well call the meeting to order and i want to thank our panel of witnesses we appreciate your being here this morning very much and of course the title of today's hearing is climate science in the greenhouse gas regulations and this is our third hearing on the energy tax prevention act of two thousand and eleven and the first to focus on the adverse impact that the environmental protection agency's globe warming regulatory agenda would have on jobs and the economy in america we could have had other hearings on that as well but we decided day to focus on the science i might say that i only brought one of my many books that questions global warming and the science on global warming i'm delighted at least one member brought a number i couldn't get all of mine in the car but anyway that's the reason we have these hearings here both sides of the issue i might say also that we've had twenty four hearings in the house of representatives over the past four years relating to the science for climate change and or global warming one thing that really stuck out to me is that these computer models seem to have difficulty making seasonal our yearly forecasts and they certainly  ting the many scientists have great difficulty trying to forecast one hundred years down the road and science serves to inform us about the nature of a problem and i look forward to listening to the presentation of all our witnesses today but whether one thinks the science tells us that global warming is a serious problem which some scientists a minor problem which some scientists are hardly and in my view clearly they are not in fact one need not be a skeptic of global warming to be a skeptic regulatory agenda case in point as e p a administrator lisa jackson testimony and she warmed about she warned us about how complex and costly the greenhouse gas regulations under the clean air act would be now of course that was in two thousand and nine and two thousand and ten when the administration was trying to pass through congress a cap and trade bill it is only now that the cap and trade legislation was not adopted in the congress that the administrator has changed her tune and emphasizes how reasonable and workable these rules would be i might also say the administrator jackson in testimony just a few weeks ago conceded that unilateral action a would not make much of a difference especially given the fact that china emits more and more greenhouse gases than the u s and its rate of admissions increases has become many times larger than ours in recent years in fact many people might be interested in knowing that carbon emissions actually fell six percent in two thousand and nine in the united states and china was responsible during that year for twenty four four percent of global carbon and missions during that same year of course the white house is insisting that the sky is falling and carbon emissions are going through the roof in america the number one reason for the reduction in carbon emissions is the downturn in our economy so it is pretty obvious that these greenhouse gas regulations will have a major impact on our economy mainly because we don't yet have a double technology to control carbon emissions on a commercial scale thus far only one global warming rule has been analyzed by e p a and that's the new motor vehicle stand the agency estimated that as a result of that they would be able to reduce the earth's future temperature by almost one one hundredth of a degree by the year twenty one hundred not much progress i want you to keep that in mind however when you hear about these scary global warming scenarios even if you believe every word of them the rules are no solution in fact they're counterproductive because the lateral regulations would impose an unfair disadvantage on domestic manufacturers and some of our manufacturing jobs to nations like china that have no such restrictions in place and no plans to institute them and manufacturing jobs would go overseas to countries whose emissions per unit output are considerably higher there's no question rules are bad economic policy but they may very well also be bad environmental policy the energy tax prevention act far from being an attack on global warming science as some have suggested is in fact a repudiation of a regulatory that will harm the american economy and destroy jobs it is also a repeat of the attempt by elected bureaucrats and government to bypass the will of congress congress has spoken on this issue three specific times and each time has said no h r nine ten is not about global warming science it is about stopping regulations certain to do more harm than good regardless of how one interprets the side it is about a dangerous job of you this will be your first time here so we're all looking forward to it science is important we talk a lot of times about the consensus from the international panel a lot of climate change at the u n but science by consensus is fraught with some danger and certainly copernicus and galileo if they were still living could testify to that effect my opinion for what it's worth is the science behind global temperature changes is not settled and the fact that we have of this panel of experts in front of us today who i suspect at some point will disagree with each other is is indicative of that now i do know this we have had these hearings before going back a number of years in two thousand and eight very very high energy prices and of those were the harbinger of a very significant economic collapse as a consequence carbon emissions in this country went down but i don't want to do that again energy prices are on the way back up we've done nothing in the meantime to protect the american people from the effect of those high energy prices and i rather expect if if past is prelude we may see yet another reduction in carbon emissions but it will be brought because of another jolt through the american economy and what would the effect and the administrator the e p a in fact has testified to this effect if administrator jackson's efforts are successful and if we were to ever pass waxen markey and those efforts were to be successful how do we do this by ourselves when it is in fact a global a global climate change that we're talking about so even if we do all of the things that have been suggested by the administrat a all of the things suggested by chairman or ranking member waxman and mr markey without similar measures by other countries we're damaging our own economy and we're not saving anybody in the process now weather and climate are phenomenon affected by a host of variables in the one nine hundred seventy s we've all seen the cover of time magazine the earth was cooling the next ice age was on the way it was the consensus of scientists at that time that that was fact and there was no point in debating it any further and we have a very significantly different set of variables to contend with today part of our issue today is what what is the role of the scientist in this debate are they there as a function as a gatekeeper or in fact are they a broker for putting out a particular type of information climate sensitivity to two models and the way that has has been interpreted over time the role that these that these have had the existing impact our public policy in regards to carbon and carbon regulation in the environment we've got a great panel of witnesses i look forward to a lively interchange i would like to since i'm the chairman now to yield the