good morning everyone if you would start to move on to your seats well good morning and welcome to the hearing on this intergovernmental panel on the climate change or at p c c report on the current state of our knowledge on climate change this is the first opportunity congress has had to examine the findings of this report the first warnings about potential potential for climate change came in one thousand nine hundred seventy nine when the first international conference on climate change expressed a concern that human activity might lead to significant regional and global changes and climate now almost thirty years later increasing evidence confirms this warning is real the importance of this report cannot be overstated the report provides overwhelming evidence that global warming is real and that human activity is the driving force report's findings may be alarming but this is not the work of short this is a unanimous definitive statement that global warming is real and is and is very likely that humans have contributed to it and let me just make that clear this is a unanimous definitive statement that man that every nation every scientist had to agree to that and so the nation that might be the most naysayer scientists that might be the most skeptical still had to agree to this report so at a minimum this is a conservative report about climate change the scientific experts have provided us with a diagnosis of a problem and a prognosis for our nation's health if we continue along our current path the prognosis is ominous the scientists have done their job now it's time for us the policy makers to do ours we face a big challenge we must explore ways to reduce emissions and to adapt to the coming changes to mitigate the negative effects of climate change we cannot accomplish this overnight but we must began to in earnest now to address this serious issue and with some today the science committee has a bill of mine on the floor in about an hour that will be the first bill that will address we're nubile energy we hope it will be we got hope we know it will be the first of many bills that piece the report tells us that if we fail to act our children math five year old daughter danus triplets brand twins and madam speaker your little four month old  son a grandson you look wonderful as they're all going to be affected and they're going to live in a very different world and let me let me just say this is not hypothetical you when you start talking about ten years twenty years fifty years maybe one hundred years it seems like it's a long time off but the actuarial tell us that our children are all going to live to the end of the century and certainly our grandchildren are going to live beyond that so this is real this is not hypothetical we're talking about something that's going to affect all of us in a very personal way because they're going to inherit a world which is  has much more severe droughts in some regions greater flooding in others and much different coastlines due to a higher sea level and two days ago my daughter spent the afternoon mouth as we were looking at the capitol and i'm hoping that when she's older she's going to remember that view and i don't want to look at my daughter's eyes in ten or twenty years and try to explain why i didn't take advantage of the opportunity to address global warming w congress we need to improve existing technologies and you develop new technologies and to reduce emissions and to make our economy and our society more energy efficient and we must understand that the impacts of climate change on our eco systems that support all life on earth continued scientific research is imperative we need better more refined regional sest much to understand the climactic vulnerabilities of communities eco systems and our economy we must continue to gather information on greenhouse gas emission and the earth's response of them and in further into further expand our understanding of climate and weather these four eminent scientist a select few representing the efforts of thousands of scientists from all over the world and as i said earlier they've done their job they have set the scientific information before us we must now move forward and act upon this information we on the science technology committee can and must play a role by ensuring that the science and research continue to provide us with the information we need to understand climate change and respond to it however we must innovation i intend for this committee to ensure we maintain that leadership and lead the world to address it with us on behalf of the committee and i want to thank all of our witnesses for joining us today and for the work you've done in preparing this paper at this time i will recognize our very distinguished ranking member mr hall for an opening statement we want to thank you and i think the chairman for all going izing this hearing about the very important topic of global warming are some prefer to call it climate change let me let me start by thanking all of the witnesses for being here today this will be a key issue in the hundred tenth congress and i hope that i speak for all the committee members and s the time that you all give us madam speaker we appreciate your appearing before us i was amazed at the crowds outside there at my age i was fearful that someone had discovered i might have been one of the lindbergh kidnappers i don't know what everybody was doing there but you are welcome i say sherry boehlert our farmer chairman and attendants a great later and the man that gave much of his time to this committee and to this congress and to this nation thank you cheri there may be a lot of debate that this congress about what policies the united states should adopt to day with the potential impacts of climate change want today's hearing is focused primarily on the latest science related to climate change it also is a public forum and i expect member for stray from the science and offer their opinions on various policy options that have been proposed so in that vein let me set the record straight from the beginning i'm skeptical that mandatory regulation of greenhouse gases which some of my colleagues are promoting is the best solution to the problem of climate change as a nation we can't figure out how to ride a cap and trade bill that does not cause immediate spike in natural gas prices a spike that endures for several years at the very least roosevelt will be the closing of more factories the closing of steel males paper mills lumber mailed and many others gas price increases over the last six years even without carbon regulation have already cost millions of permanent layoffs factories won't complete with you tell it won't compete with utilities to buy a gas rather they will move to china and india where there are no pollution controls and they have to really worsening global emissions in the meantime americans will be paying the price clearly we need to make the american people fully aware of the cost of mandatory emission camps the discussion of mandatory caps comes down to one question what is the maximum cost to the u economy and dollars per family in a global warming bail and what is a minimum effect on worldwide temperatures our country is willing to accept at such a cost of course in order to fully answer that question we need to factor into the equation the contribution or lack of contribution of those countries who produce much of the pollution problems and seem unwilling to be a part of the solution i'd like to see this committee address this important equation in the near future we have an historic opportunity to use american innovation to help address the problem and our committee is poised to offer competitive solutions i'd like to see more discussions of how technology especially alternative energy technologies can help address the issue of energy independence and climate change and also rock six per how we can encourage the development of technologies to use existing domestic resources more plainly effectively and efficiently in fact later this morning we'll be considering an alternative energy technology bail on with full house forward there's no limit to american innovation when we put our minds to solving a problem we find answers that not only benefit our country but also the world we've always been leaders in technology there should be no exception i'd like to say this committee promotes the development of a wide range of new technologies to help america become energy independent while maintaining a competitive edge in the world economy in the end innovation can do a lot but only so much well powers must absolutely do their part well that this second be no true success in solving the problem of global warming i look forward to hearing from including the distinguished speaker going to be subjected to questioning under the five minute rule as required by house he reads as follows subject to subject the asians and c each committee shall apply the five minute rule during the questioning of witnesses in the hearing until such time as each member of the committee who so desires has had an opportunity to question each witness i'm aware of it and i ask unanimous consent that the speaker be allowed to leave after her statement mr chairman i object and i request that  well if that is your choice then you will be able to do that and i'm sure that speaker will give you a very good answer thank you mr hall and sherry bell as you can see things don't always change around here but we welcome you back and you prove that you can come home and that we're very glad you're here i ask unanimous consent additional opening statements submitted by the committee members be included in the record without objection so ordered i ask unanimous consent that represented gilchrist who was a former member of this committee be permitted at his request to sit at the objection so word now it is my pleasure and privilege to welcome the speaker of the house of representatives nancy pelosi to be with us today i know this is an issue that you're both informed about and have a passion about and we welcome you here and for this for the sharing and welcome to hear your remarks thank you very much mr chairman i thank you and your are portraits and mr ball as well and i think i join you in thanking him for his great leadership country and working in a bipartisan way to use science as a basis for progress comet change change is indisputable eight underway and states with ninety percent certainty that greenhouse gases released by human activities are the main cause of global warming i'm very far as human eyes could see saw the vision of the world and all the wonder that would be what a wonderful inspiration to the work of this committee you on this committee are opening a window into our future looking through that window we see a future in which global warming will reshape our planet and our society we also see a future in which harsh harsh consequences could be blunted by prompt action that's the good news this is an issue that is as immediate to the american people as it own neighborhoods and it's as global as the planet itself it was interesting to me that our recent visit from the executive committee of the u s conference of mayors a bipartisan committee they brought forth their ten point program for strong city strong families a strong america and point number one in the mayors the conference of mayors ten point proposal was energy independence climate change global warming that was their top priority they have best practices that they in a bipartisan way are sharing with each other and instituting in their communities again this is as immediate to the lives of the american people as their own neighborhoods and again is as global as the planet and that more on that in just a moment on the science of globe the warming the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is by far the highest in six hundred fifty thousand years temperatures are estimated to rise anywhere from two degrees fahrenheit to as high as eleven point five degrees by the end of the century we can expect rising sea levels more intense storms increased drought in some areas and more floods in others heat waves spread of tropical diseases and extinction of species changes in ocean salinity and melting ice in the polar regions and that is already happening the catastrophic hurricanes of two thousand and five katrina and rita foreshadow the challenges we will face and along  coastlines are great cities and small towns will be threatened by rising sea levels and intensifying storms not only coastal areas will be affected inland communities will be greatly affected as well by drought and floods movements of climate change refugees from one country to another could increase political instability and then the regions of the world these environmental refugees are a real concern looking through the window into the future that you have opened we also see that we can reshape our activities now and prevent catastrophic global warming where once we thought the effects of global warming would occur decades away change is already underway we hold our children's future in our hands not just our grandchildren or great grandchildren but our own children as the most adaptable creatures on the planet it is time for us to continue to adapt scientific evidence suggests that to prevent the most of the year effects of global warming we will need to cut global greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half from today's level levels by two thousand and fifty the the bush administration continues to oppose mandatory limits on greenhouse gases restating this position immediately upon the release of the i p c c report i respectfully disagree with the transformation we need both in the united states and throughout the international community without mandatory action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution many of the technologies to revolutionize our use of energy are already at hand as  distinguished gentleman mentioned and we can develop others waiting on the shelf or under development restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions will drive these technologies into the marketplace quickly and cost effective simultaneously creating the next generation of good paying jobs in addition we must address land use policies in the u s and worldwide since the last a forest currently contributes about twenty five percent of global carbon dioxide emissions over forests can store more carbon while also providing fuel for biomass energy in a sustainable manner we have a responsibility to work with countries as the distinguished ranking member mr hall said but these other countries india and china to name two are on who is unable to work with them for them to reduce the level of carbon dioxide an atmosphere that may be as important to our grandchildren and our children's future as anything we do here the united states and china are to to as as well as india are the largest contributors of carbon dioxide emissions in the world and it is estimated that china will surpass the s in three years we need to engage the chinese gov by working cooperatively to develop clean and renewable sources of energy i have asked the scares of of the committees of jurisdiction to work with their ranking members in a bipartisan way with the members of the committee to develop legislation on over energy environment and technology policy and to report that legislation to that to us no later than june first so that we can have an energy independence global warming