Dr. Michaels.

Mr. MICHAELS. I think you may be interchanging two separate lists, and I think Ms. Browner may be doing the same.

There was a petition sent to various scientific organizations, including the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America. That has nothing to do with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It was done by a group called Ozone Action, which is a lobbying organization, and they got 2,600 signatures, which is a remarkably small number given the large number of people that belong to these organizations. I hesitate to give an exact number, but I think it was certainly less than one out of ten. Mrs. EMERSON. That is a very good point you make and I really appreciate your bringing that to my attention because perhaps you are right. She has also tried to confuse the issue.

Let me just move on to another question here. This Committee has identified at least $6.3 billion that the administration has requested to implement or would like to spend in the next fiscal year to begin implementing the Kyoto Protocol. Yet, obviously, as I said earlier, you all disagree as to whether or not we have a problem with global warming.

Can any of you all give me any indication at all of how much it would cost and how long would it take to really determine whether or not the Earth's temperatures are rising, whether they are falling or whether they are staying the same? Is it possible to get our arms around this, and how long would it take and how much would it cost?

Mr. SINGER. These problems cannot be settled by just throwing money at them. They require observations of the climate. You cannot hurry these things. They take time.

For example, Dr. Christy pointed out that currently the climate is not warming. In fact, it has been cooling, as seen by satellite data. Throwing money at this does not affect the speed at which you can gather these data. They will be coming in year by year as the climate develops. Incidentally, the climate is going to change no matter what. It will always either get colder or warmer. It can never be stabilized.

Mrs. EMERSON. Dr. Watson.

Mr. WATSON. The basic point is, over the last 100 years, the temperature has warmed. Over the last 20 years, there is clearly a discrepancy between the ground-based observations that still show a small warming and the satellite observation that basically show no warming and possibly a slight decrease, possibly a very small in

crease.

So there are two questions. First, is the Earth's climate changing? But the second one, which is equally and even more important is, why is it changing? So one has to look not only at the data to see if there is a change, and I would argue we have to look at the long-term change, not the short-term 10 or 20 years because of natural fluctuations in the climate. But the key issue is establishing cause and effect.

That is indeed a long process if indeed you want absolutely no ambiguity on this issue. The trouble is the time scale of the climate system is so long, because of the lifetime for CO2, the challenge for

policymakers such as yourself is that you are going to have to make some decisions without perfect knowledge.

Mrs. EMERSON. Dr. Singer.

Mr. SINGER. Again there may be some confusion here.

The Federal Government does have a very active and broad research program now which is of the order of $2 billion a year. We are not talking about that. That is the program that is supposed to determine what is causing climate change, among other things. So that deals with the science, or should deal with the science. The $6.3 billion you are speaking of

Mrs. EMERSON. I realize that is totally separate.

Mr. SINGER [continuing]. Is unfortunately not being spent for science at all. It includes corporate welfare programs. It includes subsidies. It includes many other things not having to do with science.

Chairman TALENT. Would the gentlelady yield?

$2 billion you are spending a year, right? Are you getting any of that money?

Mr. SINGER. I get none of this money.

Chairman TALENT. Somebody is getting that $2 billion, aren't they? If we were to conclude that global warming is not a problem, would we be spending the $2 billion?

Mr. SINGER. Probably not. I might point out that this is more than is being given to the National Cancer Institute, which has a smaller budget. So this tells you something about perverted priorities of the Government.

Chairman TALENT. I will wait for my questions. I yield back.
Mrs. EMERSON. Dr. Lashof, you had your hand up.

Mr. LASHOF. I would like to address the $6.3 billion proposed. The Clinton administration's Climate Technology Initiative is what it is called.

You characterize it as proposed spending to implement Kyoto and I think that is incorrect. As far as I know, the administration has not proposed any funds to implement Kyoto. The budget for fiscal year 99, That is being debated now, obviously was prepared before the Kyoto Protocol was in fact negotiated, although it was released afterwards.