remaining time to mr griffith from virginia e and proud of the good things we've done in our history although not perfect we have done a lot of great things in the commonwealth of virginia and sometimes that means standing alone like when we were the only government in the world that recognize the right to religious freedom and i'm often reminded when folks show up and say well ninety five percent are going this way and everybody else but you is going that way virginia chose a different course on religious freedom and now the world recognizes that we were right just because you might be in the minority doesn't always mean you're wrong thank you mr chairman thank you also we've discovered the problem a the difficulty of speaking we had the mute all button and no one was allowed to speak so we now corrected that problem and i recognize the ranking member of the full committee mr waxman for his opening statement well i'm glad you found the scientific way to have all the microphones working mr chairman today's hearing is a crucial opportunity for this committee does understand what is at stake before it considers legislation to block action on climate change are held the lives our economic strength our national security all are threatened by climate change as we will hear today from some of the world's leading experts human induced climate change is happening we are already seeing its effects and harm from climate change is growing members of congress have the responsibility to consider the threats facing the nation and making careful choices about how to address them we  and to future generations i'm disappointed that this hearing is happening only because committee democrats insist on it but i commend the majority for agreeing to our request we now have the opportunity here the finding that greenhouse gas emissions endangered health and the environment that determination was based on the science we will hear about today the updated inhofe bill would remov to protect the american public from carbon pollution and the impacts of climate change the bill would legislate a scientific finding out of existence and it would remove the administration's main tools to address one of the most critical problems facing the world today the premise of this radical legislation as stated by its lead said that sponsor is a climate change is a hoax so before we act on this legislation the members of this committee must decide do we act because of the personal opinion of senator inhofe or do we accept the vast body of scientific understanding based on multiple multiple lines of evan across multiple scientific disciplines which says the climate change is real and dangerous none of us would hesitate in our own lives if my doctor told me i had cancer i would scour the country to find someone to tell me that i didn't need to worry about it just because i didn't feel gravely ill yet i wouldn't assume that my doctor was falsifying the data and if my doctor said he didn't know how long i had to live i wouldn't say well you know about that he's probably wrong about the whole thing i would try to get a second opinion from the best expert i could find about the diagnosis but i would never call the findings of the medical experts a hoax most of us don't substitute our own judgment for that of experts when it comes to medicine nuclear engineering building bridges meteorologists biologists statisticians computer scientists paleontologists and geologists thousands of highly trained professionals who have published tens of thousands of research papers in the year's energy bill i willing to work with you on new approaches a creative ideas we can start from a blank piece of paper i'm prepared to meet with you without preconditions for as long as it takes to find a basis for great harm to our nation and our world if we don't address this challenge we do not meet our moral obligations to our children and the future and history will not judge us the few introduce the panel first of all we have dr richard summerville who's professor emeritus at scripps institution of oceanography university of california san diego and dr john christy who's director  science system science center university of alabama huntsville we have dr christopher field who's the director of the department of global ecology carnegie institution of washington in stanford he's the director of the specific climate impacts consortium university of victoria victoria british columbia we have dr newt natal hoffer who's the director of university of michigan biological station university of michigan minutes for your statement and then we're going to open the the panel for questions and we look forward to your testimony and dr sam a failure to recognize for five minutes mr chairman and members of the subcommittee i appreciate this opportunity to testify concerning the science of climate change since nine hundred seventy nine i've been a professor at scripps institution of oceanography at university of california san diego today however i'm speaking on my own behalf as a climate scientist today the great preponderance of experts agree on the following fact one sensual findings of mainstream climate science are firm the world is warming there are many kinds of evidence air temperatures ocean temperatures melting ice rising sea levels increasing water vapor in the atmosphere twice as many new high temperature records as new low temperature records and much more many lines of evidence also clearly demonstrate that most of the observe warming is due to human activities to the greenhouse effect is well understood it's as real as gravity we've known for one hundred fifty years that adding manmade carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will amplify the natural greenhouse effect and trap we know carbon dioxide is increasing we measure that we know the increase is human cause we analyze the chemical evidence for that three hour climate predictions coming true many recently observed climate changes like rising sea level occurring at the high end of the predicted ranges some changes disappearing arctic summers are happening faster than the anticipated worst case urgent global action is needed if climate disruption is to be limited to moderate levels like the three point six degrees fahrenheit or two degrees celsius target above pre industrial one thousand nine hundred temperatures a target not set by scientists but by governments and agreed to by the g eight and the g twenty nations and the european union for standard skeptical or contrarian arguments have been refuted many times over technical papers published in the peer reviewed scientific research literature nobody today should be impressed by these discredited claims science has its own high standard science works by qualified scientists doing careful research and publishing it in well reviewed scientific journals it doesn't work by opinion makers on the internet or television or by bloggers or op ed pieces six the leading scientific organizations of the world including national academies of science and professional scientific societies have carefully evaluated the results of climate science and indorsed these results if the world is to confront the challenge of climate change wisely it must first learn what science has discovered and accept that and then act are already experiencing impacts of climate change today on health safety water and security for the climate change is inevitable but how much is up to us this problem is