package by the fourth of july this committee is way ahead of the rest  mentioned on the floor today and i commend you for that chairman gordon and mr hall and members of the committee i know that you have other issues other legislation that relates to innovation and agenda which is directly related to this issue that will help advance the technologies needed to help save our planet we hope to have legislation that will be a starting point on global warming and energy  independence soon again you have taken the lead i also want to mention that we're creating a select committee on energy independence and global warming to raise the visibility of these urgent issues and gather critical information to protect america security this is a national security issue the select committee will not have legislative jurisdiction but will develop a policy strategies technologies and other innovations intended to reduce the dependence of the united states on foreign sources of energy and to achieve substantial and permanent reductions in emissions and other activities that contribute to climate change and global warming the select committee will share its findings with the legislative committees of the house and with the public and they will make a special to communicate with younger americans by using more cutting at edge technologies young people are very concerned about the issue of global warming it's natural because the future is theirs and this has a big impact on the future for twelve years the leadership in the house of representatives has not has stifled all discussion and debate on global warming the long rejection of reality is  to the relief of members i believe on both sides of the aisle we teach our children the chairman and ranking member members of the committee that everything in nature is connected and indeed it is the bible tells us in the old testament that to minister to the needs of god's creation is an act of worship to ignore those needs is to dishonor the god who made us this is into us this planet is god's creation that's why large segments of the un jellicoe movement have become part of this effort to curb and stop global warming we have a responsibility to make an act from scientists to fortune one hundred c e o s from evangelical christians to environmentalists from farmers to hunters and anglers will work together holding hearings developing legislation and tackling one of america  promise that we're this is not about taking one point of view and going forward but in trying to work in a bipartisan way for a sustainable for sustainable that we can agree upon and like a difference for  years but you were the first speaker that i know of those twenty two years to make a presentation for any committee and i suspect this may be groundbreaking in the history of the congress which i think demonstrates your passion and leadership on this issue and we appreciate you being here well then we will we will we'll have mr sensenbrenner have the first question thank you very much madam speaker i welcome you here today i hope that you and your successors in the debate on the issues before the congress and i think that this is a very welcome development i really do have to take issue with your comments in your statement that for twelve years there was no discussion of global warming because during my chairmanship of this committee and particularly in one nine hundred ninety eight and one nine hundred ninety nine we had a number of hearings at the full and subcommittee level relative to the kyoto protocol the science behind it and the direct appointee of president clinton and this man testify that the ratification and of kyoto and the caps that are similar to that which you are advocating would cause a sixty to eighty percent increase in the cost of natural gas and electricity and fuel oil to the american consumer and given the fact that china is not under any caps and as late as last week said that they didn't want to do that  i would ask you to look after the impact on american jobs because we do not want to have anything we do result in the outsourcing of american jobs to countries like  and on the and one fact is that america must innovate in this arena for us to the ahead we look forward to doing this in a bipartisan way we have you you know that they'll be in impacts on the coal industry on other sources of energy and we want to hear what those industries have to say this isn't about running roughshod this is about working together and the hopefully we can work in a bipartisan way with the president of the united states in order to do this i see it as an economic opportunity a place where green can be called for our country where the technologies we develop to for dealing with a coal industry and other  industries in our country on which we are dependent now for energy can using their initiative because there they are my king changed and we have to listen to them as well to mr ray hall to mr boucher who represent these districts members the republican party who represent them as well so what we want to do is do something where we have as much unity as possible and we certainly are sensitive to the issue of economic growth in our country ma speaker just to follow up i would make the observation that there are two sides to the equation one is the scientific side relative to admissions of greenhouse gases the other is the economic consequences of any actions that we take and you know i'm very fearful the way this the beard has been joining and given who the witnesses are following you that we're looking at one side of the equation and ignoring the other side and we can't do that for the sake of point out that the minority had the right to submit witnesses think that you had won you withdrew him and so this was not a rigged jury but rather it may be by default that you choose maybe no one else wanted to come up and speak but that's where we are madam speaker as we gather together here i know you had mentioned earlier again your passion for this and that you wanted to develop a select committee you tell us more about that select committee to try to get some of the best information possible by communicating directly in the inner cities of america where again were best practices are being used to address this issue where the bipartisan conference of mayors is putting forth global warming and energy independence as their top priority in their ten point program working with the governors are working with leaders around the world the european union is way ahead of us on this issue they see it as an economic issue mr sensenbrenner they see it as an economic issue they know that they want to be out there in front with the technologies with the technologies that will enable  to curb global warming and that is in our economic issue interest the united nations of course we have this report but the united nations has has this as a priority as well i have asked this a select committee to whether it's as local as a neighborhood as global as the planet are to help communicate this message get the best possible information i could have done it as a task force within the democratic party but i wanted it to be bipartisan so we had every point of view represented different represent the views in our own party as well as views within the republican party so that as we go forward we're doing so in a way that understanding the consequences of it so what it's it is a way for us to communicate with the next generation of leaders in our country to communicate with countries that have a big impact on global warming like china and india to communicate to the neighborhoods of america that everyone is involved in this decision because everyone is affected by it and i want to not go forward in a temperate temperate way but in a great body of advice for this committee they said they did not have the time to answer the political questions i thought it was going to be on science alone it's not that and we'll have them for you later now you know back in the time that you m comments you laid out a couple of basic premises that you were assuming the first premise is that the earth is getting warmer i don't think there's a lot of debate on that i think the earth is getting warmer the second one is maybe another question that  interesting it's being caused by our burning hydrocarbons if in fact you apparently believe that to be true my question is do you endorse the expansion of nuclear energy because that does not burn h mr lucas and early days of my life in congress i was an opponent of nuclear energy because i didn't know what was going to be done how we would dispose of waste from it your question to because the technology has changed and i bring a more open mind to that subject now because i think we should have to look at the technology and really compare it to what the alternatives if we're looking at india are looking at china and looking at them putting on more coal burning plants than we have in a united states that they're just going to even add now and the alternative might be nuclear we have to weigh what that does to the environment but i think that the answer is always with technology if we can if the technology is at a place where we can dispense it's a waste of well let's at least try to move it to that place but i have a different view of nuclear energy than i did say twenty years ago when i came to the thing but hope that we could work together to take it to a place where we can dispose of the waste that's the big challenge but i say this again we have to always compare it to it's not this then what and what does that do in terms of global warming so i think it has to be on the table and that's what that's interesting appreciate your open mindedness to the government that's coming from an engineering and i'm one of the few engineers i guess that managed to get in the congress perhaps by the earth that is all of the nations lived up to the united nations kyoto protocol on global warming that we would prevent no more than point one to six degrees fahrenheit over forming in fifty years  that's that says that you're talking about some pretty strong actions that are going to have to be taken i think is make fixing social security look easy by comparison and i guess i guess i'm wondering if you talk about that we've got the highest level of c o two and six hundred fifty thousand years ago spy question was how was it the greenland was harvesting corn in the year what nine hundred thousand if the c o two was so high or was there something else making the world werman is it so bad if it gets warmer well that's a very good question that twenty nine hundred eighteen years ago early in my term and congress i had piece of legislation that was called the international banking environmental protection act and it goes right to your final question and that was a bill that said that talked about the international banking well bank  gillette development banks it was of an piece of legislation that i introduced on the banking committee and at the time i had opposition from my fellow democrats on the legislation because it calls for an environmental impact  statement to be made on any projects that the u s would vote on and that the as a result of that impact statement would be made known to the indigenous people of the region as well as internationally so that's the bottom line to me at the very same time now this had to be a president bush was president was after president reagan so was saying ninety something like that at that time the president of the world bank said a very distinguished gentleman but this is what he said he said what difference does it make if there's global warming if this climate change we can just go develop those countries where the snow that was there where the snow is melting it wasn't really a very informed statement and that was again like nine hundred ninety and it didn't want to pass my bill than anything i could do even getting past the democrats on the committee who were not particularly well kind then president bush with that it may not matter to missouri about global warming but if greenland loses all of its ice and snow then friends around the coast are going to be concerned about it because there will be an enormous amount  kioto and the question is and i thank you gentlemen is asking then that is do we currently have affordable technologies for significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and it's very any estimate of cost and who pays i think that's a major question that's raised in a general but if you did just that in this chamber did not want to come on such short notice well i have a higher regard for the chamber and their their intelligence and their ability and i think that they could have made a good statement but the good news you have raised a good question the good news is we have a plan a panel of scientists that just got through working on a report with one hundred thirteen nations i think six thousand signed just approved by this country and this president and we're going to hear from them with those very specific answers and i'm glad we're going to be able to do that mr costello mr chairman thank you mr chairman i do not have any questions for the distinguished speaker but let me say that i am very disappointed and very surprised that we have not extended to this witness to the speaker of the house the same courtesy that we've extended to many members of the house of representatives since i have served on this committee i served on the science committee for eighteen years as i recall under the leadership i think the record will reflect under the distinguished chairman sherry boehlert under mr sensenbrenner under every chairman of this committee since i have been there serving on this committee i can recall many members of congress testifying presenting their statement before this committee and we extended the courtesy to them because of demanding schedules let alone the speaker of the house of representatives allow them to submit their testimony and to leave without  going through the long our deal of questions i serve on the transportation and infrastructure committee as mr boehlert did in his service in the congress we extended the same courtesy there to countless members of congress and i just have to tell you that i am extremely surprised this is not the first this is the first but it won't be the last time that we're going to debate this issue in this committee and a whole host of other committees so i just have to tell you i am very disappointed and very surprised the gentleman we were just one second that we are subjecting the speaker of the house of representatives to a higher standard than we yes you may i thank the to distinguish chairman ranking member members of the committee it is the first committee that i have testified before as speaker of the house and because you are a committee about the future i think that's perfectly appropriate i thank you all we have our clocks working again now that we have a quick but back in shape we will recommit and i would i will call on this committee back to order and i would like to call our panel of witnesses to the table thank you and we're very pleased to have this distinguished panel of climate scientists here for this morning all of our four witnesses have just returned from paris where they have participated in the preparation of the summary for policymakers release  friday alba gan by introducing mr richard alley mr alley is a professor of geoscientists slats and associate of earth and environmental systems institute at the pennsylvania