is not a well-mixed reservoir and the overall mixing time of the ocean is more on the order of 500 years. There is a top layer of the ocean, about the top 75 meters, that is well-mixed by winds. But below that the ocean is highly stratified.

So you have part of the CO2 that equilibrates quickly with the upper part of the ocean. But then for the full equilibration, which is where you get most of the removal, the full depth of the ocean, the other 4,000 meters, requires centuries.

Mr. MICHAELS. Mr. Bartlett, I would like to point out that if we read the record of today's proceedings we will see that my two colleagues on the right have said that the residence time of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 100 years, 120 years, and 30 to 120 years.

Mr. BARTLETT. We just do not know, is that what we are saying? Mr. LASHOF. It is not a well-defined question is the problem. There is not a single residence time. It is not exponential decay. Mr. BARTLETT. But do we still have a ways to go? There still is a sink out there that will pick up the CO2? That is a correct statement?

Mr. LASHOF. That is correct. That is fully accounted for in the projection that we have been talking about.

Mr. WATSON. Indeed, we expect that roughly two gigatons of the anthropogenic carbon, human carbon, goes into the oceans every year. The energy emissions are about 6 billion tons per year. We expect at least 2 billion tons of that is absorbed by the ocean and that is fully reflected in the models.

Chairman TALENT. I am going to, Dr. Watson, since you gave up a trip to come here, I believe I am going to let you have the last word. I want to thank everybody for being here this morning and for your patience with the Committee and our questions, which often may have been perhaps too passionate. But it is a very important subject. On that I think we all agree.

I thank the witnesses for being here and adjourn the hearing. [Whereupon, at 2:12 p.m., the Committee was adjourned, subject to the call of the Chair.]

TESTIMONY

Full Committee Hearing

July 29, 1998

Opening Statement of James M. Talent

Chairman

House Small Business Committee

Today, the Committee on Small Business will be holding its third hearing on the impact of the Kyoto Protocol, in which the United States agreed to reduce its production of greenhouse gases to below 1990 levels. Our previous hearings established that this is equivalent to raising the cost of energy to the American economy by 30-50%. For Americans this would mean:

1. Gasoline prices would increase by 65 cents per gallon;

2. Natural gas prices for industry would increase by 90%; and

3. Gross Domestic Product would decline by 2.5%.

The proponents of the Kyoto Protocol justify this effect on the American economy by the need to prevent what they describe as catastrophic warming of the Earth's temperature.

I called this hearing with scientific witnesses to determine whether and to what extend the Earth is actually warming. My research into the subject suggests that the catastrophic global warming predictions of Kyoto proponents are based primarily on

1. The pretense of a consensus within the scientific community, when in fact no such consensus exists;

2. Highly selective and misleading use of data; and

3. Utter failure to confront the body of evidence suggesting that the Earth's warming trend is natural and beneficial.

We have a number of distinguished scientists here, several of whom will attempt to disabuse me of these views. The Committee is grateful for the time of these witnesses. I will introduce them later, and now recognize the ranking member, the distinguished gentlelady from New York.

50-206 98-3

Verbal Remarks: John R. Christy, 27 July 1998

House Committee on Small Business

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and members of the Committee on Small Business for inviting me to provide some information on the global climate. Please note that I will be referring to figures which you should have attached to your copies of my remarks.

Twenty years is nothing in terms of the Earth's climate, but twenty years is everything in terms of the science of climate as shown in Figure 1.

In the late-1970's, the climate stories were filled with the potential disasters of the coming Ice Age. I lived in South Dakota during the coldest winter of that decade and we can only hope those ice-age forecasts of the 70's will never be realized.

Ten years ago, the potential catastrophe of human-induced global warming began receiving a lot of attention, thanks in part to a couple of warm (but not record breaking) summers in the eastern US. The predictions were horrifying ... rapid temperature rises, coastal flooding, massive hurricanes and so on.

Twenty years now have passed since the 1970's and we are now almost exclusively discussing global warming brought to the forefront ten years ago. Twenty years makes all the difference in the science of climate.

When global warming became a popular issue ten years ago, I and others were concerned with the lack of proper data to describe the Earth system and a lack of perspective in which to judge the quasi-extreme events occurring at that time events so often connected with human-induced climate change. In 1989, NASA scientist Dr. Roy Spencer and I set out to create a satellite dataset of truly global observations of atmospheric temperature. These data would not be plagued as the traditional surface data are by changing locations or dependence on transient shipping or lack of coverage for large areas. We did not know what this dataset would show, our goal was precision to provide scientists with excellent, truly global temperature data.

