dominate emissions 30 years into the future that it may be useful as practice but it sort of misses the point.

PARTICIPATION OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES IN KYOTO
AGREEMENT

Mr. ROEMER. You mean

Mr. PRINN. The point I was trying to make

Mr. ROEMER (continuing). —The developing countries being left out?

Mr. PRINN. Well, developing countries have clearly got to be on board and it was too bad that there was a definition of Annex 1 countries in the Berlin Mandate that sort of gave a separation of countries in that way. But, I think more important is the issue of do we, in fact, have the technologies to significantly lower emissions? Because if we're on that rapid warming pathway, just simply increasing efficiencies of the technologies that we have today is totally insufficient. So, my message is clearly, you know, let's look for the discernible human influence in order to calibrate. But, in the meantime, we really need to open up the options of technologies ranging from how we can use fossil fuels without emitting large amounts of carbon dioxide all the way to renewables. We need to open up all those options and maybe even nuclear, once again. But that's my feeling on technology.

POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS

Mr. ROEMER. Thank you. Can I get short answers, Mr. Chairman, on the record or are you anxious to move on?

Chairman CALVERT. Go ahead and get a short answer.

Mr. ROEMER. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman CALVERT. We could have a second round on this, too. Mr. ROEMER. Okay. Can you give me

Mr. PATRINOS. My answer is

Mr. ROEMER (continuing). A short answer? I don't want to
Mr. PATRINOS. My answer is-

Mr. ROEMER (continuing). —Push the

Mr. PATRINOS (continuing). -Very short and in the Department of Energy I don't really deal with that issue. You will hear from representatives from the Department of Energy on Thursday on that. Ask me anything about the science. When it comes to the policy, I recuse myself. Thank you.

Mr. ROEMER. Okay.

Mr. ROBOCK. I would agree with Dr. Prinn. The-India and China are going to have a lot more missions in the future than we are and we have to this is an opportunity for the United States to develop the technology that can be used and a big, good business opportunity that will be needed by these people to provide public transportation, refrigeration, and so forth.

Mr. ROEMER. Dr. Spencer?

Mr. SPENCER. I go along with Dr. Patrinos. As you know, policy is a multi-disciplinary effort and I don't think scientists should be speaking out on policy matters unless they know a lot about those other disciplines.

Mr. ROEMER. Okay. Mr. Chairman, thank you.

Chairman CALVERT. Thank you, Mr. Roemer. Mr. Rohrabacher.

GLOBAL WARMING VS. ICE AGE

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and I appreciate this chance to look at this issue because some of us will be going to Kyoto and are very worried that our Government is planning or at least our President is suggesting that we give away enormous powers to foreign entities or multinational entities that would dramatically impact on the economic well-being of the people of our country. Based on some-what some people believe is a cockamamie theory of global warming, I guess I'd like to phrase my first question to paraphrase what my colleague has just said. Is the evidence, and I hope you can give me a very short, quick answer on this, is the evidence stronger or weaker today that we will have global warming than the same evidence that some of the same experts were presenting to us in the 1970s claiming that we're going to have global cooling? Do you understand that question?

Back in the 1970's, my-what I see is that many of the same scholars, especially Dr. Steven Schneider, for example, was advocating that we're going to have global cooling. And now, some of these very same people who were advocating global cooling-saying that we're going to have global cooling-now are saying that we're going to have global warming. Or was the evidence stronger then or is it stronger now and which way are we going? So, maybe, is it was it is the evidence stronger today, and let me just go on, stronger today that we're going to have global warming than it was then that we were going to have global cooling?

Mr. SPENCER. Well, I think you'll hear that the timescales are very different. But it's my personal, educated opinion that the evidence right now for some amount of global warming would be stronger, in my view

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay.

Mr. SPENCER (continuing). -Than for global cooling due to a new ice age.