state university mr alley is an expert in the area of glaciers and ice sheets and their potential to cause changes in the sea level he serves on the national academy of science polar research board and shared a an a s d panel on abrupt climate change mr the national center for atmospheric research and i want to start with dr susan solomon she serves as the working the co chair of working group one of the i p c c and she provides overall coordination for the report received her ph d in chemistry from the university of california at berkeley in one thousand nine hundred one in currently is a senior scientist at noah's earth system research laboratory a couple of interesting background facts about dr solomon she has a glacier named after her in the antarctic because of her work on the causes of the ozone hole she's a member of the national academy of sciences in march of two thousand and she received the national medal of science united states highest scientific on her for her quote key on some insights and explain the cause of the antarctic ozone hole in the quote she's also written a book which is of great interest to me as an aging mountain here called the coldest march which shipped covers the tragic story of captain robert robert falcon scott and his british team who in november one thousand and eleven began a trek across the snows of the antarctic striving to be the first to reach the south pole and sun i can't help but wonder if the lessons learned from scott's and adamant since expeditions to the south pole could be applied to this similarly long challenging and crucial journey to stabilise and reduce greenhouse american association for the advancement of science in one thousand nine hundred four he's published a reform hundred scientific articles or papers including forty books or book chapters in over one hundred seventy five refereed journal articles and he's listed among the top twenty authors in highest citations in all geo physics he's also recently served as the member of the national oceanic and atmospheric administration climate working group from one hundred eighty seven to two thousand and six and is a member of no climate observing system council and those advisory panel for climate change data in detection into the table is a dr gerald meal dr milos the corning lead author for chapter ten of the report global climate projections dr miller received his ph d in climate dynamics from the university of colorado in one thousand nine hundred seven his expertise is in the field of climate modeling he's going to scientist on staff at and cause since one nine hundred seventy nine indian monsoon analyze the results from global coupled ocean atmosphere general circulation models and car and examine the possible effects of increased carbon dioxide sir fate aerosols and other forcings on global climate really proud to have you three here today thank you for taking your valuable time to share your conclusions and your observations thank you mr chairman thank you mr you know this is a very very distinguished panel and we know this is been a hectic period for you and we do appreciate you being here each of you will be allowed five minutes but in the spirit of a former chairman i don't know whether he was embarrassed and left but sure he voted here earlier he would say to witnesses of your nature that thirty for three hundred seconds is not very much to talk about these very serious problems so we hope you'll be quizzed because we want to have questions but we want you to take the time that you need to make the point that need to you i'd like to thank chairperson gordon ranking member hall and the other members of the committee for the opportunity to talk with you today on the working group one report of i p c c and showed very much the generous introduction by mr all i just like to add that i served as an author on various reports of the i p c c beginning in one thousand nine hundred two in two thousand and two i was greatly honored to be formally nominated by the united states of america to co ch air before this estimate of working group one the part that deals with physical climate science established under the world meteorological organization and the united nations environment program to provide regular assessments for policymakers on the scientific technical and socio economic aspects of climate change today we'll be talking about the scientific aspects of climate change the physical science basis i p c c does not do more doesn't manage research it provides assessment reports covering the state of scientific understanding based upon the scientific literature each report is written by international experts on a volunteer basis i p c c is past reports of been highly praised by many organizations such as scientific academies around the world including our own u s national academy of sciences but one hundred fifty two primary authors of the working group one fourth assessment report come from every inhabited continent in the world about seventy five percent of those authors did not work on the third assessment report the last previous report guaranteeing a fresh look about a quarter of the authors are young the professional sense having had their highest degree for less than ten years at the time that we started our work over six hundred experts participated in two rounds of open review and then it does in addition to the experts dozens of governments also provided formal coordinated reviews including our own government in total the working group one scientific assessment received over thirty thousand comments to put those numbers in perspective a typical research paper published in a scientific journal is subject to review by two or three experts it may receive a few dozen comments a distinguished team of twenty seven review editors who are independent of the author teams played an oversight role ensuring that all substantive review comments were given appropriate consideration it took over two years to write review and revise and finalize the document giving us a product that we believe is unique in many ways not least the fact that it is not the view of any one scientist or a few scientists but rather reflects an extremely broad ranging synthesis of scientific viewpoints it indicates what is known and also what is not known in the remaining uncertainties a different working group covers impact adaptation and another covers mitigation and policy options the reports of those other two groups will be delivered later this spring now i'd like to briefly turn to some key highlights of our own report the few messages of this document greenhouse gases years is very likely due to greenhouse gas increases we believe that has a nine out of ten chance based on a very careful detailed assessment that accounts for solar and volcanic effects it takes into account many factors including the simple fact that the recent years have been remarkably warm and the chances of that happening at random are quite small well many committed to further warming even if we were to stabilise all greenhouse gases now instead of having continuing increases and in that regard the rate of increase of carbon dioxide of the past ten years drought more heat waves and more sea level rise how much depends on how much we choose to emit on a global basis see whether or not as is expected to increase due to expansion of water in a warmer world changes and ice sheets are currently contributing about twelve percent to the total sea level rise in the past decade that could grow already well that could grow or it could decrease in the future and i'll leave it to dr allie to talk more about that and thank you very very thank you mr chairman i think represented a good offer introducing me and as he said i am the coordinating lead author of chapter three on the i p c c report which susan has introduced and that deals with the observations in the atmosphere and at the surface and also does a synthesis across all observations and that's what i'm going to focus on here and essentially what we have done in the i p c c perhaps as a medical analogy is to do a diagnosis of the vital signs of the planet earth and what we have found then is that the planet is running a fever so to speak and the prognosis is that it's apt to become much worse now to paraphrase the report warming of the climate system is unequivocal that's actually a quote and it is very likely due to human activities and my written testimony a summary is given of the main findings for chapter three and and its link to the other o chapters in the overall summary statement of one of the highlight points in the policymakers summary is to quote roaming of the climate system is unequivocal as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global mean sea level and then there is another i don't which goes on to elaborate on more regional aspects and other variables as well and that's what i'm going to focus on in my following remarks and so we say that the warming of the climate system is unequivocal because it is now clear from an increasing body of evidence showing discernible physically consistent changes in other words we can relate all of these changes to warming and there are many more variables listed in the brief i p c c than in the brief i p c c statement now these include firstly global average air temperature and i'm going to come back to that if i could have the first slide if i please this just shows you global warming is unequivocal and what i've done here is to put the main bullets that i'm going to talk about on he had the different variables and the items and so as well as global surface air temperature there are the ant temperatures above the surface and this refers to what is called often the satellite temperatures sea surface temperatures are also increasing and they are very important for things like storms of the oceans and hurricanes subsurface ocean water temperatures are increasing spello the subs we can measure those and that leads to expansion of the ocean contributing to sea level this widespread melting of snow in the in the last twelve years of more than a foot a century and that is contributed to by the expansion of the ocean and the melting of land ice the observed sufis warming at both global and continental scales is also  consistent with the reduced duration of free seasons less frost increases in heat waves increased atmospheric water vapor in the atmosphere and this is very important because it feeds into heav events and this includes ironically perhaps heaviest snowfall events because the fear can hold more water vapor when it's warmer there are also changes in pursue potations around the world and part of that leads to increases in drought especially in the tropics and this is already evident in the observational record increases in the intensity of harken activity are also evident and there are changes in the large scale patterns of atmospheric wins changes and we have storms are actually going in middle latitudes so if i can look at the seconds of the next slide here it is here this is one of the this is the global average temperature is the time series from eight hundred fifty up until two thousand and six the dot so the annual values the heavy blue smoothed values in the yellow is the sort of uncertainty around that and what we frequently do with a curve like this is to put a straight line through it and if we do that you get this line here for the last hundred fifty years and on the bottom right and if you can see the numbers there there's this actually the rate of change is given that what i what we all what we can also do is then put a line through it for the last one hundred years and it looks like this and you can see that it's considerably steeper and then for the last fifty years it looks like this and then for the last twenty five years it looks like this and listed at the top there is a list of the last twelve years indeed the eleven out of the last twelve years the warmest on record and certainly rate of warming has increased over the time and and the this is the direction we're going in the immediate future and so the fourth assessment report of i p c c finds that the earth is warming and that the major components of the us climate system are already responding to that warming of the wide variety of observations gives a very high degree of confidence in the overall findings and moreover these changes are now simulated in climate for the past one hundred years to a reasonable degree as my colleague during neal is likely to talk about and this adds confidence to the future projections environmental dis deficit and it will indeed be paid for by the future generations i appreciate the opportunity to address the committee concerning the science of global climate change and i look forward to answering any questions thank you dr alley mr chairman honored members as dr trenberth pointed out the observations of snow and ice show that melting is now widespread we see this in snow covered in the north we see this in the arctic sea ice we see it in most glaciers of the world we see it in frozen ground in permafrost we see it in the great ice sheets of greenland and antarctica and we see it even where there's more snow falling and so it's really hard to blame a loss of ice on loss of snow if there is more snow in some places and yet it is melting faster and so it's very clear that warming is implicated in this i'd like to focus especially on the large ice sheets of greenland and antarctica because their great potential to change the level  falls on top and nothing happens around the side especially in greenland and our understanding of those processes has gotten a lot better however we have observed surprising changes in the flow of the ice sheets around their edges that we didn't really expect if i may for a moment an ice sheet is just a two mile thick continent wide pile of snow that has been squeezed to ice under its own weight and like any pile it spreads under its own weight if i were to pour a pancake batter on a gr front of you here you would see it spread and then a drip off the edge same thing happens to a nice sheet it spreads and then it's and it drops icebergs off of the edge if i were to greenies that pancake griddle you would see the batter spread faster ice sheets have exactly the same problem and greenland observations show that when the melt water starts on the edge it goes through great holes in the ice to the bottom and water makes things slippery and so the ice actually spreads faster because of this and the water that amplifies the the effects of it and so in the same way that you can greenies a pancake griddle the ice sheet is greasing its own bed to spread faster if i were holding the pancake batter in with a and i removed it of course the batter would spread faster and ice sheets have this same problem as well when the ice gets down to the ocean it usually does not immediately break off to make an iceberg it's bread's over the ocean in world those are very well in elevation they can be warmed easily they are in contact with the ocean already there at that melting point underneath and so they can melt very easily underneath we seen where warming has attacked these  shelves and when they've been pulled out of the way the ice behind is gone faster by as much as eight fold so so we know these things are out there and we know that we don't have a really good scientific understanding of all of these aspects and when we look to the future we expect sea level to rise as ocean water warms and expands as a mountain glaciers melt and with effects