The point I want to make is, if you look at what is proposed there, it is primarily for energy efficiency, renewable energy, both technology research and development, much of which is going to scientists, as well as tax incentives, it is fully consistent; indeed, one could argue the kind of program that is required by the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is the law of the land. It was ratified by the Senate in 1992.

Mrs. EMERSON. But my question really had to do with if in fact you all as scientists could say, yes, we can in fact determine over this length of time that there is a problem or there is not a problem and then how much it would cost.

Dr. Lewis.

Mr. LEWIS. Yes, I would like to speak just briefly to the question of priorities. We heard comments here today that one of the perils potentially of climate change is an increase in disease vectors or the spread of malaria and dengue fever and so on.

Just yesterday, there was a fascinating presentation given by Dr. Paul Reiter of the Centers for Disease Control, who rejects entirely the thesis that climate change is in any way important to the public health of the United States and not even the developing countries with respect to diseases.

He pointed out to me, though, that right now the U.S. Government is only spending $200,000 a year to try to develop a vaccine for dengue fever, which is really having an upsurge in places like Puerto Rico, where he is stationed. I think we just have to ask ourselves, how many $200,000 grants is the Federal Government handing out to nonprofit organizations to study climate change, or how many times does $200,000 go into $6.3 billion?

I mean, if we are really concerned about the health effects of climate change, why aren't we even more concerned about the suffering and dying of people right now and why don't we divert some of that $6.3 billion into developing a vaccine for dengue fever if dengue fever and the threat of it is one of the rationales given for the Kyoto Protocol?

It seems to me that some of the priorities here are completely twisted.

Mrs. EMERSON. You make a good point. If you take a look at the Environmental Protection Agency's budget and that particularly which has to do with studying global climate and greenhouse gas impacts, there are many, many grants to many different organizations but they are mostly advocacy groups who have an unbalanced position already, but there are several million dollars worth of those grants.

Dr. Watson, you mentioned during answering the last question the increase in greenhouse gases produced in the last century. You talked about that. Can you measure how much of that increase is due to human activity?

Mr. WATSON. Of carbon dioxide, we are almost sure that nearly all of it is due to human activity. One can look at that by, without getting too technical, the so-called isotopic composition of the change in carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere. Probably 70 percent or thereabouts, I have not got an exact number, has probably come from the burning of fossil fuels. That is the combustion of coal, oil, and natural gas. Some of it has come from deforestation, that is cutting down trees, and most recently in the tropics. Just as one quick aside, and I apologize for this, the U.S. Global Change Research Program is correctly stated to be between $1.8 and $2 billion a year. The National Cancer Institute Budget is $2.54 billion, so they are comparable. I think that is a fair thing

to say.

Mrs. EMERSON. So, anyway, you are saying that perhaps most of it is due to human activity. But yet, in your 1995 IPCC, if I can quote from page 5, it says "Our ability to quantify the human influence on global climate is limited because the expected signal is still emerging from the noise of natural variability and because there are uncertainties in key factors, etc."

So, in other words, you think that it does but you are not sure? Mr. WATSON. They are two different questions, good questions, both of them.

The first question is, has atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases increased? The answer is unambiguously yes. No one would debate that. I believe it is also fair to say most people would agree the carbon dioxide increase is almost exclusively due to human activity. So atmospheric composition is changing.

Second, has the global temperature increased? The answer is also yes. Third, I will get to your last point, is: Can we establish cause and effect between the greenhouse gases increasing and the observed change in the world's temperature?

We have said, basically, there are uncertainties. But the preponderance of scientific evidence supports the view that human activities are involved in the observed climate change. So there are really three steps to the argument.

Mr. MICHAELS. Could I amplify on that for a minute? Because I think Bob is accurate except he left something off, which is, while one might say that the evidence suggests a "discernible" — that is the word they used human influence on the climate, the real question is why is it so little and because it is so little, what is nature trying to tell us?

Again, this constant error factor of about a third between what was predicted and what was observed remains, and will, and I think tells us a lot about this issue. You do not care whether it warms. Nobody here cares whether we warm the climate. You care whether we warm it a lot; you care whether we warm it in a deleterious fashion.

