good morning welcome to the select committee on energy independence and global warming all eyes are focused on the economic and environmental disaster unfolding in the gulf of mexico bp oil spill is causing an immediate human and ecological tragedy the spill is yet another dramatic example of why we must find alternatives to oil the american people are desperate for safe clean energy alternatives solutions that add jobs end our oil addiction and heed the warnings of climate scientists who have called for pollution reductions eleven people tragically lost their lives in the b explosion and for the past week an estimated five thousand barrels of oil a day have been leaking into the ocean as a result the gulf coast fishing seafood and tourism industries are bracing for the worst wildlife refuges and marine sanctuaries remain in harms way congress will keep a vigilant eye on bp's efforts to stop the leak and clean up this environmental mess however the visible oil is not the only c pollution we have to worry about once gasoline is burned in our cars and trucks carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere we can see the oil slick in the gulf from space but it is the buildup of invisible carbon dioxide in our atmosphere that is preventing heat from escaping back into space even as carbon dioxide's concentration in the atmosphere has been accumulating so has our scientific understanding of its effects and impacts based on over one hundred and fifty years of scientific research a clear picture has emerged of rising temperatures increased droughts severe rain storms and an acidifying ocean those who deny global warming point uncertainties that have been refuted they ignore the overwhelming observational evidence that the increased levels of heat trapping pollution are already warming the planet instead of trying to understand the science they use stolen e mails about analysis of tree rings in siberia to turn an honest discussion into a russian tree ring circus or they manufacture a cooling trend by cherry picking a few years out of a longer record of warming temperatures while the deniers hope to confuse the public the real world consequences of inaction mount over the weekend killer storms blew through tennessee mississippi and kentucky in nashville nearly thirteen inches of rain fell in just over two day's time almost doubling the previous record that fell in the aftermath of a hurricane in one thousand nine hundred and seventy nine these storms follow the wettest march on record in boston two fifty year storms occurred within two weeks of each other the national guard was mobilized hundreds of people were evacuated from their homes the region suffered millions of dollars in damages no single rain storm can be attributed to climate change nor can a snowstorm disprove its existence but the underlying science and the observed trends do point to more extreme weather events especially heavy precipitation events because  atmosphere can hold more moisture extreme rainfall is just one of the consequences of the carbon pollution we are releasing into the air our witnesses today will explain how science has revealed this unseen pollution for what it is and discuss the very real consequences of its continuing accumulation in the atmosphere as we approach summer our clean energy debate needs to acknowledge what many would like to deny our dependence on oil carries with it national security economic and environmental risks as gas prices rise and the oil slick spreads perhaps we will finally acknowledge that we cannot drill our way to energy independence we have two percent of proven oil reserves in the world perhaps we can also acknowledge the basic facts that have been known for decades increasing carbon pollution in the atmosphere is warming the planet and that the only way to put a halt to such warming is to move to a clean energy solution i would now like to turn and recognize the ranking member of the committee the gentleman from wisconsin mister sense i thank the chairman when global warming alarmists tried to advance their agenda a decade ago they pointed to a damning graph in the two thousand and one ipcc report that showed a sharp rise in temperatures over the past century this graph is commonly known as the hockey stick and it did a good job of scaring a lot of people especially politicians but the authors of the hockey stick may not have done a good job with their math at least that is what a couple of enterprising researchers t in double checking the hockey stick data stephen mcintyre and ross mckitrick showed that it wasn't as solid as previously thought lately a lot of people have been taking a second look at the so called settled science of climate change data collected by nasa may not be reliable as once believed and the climategate scandal shows at best that some researchers did everything they could to prevent review of their work and at worst they outright so manipulate data the debate on the accuracy of climate science is good for science proclamations that the science is settled are just politics the shortfalls in the scientific record could have expensive consequences proponents of expensive regulatory reform must understand that they need more than political victories the epa's burdensome regulatory regime must be based on sound scientific foundation  and thirty five two reliance on an unpublished study to claim the world has suffered rising costs due to catastrophic weather events where the author later said there was insufficient evidence to support the claim three stating that fifty five percent of the netherlands is below sea level when in fact only twenty six percent is four failing to support the claim that africa's agricultural output would be produced by fifty percent by tw a third of all the sources were not peer reviewed publications but rather gray literature such as press releases newspaper and magazine articles discussion papers master's and ph d theses working papers and advocacy literature published by environmental groups these sources lack authoritative scientific rigor and are more often than not intended as propaganda this week the interacademy council said that it had picked the twelve member committee to conduct the climategate scandal brought serious questions about the reliability of data compiled by the climatic research unit at the university of east anglia these e mails showed a clear bias a systematic suppression of dissenting opinion intimidation of journal editors and journals that would publish articles questioning the so called consensus manipulation of data and models and possible criminal activity to evade legitimate requests for data and underlying may have cherry picked weather stations to favor those that would produce higher temperatures that produce a record that is warmer than truthful internal e mails also showed that at least one senior nasa scientist raised questions about the accuracy of that agenc temperature data set the ipcc report relies heavily on the cru and nasa data to support its conclusions and the questions raised about these data sets raise even more questions about the accuracy  ipcc's study a report issued today by the select committee republican staff shows that the epa is violating its own rules by relying so heavily on the ipcc report both the epa and the office of management and budget guidelines state that an agency must base any regulatory proposal on science that is clear and transparent omb guidelines further state that simply because a study is peer reviewed doesn't mean that it fulfills the requirement that the results are transparent and replicable i want to welcome here today lord christopher monckton the chief policy advisor of the science and public policy institute by helping to check and double check the scientific literature lord monck helping to improve the state of climate science and i look forward to hearing both his perspective and the perspective of the other witnesses today thank you the chairman we thank the gentleman the chair recognizes the gentleman from here today and i look forward to relying on their expertise as we address the increasingly dire and challenging impacts of global warming i am from the san francisco bay area where our most recognizable icon is the golden gate bridge a little known fact however is just next to the bridge is our nation's oldest tidal gauge a one hundred and fifty year old station that has given us the longest continuous tide record in the western hemisphere the gauge shows