from changing snowfall and nothing on the big ice sheets and there greatly increased confidence in that if you compare the projections the sea level rise that we're just now made in the new report those were made in the previous report we have better understanding of certain things the numbers look slightly different had we treated uncertainties in exactly the same way you would have had very similar projections they have not changed much but we have this additional on certain days that we just don't know whether these changes in the spreading of that giant pile in antarctica or that giant pile in greenland will slow down whether they will stay constant whether they will speed up there's just this big uncertainty that's sitting out there we do not have any credible scientific models of which i personally am aware that would dump an ice sheet into the ocean over decades however it is possible that we will reach temperatures over decades that if sustained would lose an ice sheet over centuries to  millennia someone who works for a land grant institution which tries to provide useful advice to you i am distressed that i cannot tell you more accurately what the future might hold of someone who gets paid to do research i'm really excited i'm going to go home and have fun to summarize we have much scientific confidence that warming induced ice loss is now widespread in the climate system that is contributing to sea level rise and other changes improved understanding of many aspects of this is reflected in the new report and it's really wonderful but there are unexpected changes in ice flow that have occurred for which we lack a scientific basis to provide accurate estimates thank you thank you doctor i just received good contagious i think we'd all like to run back to the our labs and get back to work on science after doing a lot of this kind of assessment work but i want to thank the chairman the members of the committee for the opportunity to communicate to some of the findings from the i want to stress the first thing is that a significant new aspect regarding projections of future climate change is involved in an unprecedented coordinated international effort to perform a set of climate change experiments these are done with high end computer climate modeling tools we use to quantify possible future climate change these are called global coupled or shamash for climate models or we just call them c m s for short and a total of sixteen modeling groups from around the world from forcings three possible outcomes for the twenty first century based on low medium and high emission scenarios and three idealized stabilization experiments these data are then collected made openly available for analysis and this is really the first time we've been able to do something on the scale and to date over nine hundred fifty scientists from around the world of access these model data and many papers that have been written recessed bias in the process of coming up with air for these analyses provide an improved quantification of likelihoods of many aspects of future climate change and one of the models the amount of detail in realism in the climate models we use as increased in recent years this is partly because of our increased understanding of the processes in the climate system and also in part because the calculation part of the calculation for provided by your super cute or super computers is increased future climate this now allows us to provide more detailed information on aspects of the climate system such as possible future changes of weather and climate a new term climate change warming of about two tenths of a degree c decade over the next couple of decades is projected across the range of scenarios considered and this actually continues about the same rate we've observed in observations over the past few decades i pathetically if concentrations of greenhouse gases have been held constant year two thousand values we are already committed to about a tenth of a degree c per decade mainly due to the slow response of the ocean by the twenty twenty s most of the us is projected to warm by about an additional one degree centigrade this is larger than warm warming we observed during the twentieth century and very likely larger than estimates of natural variability during the twentieth century as we approach the middle part of the twenty first century and beyond it is clear that it makes a difference regarding what emissions scenario we choose to follow now by twenty one hundred there is a spread of global average service or temperature increase among the six in areas considered best estimates for this global warming range from about one point eight degrees centigrade to the lowest scenario with a likely range of one point one to two point nine degrees c and four degrees c for the highest scenario with a likely range of two point four degrees to six point four degrees centigrade and these scenarios are constructed based on various assumptions of future population growth economic activity and energy usage but no climate in issues and issues were considered in these scenarios based on the existing models available for assessment the central values for projections rise by twenty one hundred or similar to previous estimates these range from about twenty to forty centimeters depending on scenario with the upper end of the range for the highest an area of about sixty centimeters these ranges a single rise are narrower than previous estimates mainly because reduced uncertainties and some of the components that contribute to sea level rise however a large unquantified uncertainty arises from processes we don't yet fully understand and have only recently been able to observe such as potential  alluding to for example additional steel or ice from this source by the end of the twenty first century could another ten to twenty centimeters to the upper ranges and higher future still rise values cannot be excluded this is an area of great concern and active ongoing research given the potential consequences as seen in recent trends and observations the future pattern for temperature change is characterized by greater warming over land compared to oceans and warmer and more warming at high northern latitudes associate with these temper changes their projected decreases the snow cover increases and thought if the are most permafrost regions and other changes directions and sea ice of course go along with increased temperatures with the late summer sea ice free arctic by the end of the twenty first century and a high forcing scenario on some models and in the future precipitation change indicates increases at higher latitudes such as the northern tier of states during winter and decreases of over subtropical land areas such as the southwest us with a picture of a future warming world appears bleak it is not yet hopeless the six different missions in areas considered an air force show that the longer we wait to do something the worse the problem gets but these new areas also illustrate that what we do now can make a difference for the future  thank you very much for you and your invitation to address the committee thank you dr dale and dr solomon the message i'm taking away from this report or that the the climate is changing the earth is solomon i understand that that all one hundred thirteen nations had to agree on this had to be unanimous report is that correct well the nations present in paris including the united states were in agreement with the final document that's correct it was a consensus document and but you have that does that mean that that this would be a on the conservative side of a report and i would i would actually say that the the point of this kind of a report is to say what we know what we don't know and what the remaining uncertainties are i don't think that a report such as ours if it's intended to be the sort of global consensus statement that it is could go any farther than we've gone i think we've done a very fair job of reporting what's known and what's not known i would not call it conservative came from agreement with the ice floats and things of this nature were not a part of this really of this information is that correct some of the information on the exaggeration in greenland did come in time to be assessed properly and a couple of recent papers are not included that is correct and from press reports that i've seen it indicated that in terms of the rise in sea level you were somewhat limited to the the change of temperature as the water got warmer obviously it would expand how limited were you in the discussions and the new information concerning greenland and elsewhere where glacier were melting the numbering of mountain glaciers in the alps for example or in the rockies is taken account of an improved accuracy so i think we understand better the changes and snowfall and melting on accurate assessment of these changes in the spreading the changes in the flow how much the cells lubrication of the ice or the loss of the spatulas would contribute to accelerated flow in a warmer world and we simply don't have the scientific understanding to provide an accurate assessment that we know is not going to be slower it's only going to get faster the question is just how much faster we don't even really know that because that sort of implies the knowledge that we're trying rather desperately to build for you right now so certainly we have seen recent accelerations and we have seen those accelerations in response to warming we have fairly high confidence in that if you see future warming  perhaps would not be surprising that if warming causes mass loss that more warming would cause more mass loss but we're still we're still fighting on that they really is this document works very very hard to be assessment of what is known scientifically what is well founded in the refereed literature and when we come up to that cliff and look over and say we don't have a foundation right now we have to tell you that and on this particular issue  trend of acceleration of this flow with warming we don't have a good assessment to fix it and they should right now would you how long would you expect that that will be before you will i don't know i'm very bacher thank you very much and thank you very much mr dr ali for your honesty and your candor considering that people obviously wanted you to say something else than what you have just told us that they would like to have certainly for the record mr chairman i'd like to put in the record a list of a number of scientists and statement statements by scientists very well respected statements very respected scientists  the minority had the opportunity to call any of these witnesses and have been part of this panel i say that has got had quite a bit of time to be able to do that but certainly this will add to our report and without  scientist look i'm a former journalist i'm a writer and so i have to really you know look down and see what's being said condense things into the real meaning let me ask you a couple fundamental questions iris on the history channel a whole special on the many ice age was there are many ice age and then it ended about the middle of the nineteenth century or you know were there really vikings that that were living at a much higher indeed occurred around about that time up until about the end of the nineteenth century which was not clearly cooler it's a little bit of a euro centric view of the world though because a lot of it was certainly focused in the in the  any ice age and i went down to about the middle of the nineteenth century i noticed on the chart i couldn't help but notice that the chart that was presented started the low point of this many ice age it started there to prove that there was a global warming trend now if you start at the bottom of something that is recognized as a time of cooling down the earth is going to go up naturally if there is a natural cycle going on the record instrumental record we've been able to push it back to eight hundred fifty and that's the reason it starts then and the way you would characterize it is that it's really not not much change up until about nine hundred twenty there is a warming that goes on from about one hundred twenty to one hundred forty and we believe that some of that the work that the models have done in the in the estimates of what's happened with the sun is that a part of that is natural associated with changes in the sun it's really only in the last thirty five years since about nine hundred seventy that the global warming aspect has clearly emerged above these levels of of natural variability so and there are now about one degree one degree change right in fact over these last twenty on here is a possibility this is one of the things that we can do now natural cycles also have cause think like you know like some small come from somewhere right some spots some spots are or are changes in the heat and the little bit of time left let me ask you i'm sorry as compared to humankind all of humankind produces what ten percent of the excuse me but unless you're going to be honest about this we're going to honest discussion recently as mr ali was being honest about saying we don't know if i ask you a direct question what percentage of the greenhouse gases are caused naturally rather than by human beings can are made by nature i want to know if any number got in the increase since seven hundred fifty that greater than ninety percent of the increase is been caused by human activities and that wasn't the question wasn't why can't you listen this is very dishonest presumably yield the information you're asking for which is what percentage of the carbon is cause well i don't know about that there's not a suggestion on that is not the way i mean it is a simple question and every scientist that i've asked this said it's less than ten percent of any the greenhouse gases are caused by human activity and i was just asking to find out whether the scientists agreed with the assessment that i've heard from all the other scientists gentleman cat expired but let me suggest that if you're put those questions in writing exclude people who might have a different opinion about global warming or were people allowed to participate and offer comments if they disagreed with global warming has been if you process was entirely open scientists could  register on the lead they only had to say who they were they weren't asking anything else and they were sent whatever materials they wanted to review so it was totally open to anyone who wished to review it so presumably they have had compelling arguments and data to skeptics that participated as reviews and there were comments were all addressed so it would not be accurate to suggest that this was some highly biased report and one could actually see if there are some of my colleagues are raising questions that they've heard from from so called skeptics one could see those answers to the skeptics in the report are only in the web dialog the report is is changed of course in response to comments but there are many comments and in addition all of the comments are responded to in writing and there was a file this great big file at the technical support unit which has the responses to every comment and how they were addressed i appreciate that so what you're saying is there's about a baseline level of c o two produced by requests for processes c changes it's the normal kind of fluctuations but the beyond that baseline we have seen a substantial increase in c o two that correlates quite closely to the production