An added incentive for us was that two of the atmospheric layers we could observe happened to be two layers for which climate models indicated the largest and most rapid responses to human-induced climate change would occur - the lower troposphere (sfc to 20,000 ft) warming faster even than the surface, and the stratosphere which would cool. In the data presented here, all known artificial effects, such as orbit decay and orbit drift, have been removed.

Figure 2 shows the tropospheric temperature since 1979 has little trend, either up or down, while the stratosphere shows a decline, being heavily influenced by volcanic events and ozone depletion.

Were these data accurate? Balloons also measure the atmospheric temperature at various places around the world. I and others have compared the satellite data with many estimates of regional and global temperature, with one example shown in Figure 3 produced by the U.K. Meteorological Office using about 400 balloon stations. The comparison shows the correlation is high and there is no warming in either dataset for 1979-97. The satellites were truly providing the precision for which we had hoped. This is that same period in which the science of climate shifted from thinking mostly about global cooling to thinking mostly about global warming.

If we look at the comparison since 1979 between the surface and the atmosphere in Figure 4, the temperatures seem to be going in somewhat different directions. Now, we have only twenty years of satellite data – too short a period to judge long-term climate variations. However, these data tell us that in this layer and during this period when CO2 warming should be most pronounced, we see no trend. We also see something unpredicted by climate models a difference in trend between surface temperatures and the deep atmosphere. Could the consensus about global warming reached by these same climate models be misrepresentative of the next century? Twenty years of truly global data are important to the science of climate.

The recent fixation on extreme events as indicators of climate change is misleading because we know very little about the rates of their occurrence and we are able to publicize even marginal extremes to fantastic proportions. Perspective is often lost in the media, though fortunately we have considerable historical information archived at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).

For example, last month, a government-sponsored press conference informed you that five states, MD, CT, MA, VT and NJ experienced one record monthly high temperature at some point in the period January through May of this year. Human-induced warming was implicated in that announcement. Now, these five states would fit into the state of Kansas TWICE - not a very geographically representative sample. However, let me put a different spin on record high temperatures, provided through NCDC, and you will see my point. divides the recorded climate history of the entire U.S. into halves at 1940 and looks at all-time record high temperatures, one would see that 4 states had equal highs in both halves. Of the remaining 46 states, 35 recorded their alltime record high temperature prior to 1940 and only 11 have since 1940. Or, take the Midwest where newly digitized information from early years now provides a better look at extremes. For the ten hottest 3-day periods (i.e. killer heat waves) in the Midwest since 1896, only two occurred after 1940, and they placed 7th and 8th.' Do these results prove cooling? No. They prove that the spin one places on extreme events can be very misleading.

1 K. Kunkel, Midwestern Regional Climate Center

The recent attention given to the heat in the South is another example. An A.P. story declared June 1998 the hottest in Huntsville, Alabama's history. I was surprised that our Office of the State Climatologist hadn't been asked about this record which I knew to be misleading. So, I did some checking and found at least 6 other years between 1914 and 1953 in which June was hotter than in 1998. I sent the information to the local paper which eventually published it. The problem was that a local weather service forecasting office, which reporters typically call, did not have access to records before 1958, and thus could not have known about the earlier, hotter years.

Again, the Florida fires and drought were highlighted every evening on the news. Was this drought remarkable? The answer from climate records at NCDC is no. In Figure 5, I show the percentage of months in which Northern Florida experienced drought conditions decade by decade. In this century you can see that in only one other decade - the 1940's were there fewer drought months than the 1990's.

Yes, it was hot in the South, but this was due to a weather pattern that placed warm air in the South, and cool air in the West. To a climatologist it was equally remarkable that towns in the High Plains recorded their latest snowfall ever in June 1998. Or that Fresno, California, my hometown, for the first time in its history failed to reach 100°F by the middle of July. In fact, for the nation as a whole, the temperature in June 1998 was below normal.

To see the real picture of extreme weather variations given by droughts and floods from 1895, turn to Figure 6. In this chart, again kindly provided by NCDC, is the percentage of area in the lower 48 states which in any given month experienced extreme conditions, dry or wet. The results show there is no significant long term trend in either condition. In fact, we have not had a widespread drought in several years, and looking at the chart, we should expect one in the near future, based solely on statistical probability. My point is this: arriving at conclusions about human-induced climate change based on selective extremes is faulty and misleading. In the United States, the evidence presented here suggests human-induced climate change is not (yet) discernable.

The satellite and balloon data show that significant global warming is not now occurring, though the simple theory and laboratory experiments of greenhouse warming are indisputable. The detection of human effects on the Earth's climate has not been convincingly proven because (1) the variations we have observed to date are not outside of the natural variations of the system and (2) the Earth system is very complex and probably has ways to expel heat energy which are not properly accounted for in climate models. The stratospheric temperatures suggest something is going on, but separating the massive effects