an increase level rise of eight inches over the past century and the rate of that sea level rise has increased and is expected to accelerate further in fact the area is referred to as ground zero for sea level rise san francisco airport and surrounding communities could be under water by the end of the century we in the bay area live on the edge we know the seriousness of this problem for our ecosystem our infrastructure and our coastal and shoreline communities in light of these most basic observations of  changing planet acting on global warming in the here and now is just plain common sense that said the complexity of how we act on these changes demands our utmost attention the sharp tried and tested knowledge of our top scientists all time for opening statements by the members has been completed the chairman we will now turn to our first witness this morning he is doctor jim hurrell mister hurrell is a senior scientist within the climate analysis section of the national center for atmospheric research his research focuses on climate variability and human caused climate change he has contributed to the intergovernmental panel on climate change the ipcc assessments he also actively involved in the international research program on climate variability and predictability doctor hurrell holds advanced degrees in atmospheric science from purdue university he is a fellow of the american meteorological society we look forward to hearing your testimony doctor hurrell whenever you are ready please begin mister hurrell thank you mister chairman ranking member sensenbrenner and other members of the select committee i thank you for the opportunity to speak today on observed and likely future changes in climate and the contribution from human activity to those changes although uncertainties exist significant advances in the scientific understanding of climate change now make it clear that there has been a change in climate that goes beyond the range of natural variability and this change is almost certainly due to human activities this conclusion is drawn from multiple lines of evidence published in thousands of thoroughly reviewed scientific studies by many different investigators and independently assessed by many groups including the u s national academy of science the fact is that the globe is warming dramatically and this change is already affecting both physical and biological systems global surface temperatures today are almost one five degrees fahrenheit warmer than at the beginning of the st century and the rates of temperature rise are greatest in recent decades fourteen of the last fifteen years are the warmest globally since  fifty and the last decade is four degrees fahrenheit warmer than the s there is a very high degree of confidence in these numbers urban heat island effects for instance are real  very local and they have been accounted for in the analysis there is no urban heat effect over the oceans where warming has also been very pronounced at both the surface and at depth moreover warming ocean water expand and thus contribute to sea level rise observed and accelerating melting of glaciers icecaps and ice sheets are also contributing by adding water to the ocean instrumental measurements of sea level indicate that the global average has increased over the last century and the rate of sea level rise is increasing global sea level rise is probably the single best metric of accumulative global warming since it integrates the reactions from several different components of the climate system and is accurately observed from satellite instruments changes in global temperature or sea level do not imply however that changes are uniform around the globe regional differences arise from natural variability and these effects can be large from year to year or even decade to decade for instance a historically large el nino event helped make one thousand nine hundred and ninety eight one of if not the warmest year on record while strong  conditions contributed to relatively cooler worldwide conditions in two thousand and eight simply connecting these two data points in time as was shown in the graph has been done by some to misleadingly argue global warming has ceased ignoring the fact that the longer term temperature trend is clearly upward and the years since two thousand have remained among the warmest on record because of such natural variations in the climate system climate scientists expect occasional but temporary slowdowns in the rate of warming even while greenhouse gas concentrations continue to increase climate models also predict such a behavior and today's best climate models are able to reproduce many of the observed changes in climate observed over the past century climate models are not perfect uncertainties arise from shortcomings in our understanding of climate processes and how to best represent them in models yet the best climate models are extremely useful tools for understanding and determining the factors that are driving the observed warming and the results are clear the surface warming of recent decades along with many other changes in climate is mainly a response to increased concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which now far exceed pre industrial values in summary the scientific understanding of climate change is sufficiently clear to show that climate change from global warming is already upon us many impacts are evident and they will grow larger with time uncertainties do remain especially regarding how climate will change at regional and local scales but the climate is changing and the rate of changes projected exceeds anything seen in nature in the past ten thousand years thank you again for this opportunity to address the committee and i look forward to answering any questions th our second witness today is doctor james mccarthy doctor mccarthy is a professor of biological oceanography at harvard university he served as co chair of the impacts adaptation and vulnerability portion of the ipcc report published in two thousand and one he was also one of the lead authors on the arctic climate impact assessment doctor mccarthy received his ph d from scripps institution of oceanography is a former president of the american association for the advancement of science a fellow of the american academy of arts and sciences and a foreign member of the royal swedish academy of sciences we welcome you doctor mccarthy whenever mccarthy you asked that we address four questions and i have done this in my testimony and so i will very briefly run through my responses to those questions you asked that we talk about observations how do we know that the climate is changing what evidence do we have for attribution of these changes and what are some of the anticipated impacts and then finally you asked how climate scientists should be furthering the understanding of climate change so i am an oceanographer i have worked on all the oceans in my career ocean temperatures are changing in a way that could not have been imagined when i began my career as an oceanographer i distinctly remember a day in one thousand nine hundred and eighty six when someone walked into my office and showed me the first graph suggesting ocean temperatures were changing now people ask how confident are we of these changes if we look at the first slide and these are the four graphics from my testimony this shows the array of sensing instruments that are employed in the ocean today this is a snapshot from last month there are over three thousand buoys that have sensing devices that profile move up and down in the upper ocean to depths of six thousand feet and they report their data by satellite to shore stations so this is how we are tracking today the changes in ocean temperature and are very confident that they are responding to the climate system we know now that more than ninety percent of the heat that has been trapped in the atmosphere by the accumulated greenhouse gases is being stored in the ocean the oceans are an intricate part of the climate system now i would like to say something about sea level rise which has already been introduced by my coll as twelve to twenty four inches but it was also not known how rapidly ice in greenland and ice in the antarctic could contribute to sea level rise if you thought of a block of ice sitting on the counter and imagined turning up the temperature of the room you would imagine it would melt faster that would be true but what we didn't understand is how it could become