA here today.

I do speak to your question however.

Mr. ROEMER. Who do you speak for?

Dr. MAHLMAN. I speak for Jerry Mahlman. Okay? I am nobody's witness but mine. Okay?

I strongly concur with what Patrick Michaels just said on the value of the long-term climate measuring system. It is in my testimony, both verbal and recorded.

The simple truth, that no matter what we feel about this, what our opinions are, that the check for theories or counter-theories is in the data, and as a mathematical modeler, I have been saying that for the last decade, that this is something we are doing badly.

The ability to do that has decreased in this most recent budget. Okay. Money for certain climate activities has indeed decreased, particularly in the climate & global change program in NOAA because it was labeled as long-term climate research, and therefore inappropriate.

I expect to lose money in working in my laboratory on cloud and radiation research, which is a key uncertainty, and aerosol research directly as a result of that decision.

Okay, I am not here to complain, but you have asked. I see the effect in NASA more vicious in terms of the ability to measure and understand the climate system. It is a real effect; it is not politics, it is impacting the ability to do good science.

Mr. ROEMER. And let me ask both you and Dr. Guerrero on this. On a scale of one to ten, how important is it to gather more data on cloud absorption properties and then secondly on aerosol.

Mr. GUERRERO. We have been told that one of the primary introductions of uncertainty into the current modeling is the limitations on modeling clouds, so I would rank that as very high.

And your second area was?

Mr. ROEMER. Cloud absorption properties and aerosols.

Mr. GUERRERO. And aerosols. I would pass on aerosols to Jerry. Dr. MAHLMAN. Both of the measurements are absolutely critical because they are key to our fundamental understanding of what mother nature tells us about what our theories are saying. Okay. That is the classical iteration between theory and observation; and it is theories that state how you hypothesize and address a problem, but it is the data that keeps you honest.

In both cases, the aerosol effect is expected to be a cooling offset that we do not understand quantitatively on a first-principles basis. The same with clouds. I think that both sets of measurements and the brain power to make them work is absolutely and fundamentally critical and a very high leverage opportunity.

Mr. ROEMER. Thank you.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Roemer, if you would like one more question, because I was, the Chair did intrude on your time, so if you would like one more question, please feel free.

Mr. ROEMER. I am fine, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay. There is a vote on. There is unfortunately some parliamentary haggling going on on the Floor of the House of Representatives

[Laughter.]

Mr. ROHRABACHER. [continuing] -and elsewhere in Washington. So anyway, this Committee, this subcommittee will be recessed until after this vote, and the witnesses, you can be sure we have a lot more questions to ask.

[Recess.]

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Ladies and gentlemen, I call this subcommittee back into order. It seems we generated at least some heat in the initial part of the discussion. I do not know if it has anything to do with warming or not.

But we do have with us today my esteemed colleague who actually has a better understanding of almost every one of these issues than I do. And he is one of the few Members of Congress who is a scientist, and I am a journalist by profession, which puts me one step above a lawyer, being a lawyer.

But we have a scientist with us today who has, as I say, a deeper understanding. And I would like to call on my colleague, Mr. Bartlett, from Maryland, for his period of questioning.

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much.

I will say, at the outset, that I come with no preconceptions. And let me tell you why. As a child I was, and am still fascinated by several observations.

One, I remember as a little boy, breaking lumps of coal in our basement and just being fascinated when it broke open and there was what looked like a large fern leaf to me. And so I knew that at one time, the chilly, western Pennsylvania had a very different climate, because that is where the coal came from.

I also remember the interesting stories of the discovery of mammoths in the tundra, frozen with subtropical vegetation in their stomachs.

I remember observing the lateral moraines produced by an Ice Age that came as far south as southeastern Ohio. I remember seeing the petrified forest in the western part of our country.

All of these, of course, are testimony to enormous climate changes in the past, climate changes which presumably were not much, if at all, affected by the activities of man.

Now more recently, I am fascinated by the discussions that we have. On the one hand, we are told that the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases are going to raise the temperature of our planet.

Then there is the somewhat complicating effect of the sulfur aerosols, and I remember the considerable discussion led by people of some renown, like Dr. Carl Sagan, who indicated that he anticipated a nuclear winter from the pollutants that were produced by nuclear exchange in a country.

So on the one hand, we have people saying that pollution is going to produce global warming. On the other hand, we have people say

ing that pollution is going to produce global cooling, a nuclear winter; that large percentages of our people around the globe would starve as a result of this nuclear winter.