solvable the future lies in our hands we have the technology we must find the will the road forks now we can choose a little more warming with relatively mild impacts or a lot more warming with serious consequences if the world continues on the course the current course of increasing emissions it will be a lot more impact and our children and grandchildren will experience more floods droughts and heatwaves we will see severe impacts on food water energy and security as global climate is disrupted humanity can choose today among three courses of action one to reduce emissions to adapt to the impacts and three to suffer how much of each depends on what we choose to do the more we reduce emissions the less adapting and suffering will be required the future is not necessarily bleak it is not too late to avoid the worst impacts of manmade climate change but this is an urgent issue and the urgency is scientific and not political or ideological we have a window of opportunity in which to act it closes soon if humanity can greatly reduce the global emissions of manmade greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and do it fast then we can greatly reduce the risk of dangerous climate change will require that these emissions peak not in fifty or one hundred years but in five or ten years and then decline rapidly so the global emissions are about eighty percent lower by mid century the sooner we start the lower the cost and the greater the chance of success reducing emissions can be done in many ways and the low hanging fruit is to quickly improve energy efficiency this also has many immediate benefits reducing dependence on imported oil improving health creating jobs making cities cleaner and more livable our nation economic competitiveness depends on innovation this country takes reducing heat trapping emissions we can lead in developing and producing the clean energy technologies of the future rather than clinging to the dirty energy sources of the past i look forward to answering your questions thank you thank you dr somerville at this time dr christie recognized for five minutes chairman ranking member russian members thank you for this opportunity to discuss climate change i'm john christy alabama state climatologist and best of atmospheric science at the university of alabama in huntsville my research actually involves building climate data sets from scratch to answer questions about what the climate is doing and to test assertions on model theory in this verbal testimony i will briefly address six points that are in detail in my written testimony one extreme event it is popular now to claim extreme events are somehow caused by humans  very large the weather is very dynamic and extreme events will occur somewhere every year quick analysis shows that floods in england in two thousand us trillion two thousand and ten have been exceeded several times in the past  snowstorms in the eastern us occur as part of natural circulation processes and c the recent russian heat wave and related flooding in pakistan were due to blocking systems which occur without appeal to human causes natural unforced climate v warming rate of only nine hundred of a degree as per person per decade this is the same value published in my one thousand nine hundred four analysis which covered only fifteen years and then this rate is one third of that suggested by climate model theory three patterns of warming continued research on surface temperature changes over land indicates nighttime warming but little daytime change this is a classic feature that arises from land use change not greenhouse gas warming for the tropical atmospheric temperature several new studies verify our earlier work that observations and models do not agree about the rate of tropical warming for climate sensitivity and feedbacks new research addresses a question fraught with uncertainty and contention how sensitive is the climate system to extra greenhouse gases my colleague dr roy spencer has shown that for time periods for which this quantity can be assessed the observations indicate the earth has strong negative feedbacks that mitigate warming impulses no model reproduces these types of feedbacks and so this is a clue as to why models tend to show more warming than is observed when they had c o two five consensus science widely publicized reports purportedly by thousands of scientists are often misrepresented of our science and contain overstating confidence in their assertion very few scientists actually control the content of these reports and they rarely represent the full range of scientific opinion and uncertainty that attends our relatively murky science i understand the house's approved an amendment to defund the i p c c i describe a proposal in my written testimony that should the i be funded by taxpayers then ten percent should be set aside by or for a written report by credentialed scientists who have consistently found the i p c c to have under represented critical issues such as the evidence for low climate sensitivity the importance of natural unforced variability and a focus on metrics that are of little value in understanding the greenhouse effect and finally number six impact of a mission control measures five years ago i testified before the oversight investigation subcommittee chaired by you congressman whitfield at that time i calculated the impact of c o two emissions if we built one thousand one point four gigawatts nuclear power plants and that they were added by tw that's not going to happen but using the average climate model sensitivity i demonstrated that global temperatures would change very little but with the new evidence of the climate is less sensitive c o two increases the impacts will be even tinier developing countries will dominate emissions growth as they seek to rise out of poverty a goal we cannot and should not subvert which requires low cost energy which is today carbon based thank you and i will be happy to answer questions at the appropriate time thank you  field you're recognized for five minutes thank you chairman whitfield mr russian distinguished members of the committee it's a pleasure to speak with you today and i want to congratulate you on the initiative to consider climate science and it's important for the for the country in the future i'm a professor of environmental or system science at stanford university and two of the carnegie institution's department of global ecology have worked on climate change related issues for the past twenty five years and i want to start with two key foundational points the first is that climate warming over the last century is unequivocal and primarily human caused the second is climate changes are already occurring in the united states and they're projected to grow in the future it's important to realize that the world has convened a large number of scientific organizations several in the united states  coordinated by the u s global change research program by the national academy of sciences or internationally by the governmental panel on climate change and in each of these consortia there has been an aggressive comprehensive effort to consolidate views across the spectrum of climate science we haven't looked at institutions that have been put together to reflect one perspective or another and when you see what appears as consensus statements these are overviews of the positions of a wide range of climate scientists including the full diversity of positions and the measured