unstable and begin to lose ice to the ocean and once in the ocean the ocean is warmer than the ice it would melt even more rapidly so if we look at rise for the ipcc and you notice the red lines which are the tide gauge data referred to earlier by congressman speier we see the blue line these are the data which are now available from satellites which are tracking ocean elevation far more precisely for global computation than local estimates at tide gauge stations and you will see that the blue line extends up to the upper part of this curve and the three bounds the upper the middle and the lower rapidly greenland and antarctica are changing and best estimates of sea level rise now for this century are between two point five and three feet if you look at the next slide you can see in the bars at the bottom the lower higher calcium carbonate calcium carbonate is in a very very delicate balance in the ocean the organism is taking the dissolved constituents out of the water making its hard shell but the water is trying to pull it back in the solution and trying to redissolve it the organism is constantly working to excrete material the ocean is trying to dissolve it as you add carbon dioxide to the ocean you change the composition change the relationship with this buffering system it becomes more corrosive that is referred to as ocean acidification we know now the rates at which this is changing are faster than any time any time in the history that we can reconstruct over the last several million years now just finally i am going to say something about the distribution conclude by saying that these changes are in the scientific literature beyond all bounds of historic record and i would just like to comment with an opinion in response to your last question that i think that climate scientists have an obligation to do everything we to help convey clearly this message to the public thank you the chairman thank you doctor mccarthy very much our third witness is lord christopher monckton he is chief policy advisor for the science and public policy institute he holds a diploma in journalism from the university college cardiff he has worked as an editor at various news outlets including the universe the telegraph sunday magazine today news your committee thank you for having the courtesy to ask me to testify in front of you i am going to testify not of course as a scientist because i am not one but as a policy maker and the role of policy makers when confronted with scientists is to know what questions to ask and i am going to raise one or two questions now about some of the evidence you already heard if you look at the slide now before you that slide purports but does not demonstrate that the rate of global warming is itself increasing this is taken from the ipcc's two thousand seven report where it appears three times large and in full color however it relies on a bogus statistical technique which is applying multiple trend lines to a single sto set and if you choose your starting and ending points carefully enough you can make it go in any direction you want this graph is regularly relied upon by mister pachauri of the ipcc i challenged him on it recently in copenhagen it is also tried to claim that the third rate of increase was greater than the other two it isn't they are exactly parallel at roughly one point six celsius per century now we can't explain what caused the first two rapid rates of warming because we didn't have the instrumentation to find out however in the satellite area to the right of the green vertical line there we are able to observe what caused most of the third piece of rapid warming next slide please and increases from the individual greenhouse gases we will see that what we end up with is a fourfold overstatement of the rate of increase in global temperature that was actually observed if we use the  published in two thousand and nine and published again this year showing eleven models all predicting various rates of warming from one four to infinity kelvin if you double co concentration next slide please the reality however is just seven which is less than a quarter of what the un would predict for a doubling of co concentration the conclusion from this is that we can explain the warming by other methods not very much warming is going to happen and therefore one should be very careful before spending money next slide please on cap and trade because even if we were to shut down the entire global economy for twenty three years all you would forestall is one fahrenheit degree of global warming even if the un is right in estimating the amount of warming from  therefore the correct policy is to have the courage to do nothing you will lose nothing thereby there are many other problems to address i would recommend you address those and not this the chairman thank you lord monckton very much our fourth witness  today is doctor chris field doctor field is the founding director of the carnegie institution's department of global ecology he is also a professor of biology in environmental earth science  at stanford university he was a coordinating lead author for the two thousand and seven fourth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change currently he is co chair of the impacts adaptation and vulnerability portion of the upcoming ipcc report doctor field received his ph d from stanford in one thousand nine hundred and eighty one among his many distinctions he is a member of the national academy of sciences we welcome you doctor field mister field thank you chairman markey ranking member sensenbrenner and other distinguished members of the committee what i would like to do today is take a couple of minutes to talk about observed changes in the climate system i won't be focusing at all on projections but only things that have been observed and are clear in the record if i could have the slides please as doctor hurrell has said it is very clear that during the period when we have had good instrumental records from weather stations the global climate has warmed the record you see here is the land temperatures from all the world's meteorological stations since the late th century the warming has been about one point five fahrenheit with all of the warmest years in the record in the last dozen two thousand and nine based on the data from the nasa goddard institute for space studies was the third warmest year on record if we look at the united states next slide please you see a very similar pattern but with a lot more jumpiness as you would expect for a region that represents only about two percent of the planet's surface what i would like to do is spend a couple of minutes talking about whether there are other ways we could infer whether or not the climates change is nature telling us how climates change and the next slide please gives an overview of what the ipcc has concluded we have a wide range of observations now spanning many decades on a tremendous number of physical and biological systems these are things like what are the locations physical and biological systems and then it said well which of these are changing in the direction that is consistent with climate change being the forcing and which are changing in the direction that is not consisting the overwhelming conclusion is that the vast majority of these natural thermometers are indicating that global warming is occurring fully ninety four percent of the statistically significant changes in physical systems are consistent with global warming fully ninety percent of the statistically significant trends in biological systems are consistent with global warming one couldn't look at any single one of these trends and conclude that it is proof that the climate system is warming but when you step back and look at all twenty nine thousand there is a tremendous level of confidence in the numbers now a lot of these trends are issues that don't necessarily have a lot of traction on human systems but i want to focus on three that do next slide please most states in the american west get at least half of their water supply for summertime from snowpack and we have seen dramatic changes in the water content of the spring snowpack the april st snowpack over the last fifty years in the pacific northwest there has been a decrease of about thirty percent in the interior ranges there has been a decrease of about twenty percent this is the water supply that water short regions depend on in order to make it through the summer and over the last fifty