of c o two by related activity predominately the consumption of fossil fuels would that be a is an intriguing question to ask what percentage of the total c o two budget is produced by human activity in terms of gauging changes in the c o two budget which may correlate to changes in temperature it may in fact  the change that is most significant and important for understanding here not just the base level differential percentages because prior to that presumably the c o two production of humankind was background rounding error possibly i don't know the number exactly but you know again in terms of concentrations two hundred seventy parts million by volume in say seventeen hundred two hundred seventy parts for million a thousand years before that today about thirty dollars that so that may answer the gentleman from california's question i think that's what i was trying to get to and but more importantly in terms of the global warming debate if you've got that increase presumably and i think you can't we cannot dispute that we produce more c o two i mean that be pretty hard to dispute on any credible scientific grounds we also seem to have pretty cravats from this report of the increase in temperature while correlation is not causation correlation can give us some pretty good insight one final question skeptics may ask you to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this global warming which we are observing is caused by human consumption its production of c o two i don't think that's scientifically possible i used to teach scientific method hold a doctorate in scientific field you can't do it but that doesn't mean one does not act on the best available scientific information would you get a comment on that warming are these computer climb models we use and they've been improved quite a bit and they also we've been putting in single factors that we think affected climate over the twentieth century natural and human produced so we can put in solar variability by itself particles reflect sunlight that's a cooling effect we can put that in separately fix the climate we can put increases greenhouse gases produced by human activity see how that affects the climate so we can deconstruct but twentieth century climate in a way that we just couldn't do taking observations because the observations showing at the window are a combination of all these factors wrapped up together so we can does a great use of these models as tools we can actually look at each of these things separately and in combination to see how they contributed to what we observed over the twentieth century and as was alluded to earlier the results from the studies the first one started to be done about five years ago and we have many more now that we assessed show that most of the warming that we observed in the first part of the twentieth century was natural not many volcanoes really were going off it increased solar output and we had a level period from the forty's to the seventy's when the big increase in industrial activity after world war two produced a lot more air pollution that was a cooling effect but the increase in greenhouse gases were still going up that was warming but they about balanced until about the mid seventy's then the ongoing increases in greenhouse gases plus some efforts by industrialized countries to reduce visible air pollution then produced the big warming we've seen since the seventy's so i think by being able to do these kinds of studies with these calibrated models we can make this statement that it's very likely that most of the warming we've seen in the last half century or growth of methane we'd better put catalytic converters on the back of cows certainly ruminant animal animals are one contributor to the increase of methane you're quite right there now you're hitting  wisconsin the academy right between the horns  i can tell you i love your cheese or i don't know what else to say well you know we better make sure that there are cows there to produce it and we appreciate your patronage dr trenberth yes i'm from new zealand and it turns out new zealand is pretty unique in that it gets more methane and carbon dioxide because of all of the sheep and cows in new zealand and there's a tremendous amount of research going on on exactly that topic and how to change feed in order to reduce methane  in north america don't you know there are charts on those i don't have those numbers at my fingertips and the other factor which you may want to look into is the is the amount per capita and i do know that the us leads the world in both categories and per capita the us is about as two and a half times more carbon dioxide then in europe for instance and about ten times more than china and about twenty times more than india but of course the per capita aspect the number of people then makes a very big difference and so that's another you know i was the head of the congressional observer delegation to kyoto so i went and watched all  that stuff right in the meetings that my bipartisan delegation had was with the chinese delegation and they told mr dingell that they were going to cut down on their greenhouse gas emissions no way no how mr dingell kept on going forward for twenty years seeing if they would change their mind and if i didn't tell him to stop each still be there and we'd probably be up for the year about fifteen thousand the chinese government last week when your report was coming out reiterating the fact that it was going to stonewall dealing with this issue because it needed to burn more hydrocarbons in order to develop its economy  if you have the world's biggest country in the world's most rapidly developing economy not participating in this that states for example doing what has been suggested here  f you thought about the economic impact and where jobs go meaning to china and away from the united states it's not for me to really say that but i would emphasize indeed that this is  a global problem and so whereas other countries are concerned about the united states and missions indeed i think we need to be concerned about how other countries on missions and therefore the international negotiations are about one part of th i know from my colleague from his constant that the doctor broadly who has just recently traveled to china had some very interesting discussions with the chinese and i'm going to maintain my own time but i'm hoping to cue dr about perhaps when he asked some questions of talk about the chinese so their actions are speaking certainly as loud as their words they understand that the present path cannot be maintained in the sustainable fashion dr trenberth i might want to turn to your testimony you restate the for report's findings that we're already committed to a significant level of climate change in that we believe you believe we need to mitigate the effects of the coming changes and i might like in that spirit note that yesterday i introduced h r nine o six the global change research and data management act of two thousand and seven one of my my good friend a colleague from south carolina mr inglis in this good updates the existing law that formally established the u s global change research program in one thousand nine hundred would help  orient the research program to be more user driven which would help local and state regional national policymakers make more informed decisions would you speak to that from your point of view do you believe in improving these regional models would enable us to produce these vulnerability assessments that you reference in your document one of the things that we struggled with in our chapter in dealing with observations is that in a number of countries in fact especially the surface observations are decaying of the time and as recent the national academy of sciences report has stated there are real risks in losing a lot of space based observations in the future space based observations are very difficult to deal with as well because you have every time you put a new satellite up with a new instrument it's very hard to to know exactly how those measurements relate to the previous  measurements and so it depends on whether the satellites have been launched for climate purposes and whether the observations are adequately calibrated or whether they're launch for other purposes such as weather where those issues a not so great and what the science community is certainly urging is that we pay more attention to these kinds of issues and the degradation that's going on in the observing system because this is the information as to what is going on and also why so in this case we're not just talking about observations of temperature cetacean and so on but also the observations of why the climate is changing what's happening to the composition of the atmosphere what's happening to the sun and so on and i think there's a very compelling case that we need to do more in this area to track why the winter this this winter in the east because it was so warm up until recently why there's been no snow and it's been very warm in europe and they're having trouble with the world cup what the role of el nino is in this which it is that's playing a role understanding the variability and the climate change aspects and tracking what is going this relates to natural v well if it is natural variability playing a role we should be able to measure it and account for it so if the ocean currents a changing the gulf stream is changing we should be able to measure that and assess its impact and whether or not that's going to be shot down in the gulf stream and so on so i think a compelling part of what we need to do also is to give an information base and a climate service that addresses these kinds of concerns carbon emissions in the reason i'm asking you that is is to promote the idea behind this legislation i propose which is to make better use of our resources be more efficient in this whole area of research and then we can continue to have the debate that we're having here and all over the world you know the mitigation aspects i don't think working group three and i wouldn't you to wait for their report in may of this year and it's not an area where i'm an expert on all i can say is could think about ourselves in that regard but i've never seen a study on the balance between humans as carbon sinks in the in the methane that we may or may not admit be that as it may did anything with surprise you have the  that's an interesting question i'm thinking about what to expect having been involved in it for for a very long time i think what surprised me the most is actually how much progress we have in fact from remarkable new data bases from from satellites on issues such as the effects of air assaults as kevin was saying the improvements in observations indeed there's more to be done there but we just have so much better information now the advances in modeling  chairman i'm going to go at this in a different different direction i think that there is pretty much unanimity that there is climate change taking place global warming taking place and this committee is gathering information scientific information within our jurisdiction and i assume that information will be shared with other committees that it will have the jurisdiction jurisdiction to regulate certain industries such as the coal industry  automobile industry the hydrocarbon fired energy sources within the united states and so it's important that we try to get it right because the young to ten the consequences of of taking bad information and trying to make policy has can have dramatic effects on the economy of this country and certainly for the rest of the world so when mr robach or for instance is asking the question how much of a percentage for us laymen is greenhouse gases relative to natural sources that's an important question because when and also the question of what countries and what regions have an increase relative to two natural sources for we have a better understanding of how we go about that problem it's been said that the united states produces twenty five percent or uses twenty five percent of responsibilities especially under the kyoto accord which i went with mr sensenbrenner with a number of years ago and so what we've got to get it right because i would suspect you probably all four of you all agree that with the  of the report with ninety percent confidence that human activity is the cause of global warming would you would you say that all four of you agree to that basic concept since you are here obviously testifying for the majority and  if if in fact that's correct how do we you know how do we how do we go about tackling this problem and and i think that that's what really this congress is going to be trying to answer whether we go into mandatory caps which was mentioned by the speaker or or as i believe incentives in the economy to bring on new industries that that i think will have the same results in the long term and in the short term of having a result of having less greenhouse gases in that  the united states largest energy source within the united states is still coal based on a base load power and no we're trying to get to green clean coal technology dr you think that that's possible that we can sequester the the c o two that's that's put out by the coal industry you think that's a possibility to continue to use coal this is not an area where on the next paradigm in a certain area where  less than five percent ninety five percent of all energy source united states is is hydrocarbon based or nuclear power based i mean for some of the baseload united states is nuclear the rest of it is either coal or gas power plants and so in order for us to really meet the goals that are outlined within the scientific information it's being represented to us without coal or nuclear power is that is that possible can we can we can we have a sustainable economy without co t ultimately have to make a determination because you know with the automobile industry the pearl industry the manufacturing industry in this country are really dependent upon getting it right and getting the right science to us you know something was talked about el nino earlier this year you know we were supposed to have an el nino effect in southern california this year unfortunately it didn't happen and we're having a largest drought one of the largest crowds we've ever had so being here today i dr solomon i have a question did there was seems to be a big change in the certainty assigned to this report compared to the two thousand and one was that because models models with better physics in them models would improve representation of of processes such as c r s in the carbon cycle made advances in those areas in terms of observations there's also been many many advances from ation has become available that we just didn't have before we now have satellite measurements of sea level rise for example for the last ten years we also have the satellite data that allows us to say things about the ice sheets as dr el was talking about and antarctica seems as though it has may have even cooled slightly and we believe that that is a unique part of the globe because of the ozone hole that occurs over and tanika and so it has created some changes in the atmospheric circulation there that part of antartica so that is one unique area and dr alley in your testimony you describe the effect of loss of snowpack and it will have on the wintertime water supplies in the west and since i'm from the west can you elaborate the impact on our western states i really can't