interconnect different environmental issues and relate them to global climate change.

Chairman BOEHLERT. Thank you very much. My time has expired. We will probably have a round two because I would like to go even beyond that and get a little more specific. Mr. Hall.

Mr. HALL. Mr. Chairman, I yield to the gentlelady and I will take my shot at it on the second round.

Chairman BOEHLERT. All right. Ms. Woolsey is recognized.

Ms. WOOLSEY. Well, thank you, Mr. Hall. I traveled to the Antarctica with the National Science Foundation. Talk about a learning experience and about global warming. But at McMurdo Station I asked the scientists, particularly when we first got there, their opinion on global warming. I was amazed at how silent they were and I became very convinced that their silence was based on the fact that they had to be absolutely 100 percent sure before they could speak out. And my fear is, by then, it will be too late. So I thank you for today.

I want to add a fourth wish, Mr. Chairman, and I would like each of you to speak to this. And that is, that we find a way to speak about global warming in plain English because people get it emotionally, but they aren't able-aren't always able to compute it and put it in their language and so they can speak about it and support our science. So what would you do so that people would understand why becoming more tropical is not what they shouldthat they absolutely should be concerned about it? How are we going to talk about it in plain English, starting with you, doctor? Well, you are all doctors.

Dr. ALBRITTON. Thank you. You have put your finger on probably one of the more difficult aspects of any complex problem of the environment, and that is, how to relate it in the terms of the ultimate policy-maker, which is the citizen and the voter, exactly.

Three things, I think, would help there. First, put more effort interacting with the educational system. The reason I say that is that is planting seeds of understanding and it is amplifying through the students, through the households involved, what the issue is, what it is all about, and it is that long-term investment for the future that education has.

The second point, there are many scientists who want to seek that interaction with the public as a part of their jobs. And I believe that as laboratories, agencies, institutions to explicitly support the development of that technique among our scientific community within the universities, within the national labs, ought to be a national duty.

Now, the third is that I believe we have weather information transmitting systems, commercial channels, weather forecastersclimate is an aggregation of weather. It has always struck me that that group, technically trained, but very skilled at getting to the point and stating the bottom line, making it user-friendly, putting it in a decision-relating framework about tomorrow, that that would be a group that we could very actively partner with to put a sidebar climate message on weather. Trial cases were done for that with the recent strong El Niño and I thought it was highly successful.

Dr. MOORE. I think this is a very important question and I would direct it at myself and my peers. And that is, we need to be clearer about what we know, what we think we know, and what we don't know. Unfortunately, I find that myself and my peers and then, consequently, others, confuse what we know with what we think we know and what we don't know.

Dr. KENNEL. I would support all of that and just simply add that if we can do a better job, showing real understanding on a regionby-region, place-by-place basis of what people's problems are, and how they may affect them, and if they see through shorter-term forecasts, like the El Niño forecast, that things actually work out, then we may build some confidence for the longer term. But surely, we have to learn how to both do the science and explain the science in terms that are meaningful at the local level.

Ms. WOOLSEY. Thank you, very much.

Chairman BOEHLERT. Thank you very much. There, now, I have got it. Everyone gets one wish now. This is the Woolsey Doctrine. And my wish is that we focus on filling the knowledge gap to find out what we don't know and to get recommendations as to how we proceed to fill in those knowledge gaps so that we can deal with our-either confirm or alter our preconceived notions. This towneveryone in this town likes to say they are for science-based decision-making. But my experience is, until the science produces something that is politically inconvenient, then they look to another avenue to travel down. The Chair is pleased to recognize a distinguished scientist, in his own right, Dr. Vernon Ehlers.

Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And my only wish is that everyone would simply agree with me so we could get on with things. Having said that, I want to follow along the line of the questioning of Congresswoman Woolsey, but in a different sense. There is also some disagreement in the scientific community, and I am not sure, at this point, to what extent there is disagreement. But Dr. Kennel, for example, one of your predecessors, who is a dear friend of mine at Scripps, Bill Nierenberg, was agreed verydisagreed very strongly with some of the conclusions here. How many scientists are still questioning that and what is the basis on which they are questioning what we have heard here today? And are they pursuing research to demonstrate that you are wrong? Do they have scientific reasons for their opposition? I am trying to get a handle on that as a scientist. Dr. Kennel, I will ask-give you a chance first.