If the human warming is primarily in the coldest air masses of the winter, and physics would say that is true, I am not so sure that is such a terrible thing.

Mrs. EMERSON. Of the warming that has taken place in this century, would you agree, Dr. Watson, that most of it has happened pre-1940?

Mr. WATSON. If you look at the data you could say probably about half occurred pre-1940, half since. The argument is nothing should have occurred pre-1940. That is not true. There was an increase in carbon dioxide and other gases, so some of the warming would have been expected before 1940.

The theoretical models that try to compare theory and observation have taken into account not only the change in greenhouse gases but the change in sulfate aerosols gases and they actually get a fairly good correspondence, not a factor 3 discrepancy as stated by Pat Michaels, when you do it carefully all the way from 1900 all the way through today. In fact, the projections that were used for Kyoto have taken these models that have had less of a projection than 1990 and there is a fairly good correspondence between the latest models and the observations.

Mr. MICHAELS. I must respond. Bob Watson just made the assertion that when you adjust the climate models for sulfate aerosols that you fit the globe's temperature much better.

Now, there are two hemispheres on this planet, the northern and the southern. Almost all the industry is concentrated in the northern hemisphere. The southern hemisphere has very little industry and, therefore, very little sulfates that would result in a canceling of the greenhouse warming.

If you will take a look at my testimony, please, on page 4, you will see that the southern half of the planet is cooling. There are no sulfates there to cool it. That is prima facie evidence that the sulfate hypothesis is in big trouble. If this discussion goes much further, I will show you that it is in even bigger trouble than that. Mrs. EMERSON. I just want to ask one more question, because the 1990 IPCC scientific assessment says that the rather rapid changes in global temperature around 1920 to 1940 are likely to have been caused by natural origin.

So what is natural origin?

Mr. WATSON. This is the point that one has to make. For any short period, say 10 or 20 years, there could be human-induced changes for expand the period 1920 through 1940, that would be relatively small because of only a small increase in carbon dioxide. There are also a natural exchange of energy between the atmosphere and the ocean. There is potential small changes in fluctuation in the solar output, changes in volcanic activity that change aerosol particles in the atmosphere, and also changes in El Nino event, which is a natural climate oscillation.

So it is not at all surprising that over any 10-20 year period you may get a warming or a cooling as much as a tenth to three-tenths degree Centigrade even in the absence of human interaction.

Mr. MICHAELS. Could I respond. I would like to say a couple things. First of all, the warming for 1920 to 1940, which the IPCC said was likely to be natural, in fact is almost exactly equal to the warming that occurred between 1970, in the last 20 years or so. But I want to tell you how much we understand this issue.

We have temperature records taken by weather balloons and, as you know, they show no warming since 1979; and they match up perfectly with the satellite record that John Christy monitors. However, if we take a look at the weather balloon record back to when it begins, and it begins in 1958 globally, there is a warming in it. That means that there had to have been a warming prior to 1979 that was pretty sharp.

In fact, there was. It occurred in 1 year, 1976, 22 years ago. There is a jump in the temperature that took place 22 years ago, in the weather balloon record of a lower atmosphere. All the readings before 1976 are flat. All the readings after 1976 are flat. I do not know of one climate model that says that anthropogenerated warming would take place in 1 year 22 years ago.

Mrs. EMERSON. Well, there is so much confusion here that I am very reluctant to spend $6.3 billion or even more than that unless you all can decide whether or not there is a problem. It is kind of like dairy farmers. You know, you cannot get two dairy farmers who agree on anything even if they live next door to each other. So I am getting the impression that you all do not agree. So, therefore, I am very reluctant for us to spend a whole lot of money trying to implement something through the back door, which I think is perhaps, even though Dr. Lashof and I might disagree on that, having looked at old 1994 EPA documents that pretty well suggests that this is what they intend to do, I am reluctant to spend more money on something unless we know what the problem is and how to fix it or whether or not there is a problem at all.