statements that come from these assessments are in fact reflecting the entire diversity across the spectrum of legitimate science what i'd like to do in my comments is focus specifically on relatively recent research on the sensitivity of key sectors in the united states to climate change my distinguished colleagues who focus more on atmospheric science will talk about where we're headed with the climate and where we've been but what i want to do is talk about sensitivity that's observed from data not based on simulations that takes advantage of the fact that for example the u s department of agriculture has been surveying crop fields very very carefully over the last more than one hundred years and i want to focus on on two important as for the united states the first is yields of agriculture and their sensitivity to climate change the second is wildfires in the west and its sensitivity to climate change by looking at the summary of global agriculture yields over the last fifty years or so we can see that that agriculture is one of the triumphs of human ingenuity we've been able to increase crop yields by one or two percent per year over many decades but there's increasing the evidence that we're doing this with an anchor of climate change that's pulling us back by looking at the year to year variations in climate change we can see that for several of the world's major food crops there has been a negative effect of warming that's occurring on our ability to increase yields such that for crops including we eat corn and barley we're seeing a decrease globally that means that something like forty million tonnes of food production has been a foregone as a consequence of the climate changes that have already occurred for each of these crops we see a sensitivity to warming based on observations not sense not simulations of something like  ten percent yield loss for each one point eight degrees fahrenheit of warming in terms of two thousand and two ag yields this forty million tonnes of foregone productivity represents an economic loss of about five billion dollars recently both anxious anchor and and don roberts of explore the climate sensitivity of u s agriculture using incredibly detailed dataset that's allowed them to with much higher precision assess the sensitivity of u s crops and what they find is that for corn soybeans and cotton that's a profound sensitivity to warming such that at a temperature threshold it's about eighty two for corn eighty four for soybeans and about ninety for cotton you see a very in productivity as temperatures rise above that there is no question that temperatures are at the threshold and exceeding them relatively frequently with wildfires we see a pattern where warmer longer summers increase the probability of wildfires and what we've seen by summarising wildfire data is that in the united states a warming of one point eight fahrenheit increases on average the area in the west that's burned from one point three million acres per year to four point five million acres per year these are profound effects that indicate based on observations that the deep sensitivity of u s activities thank you very much dr field and dr phil to your recognize for your five minute opening statement and turn your microphone including air quality by conducting research teaching and also providing scientifically rigorous information of policymakers at the state level i serve two terms in the colorado air quality coal control commission where we develop the option  will program to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles promulgated regulations to mandate strict controls on wood and coal burning in residential fireplaces and stoves and on its best concentrations in the air in my custom made today and in more detail in my written testimony i have four main points first research has shown that a focus on just carbon dioxide in a few other greenhouse gases as a dominant human force on climate is too narrow and misses other important influences to the phrases climate the phrases global warming and climate change are not the same global warming is a subset of climate change three the prediction or projection a regional weather including extremes decades of the future is far more difficult than commonly and soon as well the attribution of a stream events to a particular subset of climate forcings i scientifically incomplete if the research ignores other relevant human and natural causes of extreme weather events and for the climate science assessments of the i p c c and c c s as well as the various statements issued by the age of you a m s n n r c are completed by a small subset of climate scientists who are often the same individuals decisions about government regulation are ultimately legal administrative legislative and political decisions as such they can be informed by scientific considerations but they are not determined by them in my testimony seek share my perspectives on the science of climate based on my work in this field over the past four decades first the production of multi decadal climate predictions a regional impact scale cannot be verified until decades from now is not a robust scientific no way to test a hypothesis with a multi decadal global climate model forecast for decades from now a step two as a verification of the scale of these forecasts is not possible until decades past there's also been a misunderstanding of the relationship between global warming and climate v a longer term change global warming is typically defined as an increase in the global average surface temperature the better metric is the global annual average measured in jewels global warming involves the accumulation of jewels what he enjoys within the components of the climate system dominated by the heating and cooling within the upper layers of the ocean climate change in contrast with any multi decade or longer alteration one or more physical chemical or biological components of the climate system climate change involves for example changes and to join me in a paper where we discussed three different mutually exclusive hypotheses with respect to the climate system hypothesis one human influence on climate variability and changes of minimal importance and natural causes dominate climate variations and changes on all time s in coming decades the human influence will continue to be minimal hypothesis to weigh all the natural causes of climate variations and changes are undoubtedly important to human influences are significant and involve a diverse range of first water climate forcings including but not limited to the human input  carbon dioxide most if not all of these human influences on regional and global climate will continue to be a concern for the coming decades hypothesis to be although the natural causes of climate variation and change are undoubtedly important that human influences are significant and dominated by the emissions in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases the most important of which is carbon dioxide the earth adverse effect of these guests on regional and global climate constitutes the primary cause of crime primary climate issue for the coming decades hypothesis to be the ones with the o two dominance is i p c c perspective in our paper we concluded however that only hypothesis a has not been refuted by this is one and two b are inaccurate characterizations of the climate system in our two thousand and nine pa we included in addition to greenhouse gas