years we have seen profound decreases next slide please another impact that is really clear from the data is that wildfires have been increasing across the american west and that the frequency of wildfires is strongly sensitive to temperature anomal what you can see in the plot is that the black line tracing annual temperature almost traces precisely the variation in the number of wildfires essentially the risk of wildfires goes up dramatically as the temperature goes up a third observed trend i want to talk about is in the next slide and this is the trend of observed changes in the days with the heaviest precipitation what you can see is that from the middle of the last century there has been a sixty seven percent increase in the days with the heaviest precipitation in new england over all of the eastern u s there has been at least a twenty percent increase in days with heavy precipitation heavy precipitation is essentially the driving force for the kinds of floods that we have seen  in tennessee recently we can't look at any single weather event and ascribe it with one hundred percent confidence to climate but what we can see is that this kind of change in the climate system is increasing the risk of damaging weather events you know i think that all of us would agree that you can't get in a car with a bald tire and have confidence that you are going to have an accident but you can say that you would consider the risk unacceptable with climate i think it is very clear that we have now pushed the system to a point where it basically has four bald tires and a flashing check engine light thank you very much the chairman thank you doctor field very much and our fin witness today is doctor lisa graumlich doctor graumlich is the director of the school of natural resources and the environment at the university of arizona her research focuses on the interplay of global climate change and natural resources management she has also directed the university of arizona's institute for the study of planet earth and montana state university's big sky institute recently she served on the  panel that reviewed the scientific work of the university of east anglia's climate research unit following the release of private e mails of some of their scientists doctor graumlich received her ph d from the college of forest resources at the much for inviting me to speak with you today in this very important hearing in what i am going to say today and in my written testimony i have focused on the observational record of current and past climate variability and i do that as a tree ring scientist as a dendrochronologist by training and i want to spend a moment talking a bit about the kind of perspective that one brings to this question as someone that ring records of the past and i am going to take you back in time twenty years when i was an assistant professor at ucla as a tree ring scientist i was off to the sierra nevada to look for very very but as you went above the tree line there were very large dead trees i mean very large dead trees above current tree line not just a couple hundreds of them and what that meant was that in previous eras tree line had been higher implying that temperatures had been warmer so as a trained tree ring scientist it turns out that we can very accurately date the innermost rings of those dead trees that tells us when the trees were established and the outermost ring with a little sort of fifty year or so error because of the loss of sap which tells us when those trees died so what we know is over the last three thousand years tree line was higher and then somewhere around nine hundred and fifty a d there was this massive die off and tree line reestablished at the current rate so i went back to the lab started looking at those data and started to also reflect on the fact that if you thought about those dates those dates were very consistent with the time in which the norse vikings colonized greenland and iceland and the dates at which my trees died were about the same time as those colonies failed so recall this is twenty years ago there were two outcomes one is that i became fascinated with what caused this long term variability in climate but the second outcome that is apropos today was that i was very much struck by the fact that when i described my research to the public it was very clear that it appeared to them that i had this very strong ability to say that yes current climate trends were well within the envelope of natural variability because i had trees in sierra nevada and historical data in the north atlantic that is not climate science that is assembly of a couple of just so stories that tell us something about climate at two places on the surface of the earth and what has happened subsequently is that along with dozens of colleagues we have very carefully scanned the earth for other kinds of high resolution proxy data tree ring records historical documents speleothems ice cores any number of  you try to understand how they reflect or don't reflect temperature data in doing that we discovered that in fact there were a couple of other places around the globe that had this medieval warm period in particular  part of the arctic and parts of of course the north atlantic and the western part of the u s in other places like the northwest the tropical pacific temperatures were also cooler during the so called medieval warm period and that this dozens and dozens of peer reviewed studies have allowed us to be able to assert with great confidence after twenty years of looking for these kinds of records that in fact the late th century is the warmest period of earth history in the last five hundred to one zero years so finally it is these kind of data that were assembled by the climatic research unit at the university of east anglia i had the scientific malpractice in any of the work of the climate research unit and had it been there we believe that we would have detected it rather we found a small group of dedicated if slightly disorganized researchers who were ill prepared for being the focus of public attention the full report from that panel is appended to my own testimony thank you the chairman thank you doctor graumlich very much the chair will now recognize himself for a round of questions today is election day in the united kingdom and it is unclear which party will emerge as the winner what is clear is that the leaders of the three major parties believe pollution must be addressed nick clegg the leader of the liberal democrats has said climate change scientists now agree that time is running out the next parliament is the last chance we have as a nation to introduce the bold measures of legislation leading us to set us on the path to green and sustainable growth in the future gordon brown leader of the labor party has said everybody knows the importance of climate change it is one of the key issues that has moved me most and  made me determined to act internationally as well as nationally over the past few years david cameron leader of the conservatives has said we all agree that climate change is one of the greatest and most daunting challenges of our age we have a moral imperative to act and act now and this concern about global warming is not new for british politicians please play the videotape  doctor hurrell despite all the stolen e mails ipcc issues what is your conclusion in terms of the strength of the case that has been made that global warming is real and that the consequences are catastrophic mister hurrell i very much agree with those conclusions i think as i tried to state in both my written and my oral testimony much of the strength lies not in individual papers individual data sets individual analyses but rather the fact that there are many multiple lines of evidence conducted by multiple investigators as we heard in the other oral testimonies spanning many physical and biological variables that all give a very consistent picture of global warming of a warming world and the science has advanced to the point that we can clearly attribute these changes is attributable to human activities been a number of efforts over the last maybe ten to fifteen years to use the knowledge we have of what could change climate and some of these factors were referred to by  and when you use these known aspects of climate to reconstruct climate over the last few decades you find that there aren't big missing pieces that the changes in climate that we have observed can be explained unusually cool relative