because i am a physical scientists is opposed to an impacts person what we do observe is that there has been a shift to earlier snow melt and what one sees in projections for the future is that that continues so that you lose more and more of your snow pack and you well know as as a representative of a western state that that snow pack has been important in maintaining stream flow now in terms of what that means for the salmon versus the farmer versus the irrigation versus drinking water versus recreation that's clearly for someone who's wiser than me know that's water has this interesting property that is it warms up it expands and so as the warming that's taking place in the climate system and treats into the ocean you get ever increasing layers of ocean water expanding and as this warming works its way down into the ocean into a deeper and deeper layer you get more and more thermal expansion so the we talk about the commitment of climate change committed warming is on the on the order of centuries in the rich we've already committed ourselves to centuries more sea level rise from what we've already put into the system just because it's going to take centuries for that warming to work it's way all the way down through the depths of the ocean and as long as you still have warming that's working its way down you're going to have an ever increasing volume of ocean warming up and expanding so that's an important and probably one of the best things we can quantify in terms of fuel rises thermal expansion these other aspects related to ice sheets and things like that we have less confidence in how much time do we have to turn back the clock or do something about it again that's kind of a mediation question and that's frankly out of my area of expertise but i think just what we can say from the scenarios we looked at for the twenty first century where we see that what we do makes a difference if we're going to low emission track we get less warming if we're going to high mission track we get more warming and the longer we wait to do something the worse the problem gets the harder it is to try to do something about it so i think those kind of very general conclusions you can draw from from the projections chapter and therefore in terms of details on exactly how to mitigate the problem this combination of adaptation that's out of our area of expertise i'd like to ask you at the palace if you can what do you think about how much time we have to turn this around or change things you're trying to lower those emissions significantly  mentioned drought and drought has become widespread in the subtropics in particular and and parts of africa have suffered greatly from that and our understanding is building now that you know a component of this get it somehow we don't in this country i would suggest that there ought to be enormous common cause between those of us who concern that there will not be a limitless supply of oil in the world and those of us and i'm in both categories who are concerned that we're involved in global warming and i would think that maybe doesn't matter much and i have a little illustration may help us to understand that the total amount of gases up there may be some other relevant relative to what we can do to change that if you have a seesaw with one hundred pounds on each end and you put another hundred pounds on one and that's really gone down isn't that if you put a thousand pounds on each end of the seesaw you put another hundred pounds on one and it's still going down isn't it so the total amount of greenhouse gases that are up there may be somewhat irrelevant as to our contribution obviously we're earth's temperature it's the balance between the heat we gain from the sun and heat we lose and you know very small changes can be seen navas effect on the other day when i read and i would ask you if this is true that in the last ice age the world was five percent five degrees centigrade that is nine degrees fahrenheit who are than it is today that's correct well for those who think that g is the grier to it that you're like living on goes up and down thr degrees that doesn't matter much there are four degrees in the world may not matter much but nine degrees cooler fahrenheit and we're in an ice age with ice sheets coming down the southeast ohio but you can see the terminal moraines there from  those someone was asking about where it's warm and when it's cooler just ironic thing that could happen as a result of global warming that is that the british isles and nose and you have could become very much colder because we have a conveyor belt called the gulf stream which carries heat from the tropics up there and obviously water is not piling up up there so it has to come back and it comes back because it gets more dense and it drops down and one of the things that's happening up there may prohibit this increase and density and that is  melting of ice up there which reduces freshwater which is very much lighter than the salty water and so if we have a little bit more global global warming we could shut down the gulf stream and if you look at where england is on a globe it's up about central canada they have a pretty dot i had to stop for refueling in the emerald isle and that really is incredibly green and warm there in ireland compared to what it would be if it weren't for the gulf stream so we can have enormous changes in climate in certain parts of the world from relatively small changes in temperature i was in that i think i've been to the south pole twice and of course ninety percent of the world's ice is down there and seventy percent of the world's fresh water is down there in an arctic with a circum polar strain their current that kind of keeps the warm waters from the north warmest north down there from coming in accelerated changes in temperatures down there by the way if that ice pack melted with all the others the ocean levels would rise with rise about two hundred feet is my understanding but sixty percent of the world's population lives within two hundred try taking a crack at this our own social circulation changes you mention and you have a real good knowledge of it obviously are things that we're really concerned about obviously the scientists and one of the things that was really getting a lot of attention due to a certain hollywood movie that we all really like was this sudden shutdown of this overturning circulation in the atlantic that you mentioned that the gulf stream is a part of and if it suddenly shut down the idea was that you'd suddenly get a lot more colder in the north atlantic because you wouldn't be carrying all that heat up into the north atlantic that the conveyor belt transfers so we've looked at that in all the models we've run so far no model that we've run yet for the twenty first century for the present century shows a sudden shutdown of this overturning circulations conveyor belt he also a slowing down of the conveyor belt for the reasons exactly the reasons you mentioned he gets warmer and less dense in the latitude north atlantic if we don't get much sinking and you just kind of slow down this conveyor belt circulation but of course and that would contribute to less heat transport to the north atlantic you think well maybe that would give a cooling but it turns out to get that slow down you have to have some it's so much of an increase in greenhouse gases and they have a sphere that the warming itself from those greenhouse gases just swamps it overwhelms any small decrease of northward he transport you get from the slow down this overturning circulation so we're we say in fact it's very likely that the overturning would slow down and it's very unlikely that it would suddenly seize up and stop at least in the twenty first century and that's even taking a can possible contributions testimony both referred to one one result of global climate change global warming as being the intensity of probable storms in the fall of two thousand and five after the hurricane season that we had that included katrina of course and several other catastrophic storms category four category five i can't recall how many but several and and they were stunning to look at in the satellite  perfectly symmetrical they were the press wondered whether there was a relationship between global climate change global warming and that that hurricane season and they that possibility and as a result the press kind of went away on that topic and concluded that that was not seriously that was not serious science it any anyone had that question  fact there were others within that were other scientists who said that yes the formation of tropical storms may be cyclical as dr lancy had said but the the intensification very much related to temperature  what was the state of the science in the fall of two thousand and five and what is it nail on the relationship between the intensity of tropical storms and water temperature  a great deal of research that has gone on even after a report a live report i think is is still a fair assessment of the current situation and we had a breakout group that dealt with this at the  read it you know it says there is observational evidence for an increase in intense tropical cyclone activity in the north atlantic since about one hundred seventy call ated with increases in tropical sea surface temperatures this is one thing where there's widespread agreement that it's a sea temperatures go up you get more activity and we're seeing that in the north atlantic and then the second question is why are the sea temperatures going up and certainly on a global basis we know that there's a component of that we believe it's close to about one degree fahrenheit now associated with the increases in greenhouse gases and then you can argue about well you know how much of that is occurring in the hurrican regions and so on there is some natural variability another key part of the statement also recognises that m variability and the quality of tropical cyclone records prior to routine satellite observations in about one hundred seventy complicate the detection of long term trends in tropical cyclone activity and so this is saying that indeed this a lot of natural variability as well is the is the greenhouse gas induced trends that are playing a role and in addition the database that we have is not as good as we would like and so there are some uncertainties there but  nonetheless there has been an increase in activity now the theoretical understanding suggests that indeed there will be an increase in activity of some sort and that can be manifested in a number of ways you can have increased numbers increased intensity increases in size increases in duration and we don't have measures of all of those there not in the historical record we don't have measures of size adequately and so this is a very important question but there are a number of uncertain remain one of the question for any of you who wish to answer either have been several references to economic consequences of dealing with greenhouse gases you know i think statements and in some of the questions that were pounded to throughout the last fall the british government  d that global warming could lead millions homeless and result you know as much as i seven trillion dollars or twenty percent diminution in the size of the world's economy and calls the greatest market failure economic failure in the world's history comparable to the great depression worse in the great depression worse in the world wars that were not you know about the consequences of global warming of the forecast does regular working with reassessment those are the people who will be qualified to make that kind of statement also working with q i believe we'll be dealing with that this is simply not something that's covered in the wording of one report sir i'm sorry but we don't have the expertise to respond to this question not publicly this is the first time i've said it publicly but personally sometimes i think this is the rodney dangerfield committee we do incredibly good work here and don't get the respect we should so i hope this is a sign of a lot of bills on the floor farming as we've heard a couple questions read about global climate change by which i mean the whole picture that we've seem to be obsessed here this morning weekend when i got up monday morning and it was nine below wind chill twenty one below but i wouldn't want global warming at the expense of losing rainfall and michigan and having it turn into a place like kansas or tech i guess i see texas and since our ranking member is in here but that really points to the political difficulty we have we have two political problems one is if we're talking just about global warming which is related to human activity industrialization particularly that's an enormous global product political problem globally to try to get people to agree to cut back and i was opposed to kill it agreement because it gave a free card to china and i knew china was going to be one of the thinks contributors so that's one political problem the other one is that global climate change is going to be good for some areas of the planet and bad for others the plan one far along are you in determining effects of global climate change and the impacts that it is likely to have in different parts of the group what how far along are the models and determining that and with what actually are saying said a lot about changes in weather and climate extremes and one of the changes we've seen extremes recently is a decrease in them or frosties in other words one ten temperatures going below freezing that's something we've already observed in the models we project this to increase in the future that fall and then earlier warming up in the spring but then there are things like insect infestation zero effect because it doesn't it is called the winter you don't kill off as many of the bugs in the wintertime they live through the winter and you problems with insect into stations you know in colorado we've seen a lot of problems with that with the pine beetle kill so it's a kind of a mixed bag a lot of times there are some things may be better but then there's other unforseen consequences and i think that's what makes me personally nervous is that when we're moving into a new regime which we are which we've never really observed before there are things that we can anticipate that could have good consequences but other things are going to bad consequences and that's the part of least that hopefully we're going to address in more detail well that's precisely my concern because in a reyna the scientists but i ended up in this arena that's where the decisions are made on those bipartisan fashion and working on this issue and i appreciate the testimony that all of you have given i understand that your role here to talk about the science behind what is what is going on in the future or i'm sure we'll have many panels where we will talk about what can be done to mitigate this but i thank you for your expertise to us today i want to ask  i'm from the chicago chicago area represent parsha ca go and i want to ask doctor for you had you talked about managing water resources in the future as climate change progress is now i'm just wondering if there's and it's happening over the ocean over land it's happening at a slightly less rate but it means that there's more water vapor in the atmosphere now when you have a storm on a storm reaches out and grabs the available water vapor concentrates dumps it down in the form of rainfall and so with my water vapor in the atmosphere