emissions the other first two other forcings are important to understand the climate these forcings are especially heterogeneous include the effect of aerosols and clouds and associated precipitation the influence of aerosol deposition and reactive carbon in the roles of land and land cover change among their effect is the role in altering atmospheric ocean circulations away from what they would be in the natural climate system as with c o two the length of time that they affect the climate are estimated on the multi decadal time scales are longer we concluded therefore the cost benefit analysis regarding the mitigation of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases need to be considered along with other climate force and in a broader environmental context as well as respect to the role in the climate system and and unfortunately two thousand and seven i p c c assessment is not if i get legal knowledge the importance of these and other human climate forcings in altering regional and global climate and their effects on predictability at the regional scale a major conclusion indicated in these studies is that regional atmospheric and ocean due to the limited number of scientists who are leading climate assessments as just one example i present my experience with this first report my experience is documented in a public comment in the executive summary of that report stated the processes for cleaning the s report excluded valid scientific perspectives on of the charge of the committee the editor of the of the report systematically exclude a range of views on the issues of understanding reconciling lower atmospheric temperature trends future assessment committees need to appoint members with a diversity of and who do not have a significant conflict of interest with respect to their own work such committee should be chaired by individuals committed to their presentation of a diversity of perspectives and unwilling to gauge in strong arm tactics to enforce a narrow perspective and such a committee should be charged with summ zing all relevant literature even if inconvenient for which presents of you not held by certain members of the committee finally i propose a new approach in the climate community based on a bottom up resource based perspective there are five broad areas that we can use that to find a need for this  that's truly an honor to be able to do so trained as a statistician i've spent all of my career applying the tools of statistics to problems and in climate research and i've held various positions  the climate research enterprises i'm currently a professor at the university of victoria there's a growing body of literature available that examines both the changes observed changes in temperature perception in extremes  these are events that of course do happen all the time one here hundred year event a particular location is expected to recur at that location once every hundred years the question that we're we're posing to ourselves in this literature is whether or not humans influencing the climate system are tilting the odds and are increasing the likelihood of an event from a one in a hundred year event to perhaps a more frequent event and this is the kind of evidence that the literature seems to be turning  literature shows that extreme warm temperatures seem to be coming more likely over time extreme cold temperatures seem to be becoming less likely over time and very intense precipitation is becoming more likely and these are phenomena that we are generally observing at operational meteorological observing stations basically throughout the world where these data are available these are changes that are expected with an overall warming climate we've observed a shift to warmer temperatures we understand a lot about the causes of those those rises the warming climate leads to increases in the likelihood of extreme warm temperatures at least a decreases in the likelihood of extreme cold temperatures we've observed both of those from the phenomenon that leads to increases in the amount of water vapor that's held by the free atmosphere something that is also being observed and that creates conditions that would allow more intense precipitation events to occur something that we're beginning to see in observations as well climate model simulate extreme events and climate model simulate changes in extreme of the ants that correspond more or less to changes that have been observed when those models are run with historical increases in greenhouse gases and changes in other forcing factors changes in and the amount of aerosol that's present in the atmosphere for example another product of fossil fuel combustion sissoko analysis of the observations finds evidence that the signals that are anticipated by climate models are present in the we find a seventh with high confidence in the case temperature extremes with somewhat lower confidence in the case of precipitation extremes but in both cases it would be difficult to explain observed changes with natural climate variability alone the most plausible explanation for observed changes in temperature extremes and observed changes in precipitation extremes is human influence on the climate system human increase human induced increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere with regard to temperature we're beginning to be confident enough so that we can cautiously attempt to estimate changes in waiting times for rare events you could think of the twenty year extreme temperature that in the case of cold temperature events that were expected to recur about once every twenty years in the one nine hundred sixty s but we see that by the end of the twentieth century these events were recurring roughly two times as frequently they became roughly ten year events and were able to tribute that change in probability of of likelihood of an extreme cold temperature event to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations similar results are available for warm temperature extremes the case precipitate patients the odds of extreme events has appeared to increase but it's generally too soon to to quantify scientifically the the extent to which those odds have changed so we have evidence that indicates that human influence on the climate system is tilting the odds towards more intense precipitation events but at this stage we're not able to able to say by how much a few events have been studied in detail when it has been studied in detail was the european two thousand and three heatwave this was an event that took forty thousand lives and very likely that human influence on climate increases the odds of that event by factor of at least two in the case of the u k flooding in the fall of two thousand is all so very likely that human influence has increased flooding best estimate is the risk was doubled so these kinds of events have significant impacts heat waves cause deaths flooding causes death damage and enormous economic impacts even seemingly benign changes can have negative impacts do you think of the reduced intensity of cold extremes in winter time this is being linked to forest park middle of breaks throughout western north america that have deaf stated force industries in western north america so the impact of climate change over the last several decades available studies are subject to  certainties and therefore do not provide the final word on the question of whether and by how much increasing greenhouse gas concentrations is affected