to the years before immediately following the eruption of mount pinatubo the largest volcano to have affected climate our most recent volcano that was very much in the news will probably not have much effect climate because the release of material from that volcano was low in the atmosphere and of course we know interrupted air traffic so when you put these pieces together you find that there aren't big gaps there aren't periods where you can't explain how climate has changed directly its contribution to the upper atmosphere when you put these pieces together there are no great mysteries about how climate has changed over the last ten to twenty years and it is entirely consistent with the forcing by greenhouse gases  don't you just quickly try to answer that question as well mister field you know one of the major focal areas in climate science over the last several decades has been a topic that is called fingerprinting how could we really be sure that the climate change  unequivocal is a consequence of human actions and there are a large number of independent climate fingerprints for human action most of which don't require fancy climate models at all a good example of a fingerprint is that if climate change is caused by greenhouse gases we expect most of the warming to be in the lower atmosphere with cooling in the upper atmosphere exactly as we see doctor mccarthy already mentioned this balance between the heat that you calculate should be in the climate system and the amount of heat that we actually see in the oceans these fingerprinting techniques are very very powerful at discriminating alternative explanations and they point overwhelmingly at the human release of heat trapping gases as  many scientists have looked at the issue warming is unequivocal the evidence for the human fingerprint is very very strong and the prospect of continued warming in the future is very strong the chairman so you do disagree with lord mo acquaintanceship with many of the people that were mentioned in the e mails you are probably aware that both doctor malcolm hughes and i are from the university of arizona and that we both have professional relationships with the the data that myself and my students have produced have been at times part of these very very large compilations of data that have allowed us to assess the nature of climate variability over the last five hundred t what i think the panel took away from the critics of the cru scientists is that in particular what we discovered was that for example the  data and the development of documentation on computer code such that it could be widely distributed and understood by the general public was something that for years had not really been a  high priority often it was unfunded by the kind of scientific funding sources that were available and what was clear to the panel was that the stolen e mails as well as other things other events had unit and we fulfilled that charge mister sensenbrenner were well then that was an extremely limited charge you know that pre ordained a conclusion was there any analysis of the actual e mails or the biases that i believe that the panel was chosen to minimize bias mister sensenbrenner well lord oxburgh has strong personal and financial interests in the anti global warming policy he is director of an international environmental organization called globe international where lord oxburgh himself even told the university that he was unfit to chair the panel because of conflicts of interest and warning the uea that people might question his independence were any of those issues raised oxburgh or any of the other members of the panel ms graumlich those issues weren't raised what we were focusing on was the science of the climate research unit as revealed in their publication record and in their day to day operations and lord oxburgh was actually a functioned very much as someone who has a ph d in earth sciences and brought his scientific mindset to that task well if he is a director of an advocacy organization called globe international you know i have had meetings with and tiffs with ever since kyoto you know together with the intertwining of you and other members i don't think that that was an objective review i don't know how universities in the united kingdom get to the bottom of potential scandals but i don't think our news media here in the united states would  allow any university to get away with a panel that would come to a pre ordained conclusion and i yield back the balance of my time focusing on the science our purpose today was to do precisely that and i find it a little embarrassing and sad that the minority's witness is a journalist with no scientific training who didn't come here with any information against the science it has been intriguing to me i have heard mister monckton i have often thought appropriately named  in the past and it is entertaining but it doesn't deal very much with the essence of what we are talking about here my sense is that it wasn't doctor graumlich there were several other studies there has been one by the  continuing and concluded that this is a tempest in a teapot i mean there is nothing here that contradicts the basic science that has been reiterated by the other three distinguished scientists that join you on the panel is that correct ms graumlich that is correct and if i could add to the list of reviews that have happened at my own institution the university of arizona at the request of the president all of the e mails an inquiry was made every single e mail was read including those that dealt with doctor hughes and there was a finding that there was no impropriety that affected the scientific conclusions of doctor hughes and others though i suppose i should declare for the purposes of the record i have worked with globe international in other areas dealing for instance with serious problems dealing with international water supplies i don't think it has affected my objectivity nor did i notice any sinister underlying motives or an international agenda at work doctor the course of those ten or twelve years not going back now to one thousand nine hundred and eighty six when you talked about the trends that first sort of caught your attention but just in the ten or twelve years since we first met have distinctly was our discussion about infrastructure and wondering the degree to which planning particularly for a built infrastructure the bridges  i would have said well this is something that we need to be concerned about in the future but if you took the best estimates of the ipcc at that time the planning horizons were out many decades now that has all become very compressed a century it is a very different looking florida and although you think that rise just the height of the counter here is not a lot but when you consider low lying land and how far that reaches inland our gulf coast  very much in the news these days will be dramatically affected by a sea level rise of that sort and of course there are entire island nations that with the combination of the sea level rise and the loss of coral through the change of  mccarthy people tend not to appreciate how conservative the ipcc process is when you get a bunch of scientists together and get them to agree on a statement trimming as many caveats out as you can because the scientists always want to add caveats well we are not entirely sure but this would be what would be expected you end up with a conservative statement you end up without extremes on other side being represented in this case in sea level it was a very conservative statement  is in terms of the risks that are at stake we take in the northwest very seriously that diminution of the snow pack the less water content pretty dramatic just in the community that i live in and the fact that more than half of the american population is in the six hundred and seventy three coastal counties when you are talking about  inches let alone feet this is pretty compelling at least in my mind but the point i guess in terms of a policy perspective based on the potential risks based on the economic the security problems and just the waste of resources is there any good scientific reason not to advance sound policies even if we weren't concerned about global thank you mister acting chairman if that is what you are first let me begin by apologizing i have had to duck in and out a couple of times because i have another hearing going forward downstairs on the health care issue second i want to welcome doctor