Dr. KENNEL. Well, as you well know, the scientific community itself contains a whole variety of-until the issues are settled, there are a wide variety of views and they are tested through the literature and through conferences and measurements and computations, and their arguments are carried out in the literature. And every scientific community has, as very useful members, the skeptics who do not believe the current-received wisdom and they are constantly pointing out holes in your knowledge. That is their job. And the scientific edifice is improved by the system

Mr. EHLERS. I understand that. But I am just wondering, are they still out there? Are the diminishing? Are they

Dr. KENNEL. Oh. Yes. There are skeptics. But then the question, for the policy arena, is how to construct a process that character

izes the views of the general community and also the spread of those views? And this is why, for example, the climate community went to the assessment process, as now personified by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And this contains hundreds of scientists from different countries, backgrounds, funding sources, presumably intellectual biases, and they work together to try to craft common positions on issues of policy interest, and, at the same time, to characterize the spread and uncertainty and understanding so that policy-makers may also assess that. And it is with-and they try to set a context in which you can view the views of the various individuals that will come to you from different sides of the issue.

Mr. EHLERS. Thank you. I just-switching gears here, continuing on the track you had, Dr. Albritton, and we talked about what is known and what isn't known-I have been very cautious about using the term global warming at all. I mean, it is clear that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing, and that is a direct measurement. That is a very high certainty that we can make that statement. It is also a fairly high certainty-not quite as high, but fairly high-that that is going to have a climatic effect, because you are trapping energy in the earth's atmosphere.

I-it seems to me that the climatic effects-we should receive a lot more discussion on the warming effects-they are going to have much greater impact on the human race, for example. But also because of the high heat of vaporization water-of water, and uniquely high heat of vaporization of water that this becomes such a major interactor when you are increasing the energy of the system. And I think that is something very important for the public to understand. Global warming is not the real problem. It may be a problem, but it is not the real problem.

The real problem is what is all the energy going to do to the climate? And what makes this so extremely difficult is that there are going to be good climatic effects and bad climatic effects. And you are then going to have a situation where some people are going to think that greenhouse gases are wonderful because it improvedfor example, the people in my area, in the upper Midwest, think El Niño is wonderful. We had beautiful summers, great crops, etcetera, as a result of El Niño. California didn't think it was so great. And that is a microcosm of what is going to happen.

My question to you is, is can you, with any certainty, predict these climatic effects and, if not, when do you expect to be able to calculate those? Are you going to have the earth observation system, or especially ocean observation system, in place first before you will have enough data to really do it accurately? How much better do your computers have to do before you can get into that kind of detail? And I am just looking at timelines of how this is going to happen. Dr. Albritton.

Dr. ALBRITTON. Thank you. Two points. Your first one is on your comments and I agree 100 percent, that global warming is not a highly informative term. I don't use that. It wasn't in my notes. And I would much prefer to say change or variability or climate change because that is, in fact, the net effect that people are concerned about that result from the adding the heat to the atmosphere that you have cited.

I think that your second point, in terms of bringing climate change home, the concept of variability and extremes is the place to focus the information and the information exchange over coming years. The and that dissolves into two scientific challenges. One is having the observing system in place to see if, indeed, extremes or our regional climate is changing, and then, secondly, having the brain power and the computing power to actually predict on those scales. If I had to give a scorecard at the moment for both of those, the observing and the predicting, is that we there is a passing grade in that we have a few trends of extremes to find, but not very many. I would give it a C- on that scale.

To be able to predict at the regional level, a particular variable, such as water-related variables, like precipitation, which are more challenging than temperature, we probably have a similar score. And I think the two things that are needed in that area is more in situ observations, particularly in the oceans, and, secondly, better computing power to use the brain power that will be developed from their research.