the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events but they provide sufficient evidence i believe indicate that human influence is having an effect on high impact events of people and their livelihood as rest and provide an additional piece of information for taking action on greenhouse gas emissions thank you thank you  are you recognize five men thank you thank you chairman whitfield ranking member rush and other members of the committee it is a true pleasure and honor to be testifying before you and very much appreciate the opportunity my name is nail hoffer i am a researcher and professor of ecology i'm not a climatologist or a climate scientist but i study the effects of all kinds of  factors as they affect arctic and arctic ecosystems and temperate forests i work for twenty years as a researcher in woods hole massachusetts at the marine biological laboratory and for the past eight years i've been a professor at the university of michigan in ann arbor i am also the director of a major field station near the center of the great lakes basin our field station the university of michigan biological station is over one hundred years old it attracts researchers from around the world who have been recording distributions of plants and animals ecosystem properties and interactions between humans and their environments for over a century my field station is in the middle of the largest freshwater system in the world twenty percent of the world's surface freshwater is in the great lakes basin our economy the economy of the eight states and canadian provinces that's around the great lakes are the third or fourth largest economy in the world and in our region we interact intimately with our natural resources to sustain our economy and our culture so we pay very close attention to what happens around us measurements at my field station and others across the great lakes region are providing knowledge and insights into changes in ecosystems associated with the changes in climate that we have heard about climate change is real you've heard that from other others on the panel the fact that there's a consensus is minor in my view the evidence is what drives our conclusions and science is science as an evidentiary based process the evidence is strong and overwhelming we can measure its effects in the great lakes region and we know that the change is primarily driven by increases in greenhouse gases in fact even the skeptics call these gases greenhouse gases which we can thank them for warming the planet as much it is as it is excursions that we now in encountering and experiencing are likely to drive our planet to a warmer state they have in fact in the arctic where i have worked for twenty years on the north slope of alaska we see changes changes in vegetation there's now more shrub cover in the arctic but more importantly summer ice cover has decreased by thirty percent in the in the satellite record since one nine hundred seventy eight less summer sea ice means less reflection of heat back into the into space and more absorption of heat by the ocean this has huge implications for global climate as our climate scientists will tell you not only is the arctic warming the great lakes region is warming in the north by four degrees fahrenheit in the southern part of the myth of the great lakes region by one degree since one nine hundred seventy eight stunning is the fact that lake superior  warmed by four and a half degrees in the past thirty years that is a lot of jewels that is a lot of energy lake superior is a big thermometer is the deepest lake in the largest lake and in the western hemisphere second largest in the world and it is warming at a rate that no one thought it would ice cover is decreasing on the great lakes varies year to year but over decades we can see that the ice cover is lower that affects our climate that effects of aberration from the lakes in the great lakes itself in the region total annual precipitation has been relatively constant over the past fifty years but major storm events have increased by a factor of two and those major storms tend to come in the springtime late winter and they're balanced by droughts in the summer and we feel that our coastal cities small cities like south haven on the west coast of michigan and the larger cities like milwaukee on the east coast of wisconsin have storm sewers systems that are now compromised they were built fifty years ago and they can't handle this the the floods so we're paying a cost in terms of infrastructure we're experiencing more late winter early spring saw storms more summer droughts and he defends  not only does this compromise our our infrastructure but it can degrade drinking water quality lead to the export of nutrients sediments into our lakes exacerbating dead zones it because it delays jeopardizing a forty billion dollar forest products industry it reduces summer summer stream flow and groundwater recharge and threatens our tourist and recreation industry which is a part of our culture business as usual scenarios of greenhouse gas emissions will will exacerbate these trends compromising our environment the economy and culture and water of this resource rich region thank you very much for listening to me i look forward to questions thank you very much and dr roberts you recognized for five minutes emeritus of tropical public health i follow i follow closely follow closely on claims of public health harm from climate change there are parallels and claims about climate change and regulatory controls of carbon dioxide and claims about insecticides and when the hell are the arguments for government interventions and both stopping on fearful claims position to ban a famous insecticide global power global public health leaders at that time repeatedly and firmly warned that it would cause a return of devastating diseases  claims of such harm are necessary these claims are reflected in many attempts to attribute all sorts of increases and malaria and other  condition of human poverty and effort to control the most important as evidence to back up this statement i would point to the different conditions of public alf on the problem if we accept that it will worsen ask the question that arises is what should we do about it how are we to improve the health and welfare of those suffering from asthma the whole body   at some level with the international pop panel on climate change ok so everyone except one has been involved that ok now you know we find ourselves today in a situation where e p a is moving quickly on regulating greenhouse gases so in some ways as far as their decisions are in the science behind us and have any real impact on the overall presence of greenhouse gases in the world i've done several calculations in that regard and the impact is miniscule to what ever really both the greenhouse gas concentrations and really what the climate system might do as a result of that delta so you would agree with administrator jackson that's basically what she said as well yes ok now roberts i may have missed or maybe i didn't hear you correctly but did you say that there's no relationship between climate in public  health not precisely but the fact that the relationship between climate and public health is not going to go and a single direction i think i think my fear that hearings we've had relating these regulations many people say this is central because we've got to cut back on asthma we're exposing children and elderly people to