gra ch you are now at my alma mater the university of arizona where i received both my undergraduate and law degree i am pleased to have you here and i am proud of the university of arizona and proud of it being recognized for the knowledge and skill of its scientists and professors i guess i have to begin doctor monckton by expressing a little shock at the questioning that just went forward and some reference to your name i think that is a little inappropriate but if that is what we are going do in this hearing so be it i do believe you were just told that because you are not a scientist you didn't bring forward any scientific information or any information of any value to this hearing somehow i don't seem to agree with that i think you brought forth an analysis of scientific information which i thought was fairly clear and i guess i would like to see you at least have an opportunity to repaint that picture because apparently some people in the room didn't understand that what you said was here is scientific data here is how it was presented here is the conclusion that was drawn from that scientific data and here is why that conclusion is in fact unsupported and apparently that escaped  attention or the understanding of some people here is there a possibility we could call that graph back up and you could explain it to us maybe we can get it the second time mister monckton i am most grateful i think obviously what is happening here is that a certain amount of politics has crept in on one side subsequent slides first of all if you choose different starting points and ending points for where you do your trend lines you can make the lines go completely make the trend go in completely the other direction there you have got  first two cannot have been caused by co on any view the increase in co over those periods wasn't enough even on the u n s formula to cause that the third one we know was largely caused because it falls in the satellite era largely caused by a naturally occurring decrease in cloud cover chiefly in the tropics allowing more sunlight to hit the ground and that if you use the u n s multiplying up of the warming effect of that should have caused surface temperature which they do by reference to platinum resistance thermometers comparing that with the temperatures they see on the ground but also changes in outgoing radiation and changes in cloud cover all of these satellite data show us exactly what has caused the warming of that most recent rapid period and it was largely in fact very nearly all to do with the reduction in cloud cover that happened quite naturally over the period nothing to do with warming what i am saying is that in the one period we can tell about what caused the warming the satellite period it is clear that the warming was largely naturally caused and there is paper after paper in the literature establishing this go on again please next slide this is all predicting very very rapid rates of warming but this is the relationship between warming at the surface and extra outgoing long wave radiation most of the models predict there will be less radiation escaping into space if you warm the surface the truth however as you see in the middle panel now that is the earth radiation budget experiment satellite measurement it shows a very rapid increase in the amount of outgoing radiation escaping to space as you warm the surface what that means very simply is that the radiation isn't being trapped down here to cause warming at anything like the rate that the u n predicts and that is why professor lindzen of mit has concluded that the amount of warming you can expect to get from a doubling of co concentration this is scientific measurement not playing with xbox three hundred and sixty models is only naught seven kelvin compared with a three point and i would note there is a dispute about whether we actually landed on the moon and there is a dispute about whether the earth is round and there is a dispute about gravity in some places but there is no we will get to you lord monckton shortly but i want to twin of climate change i would like you to describe what actually happens to species when they are exposed and i want to put up a slide that i believe i got from doctor lubchenko this slide basically shows what happens when you put a pterapod a small creature in the water in the left you see its picture these are relatively small and this shows what the pterapod melts its little calcium carbonate structure actually melts and i just wonder if you can describe what the oceans will look like from an acidity standpoint in the next hundred years if we don't change course and what that does thank you this like a lot of the other change we are talking about is not simply a difference of one condition to another but the time period over which it happens so if we look at changes in the ocean over the last million years every one hundred thousand years or so we saw ice advance retreat we saw organisms that lived in the high north moving closer to the equator during the cool periods moving back on land out of the ocean in fact it is interesting there are very few extinctions during that period that the memory the genetics of organisms know in their history that being able to accommodate those changes is essential for survival but when you crank those rates of change up are really they are just spectacularly beautiful it is a very delicate shell they are a very very important part of the food web in the north pacific particularly for salmon we know that the pink salmon depends heavily on the pterapod for its food that was just one example i mentioned others microscopic plankton the foraminifer and of course corals are all subject to the same condition that is as carbon dioxide is added to the ocean more rapidly than it can adjust and if this were being added over thousands of years rather than over one hundred it would be a whole different story more rapidly adjust then the constant tension of the animal of trying to keep its skeletal material its shell from dissolving  becomes more and more in the favor of water that is water pulls those minerals back into solution so this is the condition and of course we know in the past there has been more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere we know that in the past the ph of the oceans  percent more acidic than they were in pre industrial times what will they be at the end of the century approximately if things don't change mister mccarthy well i don't know how to express it in terms of percent but if you take these extrapolations as is  these minerals mister inslee thank you i was impressed we are here as the house of representatives to have the state of the science discussed about climate change and i was impressed that those who have denied the threat this poses to the planet earth couldn't produce one scientist not one scientist to propose the hypothesis to explain what  is undergoing all the changes we are undergoing now they produced somebody that doesn't even have a field a background in science and that is what they produce to try to convince americans somehow that this is a big hoax i think that is impressive or unimpressive depending on how you look at it so i want to ask about lord monckton's viewpoint and basis for that lord monckton when did you start serving in the house  lords i noticed you brought fraternal greetings from the mother of parliaments to congress to our athletic democracy when did you start serving in the house of lords mister monckton sir i have never sat or voted in the house lords as you have probably been informed mister inslee thank you so basically i want to understand thank you you have answered my question you come here you call yourself a lord to try to convince the world to ignore something that serve in the house of lords mister monckton i think i have already answered that one sir mister inslee okay thank you so we not only have the deniers who have denied this clear science upon which there is enormous global consensus they cannot only not produce one scientist to deny this clear consensus they can't even send us a real lord from the house of lords now i think that says a lot about the status of this debate which we should not be and this is what they said the fact that globally average surface air temperature has shown no trend or even slight cooling over the last seven years is not an accurate reflection of long term general trends in fact calculation of a trend over the last seven years is a gross