Something happens like Mt. Pinatubo, and there is a noticeable, although short-term, drop in temperatures as a result of this.

I guess that where I come down on all of this is that I think back at an observation that Abraham Lincoln made, that the government ought to do for its citizens only what they cannot do for themselves.

And I think that collecting data about the future of our climate, putting up the satellites, I think this is something that reasonably government ought to be involved in. There are a whole lot of things we are involved in that I think do not stand the test that Abe Lincoln gave us, that we should only do for our citizens what they cannot do for themselves.

I am concerned in looking to the future. We have an uncertain fossil fuel future. It is not forever. And I am not sure that it is for even the foreseeable future.

You know, I think that in the generation of my children, we may see problems with the availability of high quality, readily available fossil fuels.

I am concerned that we are not focusing, I think adequately, on alternative energy sources, on renewable energy sources, and on conservation.

It is unclear to me what the proper role of government is. I guess I have but a single question.

And that is, that from my perspective we are kind of standing on the threshold, both politically and scientifically, of these questions. And that there is a whole lot more that we do not know than that we do know.

Just look at these contrasting views of where we are going as a planet. Either we are going to get very warm or we are going to get very cold as a result of various types of pollutants.

I am just wondering if you would agree that we are kind of at the threshold in both of these areas, the policy areas and the scientific research areas, and that the kind of debate that we are having today, and it ought to be lively debate and it ought to be ongoing is a very healthy thing, so that more attention will be drawn to it, and that we will understand better what the potentials are for both policy decisions that will help us, and for contributions that the federal government might make that would provide more and better research, so that we can have perhaps a little more control of our future.

You are all nodding your heads yes, that
Dr. MICHAELS. Is that a question?

I think we are on a threshold, and I suspect that when you look at even-not even, sorry-Dr. Mahlman's agreement that warming can be a lower level of the projections and models attract the past best producing not that much future warming, seeing a lot of it at night and in winter rather than the summer.

There has been no significant change in the-in fact, it is been a significant decline-sorry-in the intensity of Atlantic hurricanes over the last 50 years, regardless of what the insurance agency says. I know they like to raise rates.

We are in a threshold and a threshold I think is that we are going to approach a new paradigm of a new view of the world, which is going to change from fragile earth, meaning if you do one little thing, there are tremendous ecological consequences, more to the concept that the earth is more resilient than we had once feared it might not be.

Dr. MAHLMAN. I would offer a different perspective.

I think that the question you raise is important and appropriately agonized. How does society respond?

I said in my testimony that I did not think it is appropriate for climate scientists to offer political or sociological opinions on what the solutions should be. But I do feel it is appropriate for climate scientists, such as myself, to speak to what the problem is.

The problem is that global warming is something that is a harsh and inexorable reality. We do not know, quite sure, whether it is at the lower end or the upper end of the range.

Pat Michaels' arguments do not resolve that debate, by the way. But we do know that it takes a long time to build up carbon dioxide to levels that are high enough to be scary. But we also know that if we do not like those numbers, it takes a very, very long time for them to go away.

So it focuses the debate a little differently than you posed it, but I think very consistent with the tone of your question.

And that it seems reasonable to me, as a public citizen, that this issue has many aspects of it that are genuinely deserving of legitimate concern but is fraught with complexities, not just on a climate side but on the impact side, which we will hear from the next panel, and on the social side.

And so, as a climate scientist, I can say that the problem is difficult, uncertainties are significant, the cost of doing something about it, particularly if you grew up in a coal producing part of the country, is very, very large. You know, to change the way we do business has enormous global and political consequences.

The other side of the same coin, however, is that the cost of not doing something about it may be prodigious in the sense that the problem may last for hundreds to maybe even a thousand years. And so that is the difficulty of the debate. There is no soft landing spot independent of one's rhetoric or one's political position.

Mr. GUERRERO. I would like to make two observations, one on the notion of-are we at a threshold, and I would like to suggest that our understanding will continue to improve. Our ability to model will continue to improve, but despite those improvements, we will never have a hundred percent certainty in this area. The models will never produce that.

Even if the scientists at this table today completely understood the physical processes that they are modeling and completely understood the climate systems, we would still need to make assumptions regarding emission rates, population growth, technology development.

And that there is a large degree of uncertainty associated with making those assumptions.

In effect then, what we are doing is we are trying to model a future climate based on a set of physical elements, some of which are known well, and some of which we need to study further, and a set