Mr. EHLERS. And is the Argo system going to provide a sufficient

Dr. ALBRITTON. It will be an enormous help for that. It will be

an enormous—

Mr. EHLERS. Is it sufficient for what we need?

Dr. ALBRITTON. It is certainly being planned and very likely to meet the goal stated. And I believe, if we revisit it some years from now, we may find the southern ocean needing perhaps more focus. It is a major part of the planet. It is water world. We are the land world. That is the water world. The heat capacity and circulation of that very large liquid body may well figure in tomorrow's predictions.

Mr. EHLERS. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Chairman BOEHLERT. The gentleman's time has expired. Mr. Udall.

Mr. UDALL. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And I want to welcome the Panel and particularly note that Dr. Albritton is a constituent and heads the Aeronomy Laboratory at the NOAA site in Boulder. I would also note, for the Committee's interest, that Secretary Evans was in Boulder last Friday and spoke with great interest and respect in Dr. Albritton's work. And I took that as an important sign on the part of the Commerce Department and the Secretary that he was going to do all he could to learn about this issue and continue to support the research.

And, Mr. Chairman, you have, I think, set the right tone here today, which is to ask those of us on the dais here, who tend to have opinions, immediate opinions, about these kind of issues, to keep an open mind. But if I could editorialize, I think that we all ought to be agreeing that research, regardless of where we may end, is something we ought to support. And this the additional editorial comment I would make is that I think that there are some no-regrets policies we could put in place that would save energy, reduce emissions, and, in the long run, prepare us to respond to climate change if, in fact, it is something that we agree is going to occur once the science has been completed.

In-with that said, Dr. Albritton, I would like to ask you about the IPCC assessment process. You have characterized it as a consensus view. Can you talk a little bit about how you arrive at that consensus? I think a lot of us would be very interested in that.

Dr. ALBRITTON. Thank you. Yes. I would be very pleased to because I believe the IPCC scientific assessment process, as Dr. Kennel pointed out, is an important mechanism whereby the science gets distilled and majority and consensus viewpoints are formed by the experts themselves. And this is put in terms that would be useful to help guide both domestic and international policy. So a few properties of this process.

The most recent stocktaking exercise by the worldwide science community, the so-called third assessment report, has been 3 years in the preparation. It has involved well-hundreds of researchers worldwide. And these, by the way, are aimed to take in as many diverse views about the science as possible, so that it is a large, broad-based opinion-forming group.

The information is based upon the published literature. And that is, it is an assessment of what is out there and not new research, per se. So it has already undergone the individual review of journal articles, scientific debate. And this group now tries to take stock and say, what do we know and what we don't know. It is peer-reviewed twice. A draft is submitted to worldwide experts for an initial review of that. Those reviews are considered taken into the new drafts. A team of editors oversees this to see that the reviews are handled and thought and given that full discourse. Then they are reviewed a second time by experts nominated by individual governments. The United States had its list. The UK had its list, etcetera. So these this is the second review process.

The final step in that is the taking of the conclusions to the governments. This was done in Shanghai in January where the major points that I summarized for you were presented to governments, questions were asked, terminology was clarified. The message was re-asked and to be more in usable terms and that was a very productive process.

Three points I would like to see anyone take away regarding the assessment process. Number one, it is the expert community that is preparing the statement, and that contrasts to the single paper, the single viewpoint, the single study that one hears about through newspaper releases, through other accounts. And so it is an averaging and collective taking of opinion.

Second point, it is internationally based. And that is, it is the world community statement, not that of any government group, not that of any sectorial group, or not that of any individual. It is the world community.

And, third, while the information is posed in policy-relevant format, that is, here is our forecast of what would happen if no changes were made; here is our forecast if one made "X" change. It contains no policy prescription. There is no policy recommendation out of this set. Much analogous to when we visit our physician. He examines the system, he makes a-he or she makes a diagnosis, he tells us what our options are, and we leave and take in family considerations, economics, time frame, job, and make those decisions. And so the IPCC report is an attempt to lay out an up