mischaracterization of the longer term trend the last seven years have been part of a strong warming trend that began in the s which is attributable to human influences ipcc two thousand and seven during the last seven years six of the seven warmest years on record have all been observed based on noaa's global land and ocean data deducing long term trends over such a short period of time is comparable to estimating the height of a sea swell by looking at the short period waves on top of a swell noaa the people who work for our athletic democracy have concluded we don't need a fake lord to tell us not to act we need real science and we need us to have a clean energy policy thank you the chairman the gentleman's times has expired the chair recognizes the gentleman from oklahoma mister sullivan mister sullivan thank you mister chairman and lor monckton i guess i think you have a right to explain why you are a lord and i don't think you had an opportunity to mister monckton i will do that very briefly because this is not the subject of this hearing and once again i see politics of a not particularly pleasant kind public trust in their work what can they do to insure transparency and accountability in the climate scientist community especially as we look towards the development of the upcoming ipcc's fifth assessment report  short sentence which mentioned that for the last seven or eight years there has been if anything a certain amount of global cooling so there has but however my temperature record goes back as far as the ne hundred and fifty million years ago the graphs i showed today are for the last one hundred and fifty years so i don't think i can be fairly accused of having unreasonably cherry picked the periods over which i was looking at the data now what i think scientists therefore need to do if they want to start commanding the respect of the public because they are losing that respect over this issue is to stop chattering about consensus science has never been done by consensus and it isn't going to be done by consensus now stop using in the ipcc's documents references to documents not produced by peer reviewed sources but by green propaganda groups and by journalists and confine their analysis to the peer reviewed literature as i did today and also they must make sure that instead of trying to push one agenda and down anyone who dares to put an alternative point of view as i have politely sought to do today they should treat those who disagree with them with courtesy hear with some care what they have to say and instead of dismissing an argument they perhaps don't understand as one of the panelists here did when asked to comment on my testimony they should instead engage in a rational debate via the columns of the peer reviewed literature with the many scientists who disagree with the official line and of course scientists could have been paraded here today but quite rightly the minority group knowing that the majority would merely want to throw brickbats at them decided that instead somebody with a certain amount of experience in politics and a thick skin should sit and take the cow pats flung at him which i am more than happy to do so as to why the notion that consensus decides science has unfortunately crept in is that science these days effectively is a monopsony there is only one paying customer and that is the unwilling taxpayer and because of that and because of the grant funding structure and because of the resultant academic pressures to come forth it take enormous courage for any scientist to stand out against the political line that is now being taken among the scientific institutions and to say hang on a moment the numbers don't add up i have just shown you today various points at which the numbers very plainly don't add up and they are established in the p field and i may want to get the other three to respond to this as well i think all of the denials and all of the talk of climate gate has had an impact at least in the united states in one thousand nine hundred and ninety seven gallup began conducting polls on attitudes in the united states on climate change and tragically the number of people who believe that climate change has been exaggerated according to gallup the latest poll is forty eight percent and  comment along those lines indeed as i tried to emphasize in my testimony global warming does not mean that changes are uniform everywhere there are pronounced regional and seasonal variations and this is due to the natural variability in the system we still expect under climate change that we will have snowstorms we will still have cold periods cold periods may become less frequent as we go into the future but they will certainly occur in terms of some of the heavy precipitation events as my colleagues have spoken to today a key ingredient in that is that as the atmosphere warms as it has unmistakably been observed the warming the atmosphere can moisture and therefore any given storm will precipitate more than it otherwise would have as we have also been very explicit that does not mean that you can attribute any individual storm to climate change what limits snowfall in the winter is not temperature but moisture and that moisture may come off the atlantic with a nor'easter it may come up from the gulf or it may come off the lakes the great lakes so one of the early projections in climate models was in a warmer world we would have more snow accreting in greenland and in antarctica now that to many people sounded like a contradiction but indeed for exactly the reason that doctor hurrell just explained  warmer atmosphere holds more moisture the air comes off the ocean over antarctica over greenland now early studies showed that that was indeed happening not possible until we had very precise estimates of the elevation of these ice masses with satellites but what we see at the edges even though they are gaining snow more rapidly antarctica it is the coldest continent it is also the highest average elevation of any continent it is the windiest it is also the driest that is our biggest desert so  the ocean warms up around it more moisture into the air more moisture into the interior but what we see now as you look more carefully is it is gaining in the middle but it is losing at the edges and on balance antarctica and greenland are losing ice more rapidly than it is being formed so you can take any back here where you started with this comment any sort of one of those short phrases you could make a headline out of it and often the public is very confused because they see these fragments of information and don't understand how they fit together to figure out how to simplify the language for the public because otherwise they are going to get a headache and bail out because they not because they are not concerned but they don't get it now we some to get a bad word at times but when decisionmakers come to groups of scientists and say tell us the simplest version of this story that is where the consensus statement comes from if you get scientists together and say what do you want to talk about we don't talk about things we agree on we talk about the parts that we disagree on the things that we don't understand where all the interest in furthering the science lies so if you made two rosters and say where are the statements on this subject that say there is a problem because the climate is changing we know the causes of that if those trends continue all of the sort of impacts we talk about will come in play who is on that ledger all the national academies of sciences in my testimony i included a statement that came out last october eighteen organizations scientific organizations of the united states look at any of our societies the american meteorological society the american geophysical union the american ecological society all of their statements are very similar and i have given an example here so gentleman's time has expired we are about to be summoned to the floor with bells and whistles for our robust democracy on the floor of the house we deeply appreciate your coming here apologize for trying to bring it to a conclusion but we would like to give every member of the panel a minute a minute and a half just for any summary conclusion that you may have any takeaway if you have decided that it was just cloud cover and you were wrong any wrap up thoughts mister hurrell sir i appreciate the opportunity to make some concluding comments i think that transparency in process making data available