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

of economic assumptions and sociological assumptions which we can only guess at.

But that the models themselves and the estimates that are produced, the range does reflect the uncertainty in both of those areas. And that when the modelers try to estimate impacts on future climates, they take that uncertainty into effect. And when you have a temperature range expressed, it involves some sensitivity of what if those assumptions come in at this end and what if they come in at that end, and that range does embody that.

Now hopefully over time, we will see is that range becoming more narrow as we gain further knowledge and information, but there is still a large degree of uncertainty that will always be there, and that you gentlemen will always have to face regarding the socioeconomic assumptions that inevitably have to be made. Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Bartlett, you get to have one more question.

Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much.

It is not really a question, more a comment.

If you disagree with me, disagree. I think you probably will not. I think that we are faced with exciting challenges and questions, because I think at this time our ignorance far exceeds our knowledge and understanding. And that is an exciting place to be in science because there is a whole, long journey that you can take. Dr. MICHAELS. If I would respond to that, I always tell students in my classes that whatever you think of this issue, it will allow you to see fascinating visions, not only of science but about the way that science works in society.

And that is one positive benefit that is going to come out of this thing over the next decades.

Mr. BARTLETT. I remember when I was working on my doctorate, I came in one morning and my major professor asked me, well Roscoe, what do you know today? I said, well, I do not know very much. He said, well we can probably give you a PhD then.

[Laughter.]

Mr. GUERRERO. Well, I have to say that I got a PhD today and I do not have one, so I must know absolutely nothing.

[Laughter.]

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Thank you, Mr. Guerrero.

We will be calling on people to question in relationship to when they actually came in, rather than going back and forth, because some of our Members came in early, and I think so we are going to go in that way if that is all right.

Mr. Baker?

Mr. BAKER. Mr. Ehlers was here first.

Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Ehlers?

Mr. BAKER. I will be very brief.

In California, where the climate is always beautiful, we found that after seven years of drought, we not only have to learn more about climate and how it changes, but also how to make better use of our resources, and that includes water resources.

So the reform we are going to have in Congress here is how we allow humanoids to live on the earth without destroying its envient. And the word environment to me means balance.