all sorts of difficulties if we don't cut back greenhouse gas emissions with these regulations do you believe that the proposed e p a regulations would appreciably impact public health and anyway no ok now i'm going to just comment here obviously this whole issue has been politicized in a way i mean we've got sides who got politics we've got all sorts of things going on and when you look at the events at the university of east anglia when you consider the doctor ally in the two thousand and seven i p c c who made the comment that the himalayan glaciers would melt by the year two thousand and thirty five which i think then he backed off of that and said you know i don't think that was a mistake or not this is not accurate i remember someone at the i p c c announced emphatically that more hurricanes were the direct cause of global warming he was so upset about it because he said the science is simply not there that he resigned from i p c c and we've heard other incidences of that and i know that you can pick on pick out isolated events and anything but you analysis and you found that eighty five percent of the stations were unduly close to generating area is that correct well we have a study that's almost through the review process that shows that many of the stations are very poorly located next to air conditioners identified large numbers of jobs depended on the on the waters themselves but as i mentioned in my previous testimony we in the in the great lakes region in particular are dependent upon natural resources many of those natural resources are provided by natural systems like forests wetlands and agricultural ecosystems our agricultural ecosystems are at great risk because of not only warming temperatures  summer droughts spring rains and floods but also exceeding level levels of heat tolerance of major crops like corn and soybeans which as you know from illinois are are major to our agricultural economy interesting question but there are simple thing some simple answers one is again springtime floods which deliver large loads of water to the large lakes with a lot of energy carry sediments pesticides fertilizers and nutrients into the water these cause increases in production in the lakes more algal growth and are well associated with toxic algae algal blooms that is blooms of algae that  actually produce toxins that harm people they also contribute to dead zones organic matter that falls to the bottom of the lakes and then is because decompose consuming oxygen and thereby killing  fish these are happening now again on lake superior they are likely the result of floods that deliver materials and nutrients to the lakes so this increases our cost of water treatment  also the flooding when it comes early in the spring carries more water off of the landscape and there's less water available for percolating into aquifers and groundwater sources so our groundwater sources paradoxically are part of that answer is in deference to our climate scientists who again i have reviewed i p c c reports i am not an author but i think the evidence is very clear that business as usual with respect to emissions will exacerbate the trends we have seen and therefore i think compromise not only our agricultural and forestry resources but our water supplies to the extent that future droughts draw down of aquifers in the great plains creates needs for waters outside the basin any any policies in the future which which actually remove water from the great lakes could have dramatic effects on water levels right now one percent of the volume of the great lakes leave the great lakes annually in the st lawrence seaway and the lake levels are relatively stable they go up and down a metre or two but they're relatively stable if we start exporting large quantities to drought areas outside the basin our water levels will more than likely medical profession that you don't go seeking alone contrary dr when you received a serious diagnosis get a second opinion but not ninety nine opinions till you find one that you like and i think scientific evidence is overwhelming and if i could use another medical metaphor sure there is risk and cost to taking action and we also know for elective surgery for example as well as climate change there's risk and cost to not taking action too and i think the balance here is that we have a strong case we need international action us can lead it cannot do the whole job as you've heard but i believe that the u s and china together contribute more than half of the global carbon dioxide emissions if they could reach an accommodation in which they both took action then i think that would be an enormous step forward legislation that increases the government's control over how much energy the american family uses or the type of energy it's used by american families congressman i'm not an economist or a politician i but i think that in many other areas we see a variety of actions to promote things that are taken to be good and to discourage those things taken to let me ask you a question or not mean to interrupt but time is limited in  balanced and reasonable approach to addressing the problem of climate change i think it's far better than doing nothing and are you aware that that bill had as its pager previn to control the amount and type of energy used by american families  understand that aspect of it and you understand that there was no such control over families in india or china of course the u s congress can't control we actually were exactly right but it is a global problem and do you understand revulsion that the country had after that legislation was passed late at night on the floor of the united states house of representatives just prior to the fourth of july recess of two thousand nine hundred stand how members of congress went home to their districts and were actually reviled by their constituents for having done such a good activity congressman i'm going to have to stick to the science well i will tell you having been in those town halls and actually voting against the legislation voting no was not enough people wanted us to stop that cold dead in its tracks and they were not shy about telling us that you know i gave my reference my opening statement some of the problems that we encountered here in this very committee room in two thousand and eight when gasoline prices went to four dollars a gallon i remember after hurricane katrina we also had hearings in this very committee room and gasoline went to three dollars a gallon we had hearing about that now the american public is kind of inured to three dollars a gallon it gets to four dollars a gallon and it gets their attention they get it but i remember a panel similar to this where i asked the question that you guys have to be pretty happy now with gas  dollars a gallon is going to be less used and the answer i got actually stunned me and i don't remember the witness at the time but he said actually sir you have to get to six dollars a gallon before you're going to affect utilization people hear statements like that it understandably scares them to death and that is one of the reasons why it's so important for us to have a panel like this today it's important for people to understand just exactly what it is we're talking about with all talking pear shaped tones about controlling the climate controlling carbon dioxide but what we're really talking about is placing energy costs beyond the reach of the average middle class american family director