Mr. ROBOCK. Yes. Yes, the evidence is much stronger. The way the scientific process works is that any theory is then tested by other scientists. They get better data, they get better models, better understanding and test it. The prediction of global cooling was just based on observations that, in the 19-during that time, the climate wasn't changing; sea ice and snow was growing for just a few years. But now with a much better understanding of the climate system, we-there's much better evidence to support global warming.

Mr. PATRINOS. I agree with Dr. Robock.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Okay.

Mr. PRINN. I don't think the scientific arguments for the going into an ice age were very good back when Steve Schneider made them and not many people agreed with him at that time. But-and so-hence, I believe that the evidence, if you like, for a greenhouse-increasing greenhouse effect due to increasing greenhouse gases—is on a much firmer basis. But it does simply point out an important issue. And that is that the going in and out of ice ages is part of the natural variability of climate. And in all of the predictions, including the ones I show up there, there's an assumption, of course, that we're not-that the physics is not such that we're

heading into a cooling regime which, of course, we can't was not included in our models of those mechanisms.

NATURAL VARIABILITY

Mr. ROHRABACHER. And what we're really discussing is: is this a human-induced warming epoch and not just something where we've had increases in temperature and decreases in temperature, which our first witness talked about. Sometimes, there's little surprises that Mother Nature has for us that it gets to be a certain degree warmer and then there's a cloud cover that cools it off, or something like that. I have I am just petrified that we're about ready to get a powerwave based on something that you can just tell, by the testimony that we've heard today, is at best uncertain, that we're even going to have this global warming, much less any type of proof that human endeavors or activities by the human race have in some way or are making this warming epoch happen, warming epoch that may, then, be compensated by natural reactions and then the Earth might cool back again.

I was interested in the chart that we saw from the second witness that showed all of a sudden, you know, you have it next year is-or in the next year or two, is when we start seeing the 1 degree change. Well, that's after 100 years of only 1 degree change.

Mr. ROBOCK. That's because there's so much CO2 in the atmosphere based on all that's been put in in the past. It's there and it takes awhile for the climate system to warm up.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Well, I-no, my guess is that that's because it's easier to make that prediction than it is to go back because you-because in the past, where people in the 1970's were just as adamant that things were going to change very quickly and that we'd be able to see it starting in the near future, well, we have no way of proving something in the near future. I think it would be ridiculous, as you said, as the witness said, that you smelled some smoke so you go and you hose down all of your clothes and you destroy half of your furniture by hosing down the house before you know that there's a fire and

Mr. ROBOCK. If you run this model without putting it in a human impact

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Yes.

Mr. ROBOCK (continuing). Without putting in CO2 or aerosols, the temperature stays the same. It doesn't go up at all. It doesn't even go up by the 1 degree that we've seen so far. That-there's— nobody has thought up any natural causes of climate change that can explain the climate change of the past.

PAST CLIMATE CHANGE

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Frankly, I reject the idea that there's been this great climate change in the past. The experts cannot tell me within 1 degree what the weather's going to be like 100 hours from now, much less tell me why 100 years ago it was an average of 1 degree cooler than it is now and, of course, some of the testimony we have and that's just in the upper areas of the world. This is ridiculous and I know, I'm sorry, my time's up and I would like to go back-would like to have a back-and-forth question

Chairman CALVERT. You're sure you don't want to equivocate, Mr. Rohrabacher?

Mr. ROHRABACHER. No. Okay.

[Laughter.]

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman CALVERT. Mr. Doyle.

Mr. DOYLE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Dana, tell us what you really think.

[Laughter.]