making model codes available is extremely important and that is something that by and large the climate science community does a very good job of i work at the national center  research in boulder colorado where we develop one of the world leading climate models in the world that is used to understand climate as well as project future changes in climate and that entire code and all of the data that go into that model are publicly available you can go out to the web site right now and download that data and i think that climate science spanning the breadth of the sciences makes a very valiant attempt to be as powerful view the ipcc report does an exhaustive job documenting not only what we do know but also what we don't know and where the grand challenges are and where the uncertainties are there are many many peer reviewed papers that are thoroughly assessed in those international assessment reports when we saw some of lord monckton's evidence today those are largely based on single studies and i could take the time if you wanted to go through those on an individual basis and point out some of the flaws in those studies as well that is the scientific process and indeed for the papers that he has highlighted there are other papers in the literature that counter those points and raise issues and very quickly the final last word what i did not address was indeed the importance of communicating and i thoroughly agree that that  is a very fundamental very critical thing that all scientists need to be doing thank you i will try and make four points very briefly i want to emphasize a point that i made in my testimony that what we are talking about here are not just changes changes that we may see analogs for in the past but very rapid changes rapid rates of change rapid rise of sea level rapid changes in ocean chemistry and that is a very very important part of the message secondly i would like to say that we should think about this like assessing risk what if we are right wrong what is the worst thing we could do and you will puzzle your way through that logic think of how we assess risk whether we buy fire insurance for our houses or not i don't think my house is ever going to burn down but i would not own a house without fire insurance and we here we say could we err on the right side or the wrong side i think we want to err on the right side then you look at all the projections for cost and increasingly from the report from sir nicholas stern and many others you see that doing the right thing to move us away from dependence upon fossil fuel is not inordinately expensive and that there are enormous benefits many of which have never been cost in this ledger then just finally if you go through these exercises you act within the next decade to begin to bend these curves then we are entering dangerous territory finally we all need to communicate better scientists are clumsy at this it is not our profession we learned how to do science not how to communicate well and we need to work on that the central point i should like to leave the panel with is that there is no hurry if you do nothing about this at all for the whole of the next twenty three years the worst that will happen using the u n s own estimate is a one fahrenheit degree warming which will be largely harmless and beneficial so you have plenty of time to check the studies just a few of which i have shown you today in the peer reviewed literature suggesting that there is another side to this story another side based on modeling but on measurement which establishes and with increasing clarity establishes that there is no scientific problem even if there were adaptation as and where and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost effective than trying to stop the emission of carbon dioxide who is going to get  if you start closing down coal fired power stations putting up the price of gasoline and electricity who is going to get hurt it is the working people of america is that a good thing i don't think so  thank you very much for the opportunity to make a couple of concluding remarks one of the things i think really needs to be emphasized is that the scientific evidence on climate change is based on many lines of independent evidence on and thousands of scientific studies that are quantitatively careful some are based on models many are based on observations and they all fit together in a fabric in which the general kinds of conclusions that indicate that the climate is changing th changes are important are very very real it is also important to note however that there are important unknowns some of those have been discussed today and many of the unknowns are in the direction of risks that are potentially higher than we have been able to accurately categorize the risks of sudden sea level rise the risks of carbon release from ecosystems and the risks of dramatic changes in the earth's system have all been very difficult to quantify and are not generally recognized in the more conservative kinds of assessments that typically come from the ipcc and other organizations i also want to emphasize the point that doctor mccarthy made about the importance of viewing climate science as essentially  problem in risk management we don't know precisely what the future will look like but we have a very clear picture of the risk elements that are introduced by changes that people are causing in the  system and we can have an increasingly clear picture of the consequences of commonsense investments in decreasing those impacts now finally i want to conclude with a very strong comment that lord monckton's conclusion that we don't need to do anything now is fundamentally misleading we haven't seen crises that we can unambiguously attribute to climate change but we have seen increasing risk to a wide range of earth's systems and we also know that the longer we delay the more difficult it gets to address the problem and the more expensive it gets this is a problem where commonsense investments in the shorter term are likely to pay big dividends relative to waiting and  with my colleagues on this panel that the scientific consensus is clear and that the urgency to act is very much upon us but i am struck by congressman cleaver's comments about the degree to which public perception is perhaps lagging  behind the perceptions of some of you on this particular committee and want to give my view from the southwest i am part of a land grant institution that has a very strong relationship with the ranching community in the southwest since two thousand and two we have been in a deep drought and there is very good scientific evidence that that is due to the northern migration of the westerlies that are no longer bringing as much precipitation to the southwest as there was before our ranching community is not arguing about whether climate change is here or not they are coming to us saying what are we going to do about it and climate is the number one issue in this community and they are asking us to give them guidance about how to adapt both in the short term and the long term so i think that the public perception that climate is an issue whether it is called climate change or whether it is not called climate change is particularly keen among the peoples of the southwest secondly as a professor in a large public university we share your concern about the increase in scientific literacy that is going to be demanded to address the complex trade offs that we are coming up against and we are very much engaged in that enterprise thank you the chairman thank you doctor graumlich very much we thank each of you for your participation in this very important hearing we will continue with additional hearings on this issue so that we can ensure that all of the science  out in a way that it makes it possible for the public to be able to make an informed decision as to whether or not there really is such a thing as global warming that has been caused by manmade activity  we think that there is no more important debate that we can have in the congress or in our country and the experts that we had today i think very clearly laid out  scientific reality and has only added to my conviction that we have to act and we have to act soon the waxman markey bill passed last june twenty six two thousand and nine the senate has a bill which with a little bit of luck it will begin consideration of in the relatively near future but time is of the essence so with the thanks of the committee this hearing is