you expect that when it rains it's going to rain hotter well even when it snows it can smell hotter and that's what we're actually seeing and so you get hit rainfall events this is what is also predicted in the models however when that happens you also deplete the one of a per in the atmosphere and so you change the frequency of these events and it may be that they're they're more intense but a little bit fewer and farther in between and so you have a risk of a greater risk of drought in between there's a little bit of extra heat available so the drying effects of that exacerbate drought and so what ironically then you get both extremes of what we call the water cycle that are affected by global warming and that means that the challenge of water resource manages is that they have times when they've got too much of a good thing too much rainfall or risk of flooding and then there are times in between when they don't have enough and so the this is this is particularly what that comment refers to the changing character of pursuit potations the changes in snow to rain also means that you know you have less snowpack going into the spring in the summer which is when you most need the water and so that aspect of management is another key part of it and so these are the factors that play into the  i do interesting things a very long they look sluggish and yet you look in the history of climate back through the ice age and most of the time my seats were boring and occasionally they were really interesting and so we've had this long standing debate in the community  the ice he's going to be boring or interesting and the assessed science of the previous report said the most likely outcome is boring and they've been interesting so that's probably for me that was that was the most  sensitively how do you rate double c o two how much does the climate warm and it was based on moderately weak evidence it was good science but there just wasn't a lot of it and as the amount of sciences as been produced as more research has been done and more models more observations the quality of the support the strength of the conclusions has just become tremendously greater and so there are a few you know gaping holes that we would love to fill but primarily the quality of the science is just one of those people who used to global warming persuaded it seems to me it's hard not to be persuaded with the evidence you've been talking about there's always the question of causation and  likely to hurt us so it's not right to hurt us to take some action as long as we can do that in a way that maintains balance with either things that we've got to do in life like make a describes just how difficult it's going to be to address the challenge at hand but there are some real opportunities so for example reinventing the car runs ultimately on  hydrogen let's say batteries or something that doesn't emit c o two what an exciting opportunity for us to make money which is a great thing to do to clean the  air and to improve the national security and the states but it's going to be it's going to be hard i think we've made progress here today mr chairman with the speaker's open mindedness for example to looking at nuclear power it's a very significant development here today i think and it shows a level of cooperation i think we all need to have is come with open minds about how to solve this this challenge part of the change in my thinking came from a wonderful trip to an article about this time last year with the number of members that are here today and perhaps one of you can help me really learn what i think i learned there about the the methodology of core grail is like a really fancy drill if you're going to put a new door knob at your door you just take a pipe with teeth on the end you spin it you run it down you pull up a piece of ice and you do that till you have two miles of it and then you  if you break the bottles that is a little bottled sample of old air you can find out whether carbon dioxide was higher or lower in the past very high confidence that this works it matches the instrumental record over recent times different course from different places with different temperatures and different snowfall rates give the same answers and so what it shows is that the level of carbon dioxide level greenhouse gases we have in the atmosphere now are unprecedented over the last six hundred fifty increase just if one looks at a long record like that and says well it surely looks now like we're above what nature has done for the last six hundred fifty thousand years and it's happened in the last hundred that would seem unlikely in the position we very clearly companies are quite good they know how to find a local companies are quite good they know how to find coal and we know how much they find we know how much is being burned we know how much carbon dioxide is going into the air and where it's just i too don't know a lot of really good argument is against this there are were a number we have the budget we know what's going up and what's going down but then you can ask well is there a test of that maybe your budgeting is wrong and you say ok the carbon isotopic composition of fossil fuels is different than the carbon isotopic composition of the c o two that was in the air and we can see the change over time as humans are putting fossil fuel c o two up that price both the stable carbon and it applies to the radioactive carbon or diluting the natural radio carbon in the atmosphere by putting all carbon up from below one can see the very very tiny change in oxygen composition that goes with burning the fossil fuels and so so once you say well we know the budget then someone could say are you right about that and say well if we're right then you should see this in the stable carbon presented had the opportunity along with the gentleman from south carolina to go on that congressional an arctic sojourn last year and it was a truly eye opening experience we  saw a lot and i think got a pretty clear picture of what the science at least the science of people were working on down there showed one thing that that is abundantly clear is what the graphs show in the last handful of years and that is shot truly shocking in my mind to see the amount of change in terms of warmth in the in that was fear and a really surprisingly short period of time and frankly it's just hard for me to imagine that fossil fuels can be deposited in the earth over hundreds of millions of years and be released in the amounts that they've been released in in a very short period of time without having some dramatic effect on the atmosphere it just goes against any kind of  reasonable thinking and that i would like to know can you give us an any idea about how quickly you feel this process is going to speed up in the near term this warming process it's been quite dramatic in the last decade or two do you look for that speed that that sort of dramatic uptick to continue in the next handful of years do you think it'll speed up exponentially i think what we've seen from the from the scenarios we run with the models is that pretty much no matter what scenario we're on over the next twenty or thirty years the warm is going to be about two tenths degree centigrade per decade and of course that's barring any huge volcanic eruption that would cool it down for a temporary year or two but from the entertainer human cause part run a track now for another for about two tenths of your sea warming predicted over the next few all missions give you less warming so we kind of that's very consistent warming matter what scenario we're on for the next thirty years and then you start seeing the spread but having said that it does make a difference which track wrong because when we were setting ourselves on a course now to follow one of these outcomes and depending on if we are on a high mission outcome we're going to get a lot more warming if we end up on a low emission outcome we're going to get less warming so i think what we do now does make a difference for the future understand it because there is no land up there and that makes a big difference in the forces that are that are involved here can you give some kind of a prediction about what you feel is going to happen  frozen i was in water and i don't have the quote in front of me but some of the more extreme warming scenarios and some of the models get to a no sea ice in the summer in the arctic at the end of this century   the floating part then the part that is not yet floating up on greenland almost certainly it's there yet at the end of the century but in the air warming is melting fairly rapidly at that point which would almost certainly have an impact on the things like the gulf stream that kind of huge impact wouldn't you not so much on the gulf stream of things one sea level rise because in the projections we're models of included  unstable something like the greenland ice sheet is and this again is in this category is we're moving into a where we're starting to observe things we've never seen before in recorded human history glaciologists talked about the possibility of rapid icy destabilization is a possibility they talked about a possible mechanism in the last ten years they started make observations that maybe this mechanism actually is working but because we have a very short time period and we've actually observe this kind of possible instability we don't know what to make of it like dr ali said is it is a just a temporary kind of a thing would be sustained or accelerate more in the future and we just don't know and i think that's at falls under the category of things that we can say with certainty and other things  just don't know about right now this is obviously being researched and a lot of scrutiny put on this now so we'll have better answers next years but right now we just don't know you know from kentucky's time has expired but i would assume that there's no good news it's only bad news that will be coming read i think the more you and the one that that always has to i think we all have to kind of obviously since we're not scientists we have to rely on on response as much as possible so what i keep hearing more just of concluding that it is very bad news indeed they say that it's the root cause of a lot of the pleasant weather around the world and that they warn that it carries potential for human disasters of unprecedented magnitude i keep hearing that now about about this possibility because of global warming what scares me sometimes that's not about global warming that's an article in fortune magazine from one hundred seventy four about climatologists now blame those recurring droughts and floods and global cooling  dead wrong as i believe because that's what i hear and now science has changed dramatically and technology which is what i think i've heard today and that therefore that is wrong and that the new consensus that we are in a warning shot one trend is correct and therefore that i can feel comfortable with that point of view i will try first and then maybe my colleagues will harper little bit if i may interrupt you in this rally i'm also resentful in fact that you made me really hungry this morning with your prank analog assure you there's a lot of really bright students there that are pushing the limits or coming up with new ideas that are going to help us and save us and do wonderful things and some of it is a little off the wall and so it's scientists we bottle up all these interesting ideas and then you  built mechanisms we have built mechanisms the world has built mechanisms to distill all of these ideas into something which is policy relevant for you and so that's global cooling which had some of it came from us learning to understand ice ages some of it came from a lot of aerosols that were coming out of smokestacks blocking the sun was something that was bubbled up in a little bit of discussion and a huge amount of press interest but if you go out back and ask the national academy actually come out with a global cooling warning you won't find it you know when you get to the point of asking was the assassin knowledge that was pulled together to be policy relevant for your  predecessor was that warning about this was that the big issue i don't believe you will find it and so the i p c c here exists as a mechanism as does the national academies exist as a mechanism to take all these wonderful ideas this ferment and froth that's out there in the scientific community and say what stands up what is reliable and to give it to you and we're here to tell you that the assessed scientists is science of the  having lived through that period of time and having read a number of articles and books during the one nine hundred seventy s talk al is correct there was no consensus that we were cooling there was some suggestion for a variety of reasons but that the consensus appreciative that you're here the american people are glad you're here and frankly the world is this is an area that i i so passionately believe that we need to lead and and i look around at all the portraits behind you particularly the portraits take america's mission to go to the moon and explore space and where we lead and that apollo ition of the future i believe is an energy and climate change and this is just the first start and you're chairman thank you for bringing such distinguish figures here today and we appreciate your science we may all not agree but this is this is a process where we deliberate and it's i just certainly appreciate you being here my question reflects my district which is southern arizona most for district in the country you can imagine tucson going all the way to new mexico and this is an area that we're not sure quite but eight or nine years of the droughts we're experiencing we're also seeing some other strange changes that we just not seen before we had a very strange storm happen about a year and a half ago that produced some rock slides in our mountains that we're not familiar with we've also had some fire fires in arizona particularly the catalina mountain range that burned very hot we understand because of the the weevil infestation that has been allowed to build up because of it not freezing the these insects and the trees then weakening so i'm just curious and as a former legislator i tried to establish a climate change study group and there isn't a legislature but some distinguished scientists from the university of arizona where we have a global climate center and frankly my colleagues on both sides of the aisle were not particularly plight to the scientist and even one of my colleagues said well heck hot hot what's the difference between one hundred fifteen degrees or one hundred and twenty degrees so i ask you and i'm not sure which scientist addresses to if you could make explain in real terms for the citizens of southern arizona the difference is between one hundred fifteen one hundred sixteen degrees one hundred twenty degrees what does that really mean in the next five years ten years and fifteen years for the people of southern arizona let me have a crack at this indeed there  southwestern parts united states from nine hundred ninety nine to two thousand and four is one of the things which we seeing may be indeed symptomatic of the climate changes that are underway related to global warming in the winter of two thousand and four two temperature is you know one of the there is a number of analogues and the perhaps one of the best analogues is the year two thousand and two which is when the drought in the in the west and in the