IMPACT OF KYOTO AGREEMENT ON FUTURE CLIMATE

CHANGE

Mr. DOYLE. Mr. Chairman, thank you for holding this hearing today and we appreciate hearing from the panelists. I guess, you know, this reminds me a lot of the clean air debate, too, that we're not going to reach any scientific consensus anytime soon. But I think a lot of us think it's unrealistic to wait until there is a consensus. But, one of the things that troubles me is if we're going to commit ourselves to a course of action that a lot of us feel is not even handed, that we're going to commit the United States to some binding targets that we're not going to ask developing countries to do, you know, what are we really going to achieve in the end-run? And if we're going to make this just about regulations and taxes, then I don't think we're going to be successful. I really think that we need to have a technology challenge and we need to start now to invest some money in R&D so that if and when the science and the consensus down the road becomes a little bit better that we're prepared to deal with some of these challenges because, whether you like it or not, fossil fuels are still going to be the predominant source of energy for the world in the distant future and we're going to have to find ways to capture CO2 and it just seems that we're investing precious little money in those regards.

Let me just ask a couple questions about what might take place in Kyoto. Let's assume, for the moment, that the model supporting the 1995 IPCC assessment are accurate and that, by the Year 2100, the globally average near-surface air temperature will increase between 1 and 3.5 degrees Celsius. It doesn't seem to me, from the testimony I've heard today, that a U.N. agreement restricting CO2 emissions in just the developing countries, like the United States, while big emittors, like China and India, are let off the hook will get us anywhere.

And, apparently, I'm not alone in this view. Burt Bolan, former Chairman of the IPCC, recently said that, "No reasonable future reductions in Annex 1," that is developed countries, "would stabilize global emissions." A just-released IPCC study, Implications of Proposed CO2 Emissions Limitations, found that under one proposal examined in detail from the Netherlands that the reduction in global temperature increase in the Year 2100 could be as low as .1 degree Celsius, and this squares with an estimate by Pat Michaels of the University of Virginia, who, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, testified that the proposals now on the table would reduce temperatures by about a tenth of a degree by the Year 2050.

Dr. Patrinos, let me ask you, if a binding agreement were reached at the U.N. meeting in Kyoto that reduced CO2s in developing countries to 1990 levels by the Year 2010 with no binding restrictions on developing countries, like China and India, how much do you think IPCC's best estimate of a 2 degree Celsius warming in 2100 would actually be reduced?

Mr. PATRINOS. The details of the Kyoto Agreement, of course, will be addressed by my colleagues on Thursday. However, I would like to comment on the estimate of the reduction of 2100 as low as .1 degrees that you mentioned. I don't agree with that statement. I agree with the statement that the temperature increase from increasing CO2 will be in the range of one to three-and-a-half degrees. It is my personal view, as well, that regardless of what agreements are made in Kyoto we are committed to long-term climate change because CO2-it will stay in the atmosphere, the CO2 that we've emitted over the last 100 years for a very long time. So, in a sense, we are committed to a significant climate change over the next 100 years and the Kyoto Agreements would only have an admittedly small impact in the climate change by the Year 2100. However, when we speak about climate change by the Year 2100, it's common sometimes to forget about what goes beyond 2100. The models show also that temperature will continue to increase beyond the Year 2100, if we take no action right now, so, in some sense, action in Kyoto may impact CO2 concentrations and ultimately comet changes-climate change, perhaps not very much by the Year 2100, but significantly beyond that time.

Mr. DOYLE. Let me ask you another question, too. You heard Dr. Prinn's testimony, discussion of the MIT model that showed that even if developed countries were to cut their emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by the Year 2010, without contributions from China or Mexico or other developing countries, that this would reduce the projected increase in temperature in the Year 2100 by only 15 percent and, based on IPCC's best estimate, that would be about three-tenths of a degree. Do you agree with that?

Mr. PATRINOS. I have great confidence in the model that has been developed at Dr. Prinn's laboratory. It's among many of the other models that have been pursued on this scientific issue. I— since I don't know the details of it, I can't give you an expert opinion. I find it plausible that that may be, indeed, the case.

Mr. DOYLE. I see my time is up. Mr. Chairman, I'd ask unanimous consent to have my opening statement included in the record also.

Chairman CALVERT. Without objection, so ordered.