southwest was most expensive and one of the things that goes along with the with the drought is higher temperatures and heatwaves and in particular one of the consequences is wildfires and the risk of wildfires went up and in two thousand and two there were very large number was in fact i don't know what the what the cost of those was i don't know that there was over a quarter billion dollars just spent in in fighting the wildfires alone and so that's one of the risks that goes along with the increase in drought an increases in heat waves thank you and i may just just add that southwest us actually is an area that we saw some very interesting results we looked at the model projections for extreme events you mentioned rainfall  that's an area that shows that when it does rain in the future projections it rains harder but there's actually more days in between rainfall events so the dry spells in between rain rainfall events in greece is going it does rain it rains really hard but when you average those changes over a season the average rainfall is still less in the future projections so you're in that area in the southwest us is one of the areas that's most consistent in this kind of result where you just see a change in precipitation how it falls and how intense it is when it does rain that's a real if i can follow of a few concerning the differences between regional modeling and global modeling if you talk a little bit about the regional models for the area and how how long it would take them to catch up globally and there's a whole class of models that we can embed very high resolution regional models in the global model so we can have better representation of the mountain ranges and things like that and that could be very important some regions where there's like in colorado where i'm from where you have big mountains or in arizona you see the mountain ranges where you get really almost locally specific rainfall regimes depending on how the mountain ranges are so we can embed these models in the global models and get kind of more information on smaller space scales but those regional models really depend on good global models to drive them and it's kind of the old the garbage in garbage out and it's for computing so if you're global models bad your original model is not going to do much was the global models of improved it can drive the embedded regional models in a more credible way so that is one of the tools that we can use to get more regional recently specific climate change information but it's still just a tool it's not an in i would have more kids going to science because of your passion so thank you dr ali well that's why we all want to sponsor and be a part of our competitive agenda we're going to do that with new scholarships for more science and math and physical science teachers again the patient gentleman from georgia mr gingrich thank you for sticking with us mr chairman thank you so much it has not been difficult sticking with you for almost three hours i was a as you know returning to the science committee and so it puts me down and in the bottom row but dot the alley you had you had commented that those ice sheets sometimes of the well most of the time a boring occasionally exciting thank you could you might could say the same thing about the science committee those of you who have been here the morning and i think on the chairman going this leadership is going to be mostly exciting on the science committee i agree with my colleague from arizona who just said  compliment in dr allie and the other panelists who have testified here this morning if you could take the tape of this hearing and play it to a middle school class i'll guarantee you although it's pretty frightening the global warming and the increase in the in the sea level and what they also might outcome with that might be well the good news is that it looks like god has given us a lot more time than he gave of us actually six on this committee had an opportunity to go to antarctica and that's because of the science committee and i was one of those six and very grateful and it was mentioned today something that a policy that when we were on the ice that we couldn't use aerosols now i know why i didn't ask the question good then but this is been an outstanding outstanding here and i'm grateful for the panel i'm grateful for the speaker historic  opportunity for the speaker of the house to come before committee and testify i appreciate her comments particularly regard to nuclear power i do have an answer for one of her concerns and that where would we store the waste i would suggest maybe there's a place out in nevada call yucca mountain but that's an argument for another day i do have a question believe it or not and not camille i'm going to address it to you there's going to be an upcoming article in the newsweek magazine by george will we have talked about this and i know this is a question that scientist maybe don't want to address and i'm not necessarily the expert and that's for us to do but basically here's what he says in this article inconvenient kyoko truth the united states is able to drastically regulate our manmade greenhouse gas emissions thirty five percent as was stated about healers but other large industrial countries like china india and brazil did not will the united states efforts still have a positive positive effect take for instance the fact that china is set to construct all those new coal oil coal powered power plants by twenty thirty and they have stated that they have no interest they're not going to do anything to regulate their emissions what will the united states restrictions do to stem the climate change trends that you outline and  my question and again i may have to apologize because i'm not an expert in this area so i really can't give you a good answer any one of the four would be would be grateful seven good example i mean i think it is a global problem and u s leadership plays a key role and it does relate then to international pressures in order to remember one line i think but i think that's a darn good answer and i appreciate it and i too have learned a lot here today and changed my attitude i began to change that attitude when i went to the ice about a year ago and  will go to w w w dot science dot house dot gov you can get the webcast of this hearing all the witnesses statement the report the statement in the chair and ranking member statement so that's once again get your pencil w w w been on the science committee a couple of times in the past and like many of my colleagues i've been to the ice the dr valleys in the negatives and spots down in the antarctic and so maybe after this hearing i might ask my pursuing a program to reduce greenhouse gases and what that would do to my colleagues remaining here we have we have worked with about a dozen fortune five hundred companies including dupont general general electric caterpillar lehman brothers and so on to work this issue through their suggestion their strong suggestion is based on the risk factor of investment of doing something and what could happen economically if we don't do something their suggestion is that the federal government create a goal of reducing greenhouse gases by the year twenty fifty by seventy percent below one hundred ninety levels and then set up a regulatory structure in which there is cap and trade program and tax incentives and they say through that structure they can meet that goal by the year two thousand and fifty not only meet that goal but accelerate based on the potential ingenuity of the united states technology efficiency and improve economic viability by improving our situation as far as dependence on foreign oil is concerned and a whole range of other things so there is there is a pretty good structure out there to do that i i have four questions which i would like to ask right up front case i run out of time the first one is you mention let's say ten thousand years ago it's my understanding that c o two concentrations in the atmosphere was about one hundred eighty parts  r million best forward about ten thousand years you have a two hundred eighty parts per million and you come up to the present day it's about three hundred eighty parts per million now the most recent introduction of the form of fossil fuel over millions of years then you make a distinction between the kind of carbon that you get from a volcano or other natural sources and the kind of carbon that you get from burning fossil fuel is there are marker that you can see and do you use that into your equation to determine what's man induced and was not man do so the second question is can you over the let let's say the last t the last thirty years determine the cubic miles the volume of water coming off the greenhouse ice shelf and has that did it would dramatically up to about three eighty which is where it is now and it has not been at levels that high in at least six hundred fifty thousand years as dr ellis said your question about a marker is also a very good one  we talked about it all are the kinds of carbon that you get when you burn a fossil fuel is different terms of its isotopes then what you get from you know say trees or other sources of carbon so the changes in isotopes are very important element in demonstrating the human influence also the north south gradiant you see a difference between the northern hemisphere in the southern hemisphere which is also indicative of the human source in the northern hemisphere time has expired and in respect to this committee over this panel it's been here for three hours i know you have another briefing to go to and then you have a have a hearing in the senate  minority had going to notice to find someone who would but they were not able to do that either through the scientific community or the chamber of commerce however mr roboto has been very studious these last three hours in preparing  rebuttal and i think it's only fair that we allow him that opportunity thank you much as the chairman first of all let me compliment you on putting together a fine panel of experts force and i apologize for those of us in the science committee that there are many scientists or many many scientists i'm sure our panelists know scientists who disagree with them and i have an honest disagreement on this issue and in fact i will be placing in the record the names of hundreds of those scientists who just agree with this concept that climate change is caused by human activity not that there's climate change but that is caused by human activity also i'd like to apologize and we should we could have had any number of those scientists and it was remiss on our part not to have someone here representing a scientific there are people from mit and harvard and many many respected scientists who disagree with this theory that should have been your fault for not getting them here let me compliments you as far as well as a good panel i think it's great that speaker pelosi was here and i apologize if i do not believe that the objection that was made reflects in any way the attitude of the other members of this committee the republican members of this committee and i thought it was fine that she spoke and we should have paid her the same respect that we paid newt gingrich and others who have spoken before this panel in the past with that said i do have very serious disagreement with some of the ideas presented today and the reason i have to push for an answer and and i shouldn't actually have to ask five times before i get an answer on certain questions that it is important to know how much of the greenhouse gases that exist in our atmosphere were caused by natural occurrences and that is important because in terms of the weight that you put on the changes that need to be made it makes all the difference in the world a small change in the if you believe as i do and i remember dr bartlett who is also a ph d i might add as many credential as on this noted that he believed it was ten percent remember nailers at thirty five i have heard other scientists panels who really struggled to say that it was between five and ten percent but with that noted it's way there is a huge disproportion of natural causes  activity if we could indeed create human activity change on such a broad scale so scientists disagree got something for the record their names also let me note that many scientists are complaining that their research money has been cut off because they disagreed with global warming concepts and i would submit submitted their names for the record as well but there is no doubt the global climate change is happening the only question is why is this cycle of global climate change we've gone through dozens of cycles of global climate change why is it any different than all the other cycles we've noted during the testimony  that was presented to chart that showed we are now in a cycle of where the temperatures going up that it started at the very end of the mini ice age which was a very low point in temperature work temperature been declining for hundreds of years so whether or not how how dramatic this change will be are is what it's caused by are things that honest people i think can disagree with and i really personally when i having been a journalist did the first thing i was always caution by when someone was claiming well everybody's on my side or everybody says this or there is a total consensus almost always when people said that to me over my years as a journalist that wasn't true it was that there were honest people who disagreed and significant disagreement on such issues and we don't know what those other cycles were caused by in the past could be dinosaur flatulence you know or who knows you know but we do know the c o two in the past had its time when it was greater as well and what happened when the c o two was greater since then and now there's been many cycles of up and down warming so w that said i think that we have had a great discussion today we need this discussion because the idea the idea mr chairman of having some sort of initiatives so that our country creates new energy sources to make ourselves and and making sure that those energy sources are clean is a totally bipartisan goal there is no doubt that we all of us should want to make sure that america we make that decision as a congress as to what those energy alternatives will be we shouldn't be basing it on songs that's telling if it's wrong science that suggests that global climate change is big an issue as human health i would prefer to make sure that when we make sure that we are becoming energy independent and that we develop new energy sources that we focus our science on making sure that we take the bad stuff out of the atmosphere that hurts human beings rather than the stuff that may or may not create a cycle that would make us two or three degrees warmer or less in the future so that i've had my committee to be your focus for today let me i think one of the lessons learned today is something that i guess we all should already know is some time it's tough to be a messenger but you have a very important message we're glad you came the message that needs to go out from this sharing is that with one hundred percent certainty thirty one hundred or one hundred and thirteen nations concurred including this country that with one hundred percent certainty there is global warming and with ninety percent certainty it is a result to a great extent from human activities thank you very much for being here and the witnesses all the witnesses are dismissed and the meeting is