christie let me ask you a question the  memorandum that the minorities put out for this hearing explains that the state of the science is climate change is occurring it's caused largely by human activities poses significant risks for in many cases are already affecting a broad range of human and natural systems is that an accurate description of the state of the science as we know it and of course man's role and in the science i think if i remember that comment right they stated that humans were the cause or major cause of climate always changes i mean that the fact that climate is changing is not news to anyone always and always will but the notion that humans are causing most of it that is purely a model driven result that you cannot discount or cannot prove that natural enforced variability is causing this i don't have some ometer this much warming was human caused and then this much warming was natural we only have one to monitor and so you're trying to figure out how much might have been caused by humans and the fact that models fail so many times in the test we do with the data sets we build tell us they don't have a natural and force variability well at all y dr somerville is i understand most people looking at this problem they look at the fact of warming and they see climate change happening as a result the mainstream consensus appears to be that it's primarily caused by humans is there widespread in practice are occurring now and expected to get worse i'm not a scientist but my understanding is that there is tremendous amount of data to support these conclusions not just models but actual observations and measurement can you briefly describe the independent lines of evidence that support these scientific conclusions  waxman i'm glad to do that i'd like to say that the thread has been running through this hearing that disturbs me that i think that it's wrong to frame this issue in terms of the evidence for human caused climate change hanging from some very slender chain of evidence that could be cut by one brilliant insightful paper it's not a slender thread at all it's a rope woven together of many many chains of evidence and there's a well developed branch of science and chapters in the c reports devoted to exactly this question of discerning a natural climate change and attributing it to a cause there's one paper cited in the reports it's very unlikely that they're going to be overturned by single  characterization of science where the science is solid and relatively firm where more research needs to be done and it does take into account a wide range of i think the discussion of this has to begin with that and not with i would like but what did you think of contrary point of view what do you think of that in terms of distribution of money to scientific research you have to start with the fact that the i p c c doesn't really have much money it's a little organization with a skeleton staff in geneva it basically organizes scientists into writing these reports and we serve without our universities our employers who pay our salaries we don't get a penny from the ip and i think the he does a very fine job of taking into account contrary opinions you know the  stolen emails from the server in east anglia have been mentioned in this hearing people have to realize that those events have now been thoroughly investigated the scientists have been exonerated they are clear they did not commit fraud they did not suppress publication of their opponent's  that scientific money for research to be distributed based on who has minority points of views and give them a certain amount of money seems to me it ought to be peer reviewed see what's the most promising research otherwise i can see going into united states what are the key impacts on the future crop you know what is it that you see happening in this area if we look at the observations what we see i agriculture a system that's very sensitive to warming based on farmer experiences on models there are a wide range of different mechanisms that can different parts of the world some of the stresses are related to limited water availability some of the stresses are intrinsic to the crops some of the stresses have to do with outbreaks of disease and pathogens and some have to do with complicated factors like when the farmers can get into the fields for different kinds of activities  observations of the crop sensitivity are based on summaries over all of these different processes and that's one of the reasons that they're so robust thank you thank you yes sir mr mckinley you recognize   in which we have apparently fifteen million people unemployed in america probably an equal amount underemployed or quit seeking work we have ten point three percent unemployed in west virginia  lisa jackson was here just a few weeks ago and said that she feels she has no obligation to take into consideration the economic impact of any of her decisions to the regulatory bodies we've had others come before this group of the greenhouse gas emissions under the clean air act and others have talked about the high energy costs will cost economic malaise and this in the deter the manufacturing expansion so since west virginia is the one of the leading producers of fossil fuel and so dependent on all this with one hundred fifty million tonnes in the work that we do that we do pre producing coal in west virginia what's the what's the future what's going to be the impact of all of this testimony that we're hearing about the e p a overregulation greenhouse gases on west virginia jobs whether or not an attack on cold war on call is going to have an economic impact well i came to talk about the science and that really is i sat outside my area of expertise as really into the politics of it and i'm going to stick to science thank you dr christie state climatologist i deal with a lot of economic development activity and in my state it would be a real problem it would create more poverty than there is now and i can tell you as someone has lived in africa without energy life is brutal and short thank you concur that there is a there has been your predecessors that have come before the panel before have indicated to the group that the  that the greenhouse gases your precursor to earth warm global warming is that generally a  consensus i think we have to recognise that greenhouse gas increases are one component of the climate system it's not the entire picture and i think that's one of the failures of the i p c c atic we take into account the fact that we've had some come before us and say if it's a purse or to global warming you're going to see that the greenhouse gases c emission greenhouse gas your cursor to global warming but yet from my reading your paper clancy's how lois's and others have indicated that what they're finding in antarctica the scientists down there that it's the reverse is true well but it's unequivocal i think that's the wrong argument because we can see that c o two is increasing because of human activities we know that the problem is how does that fit into these other forcings land use change aerosols the natural  variability and as we learn more about the climate system it comes because it's more complex than we thought and the i p c c unfortunately takes a very narrow and limited view of how we're altering the climate system so when we're talking about all these impacts about global warming climate change is more than global warming and secondly even global warming is affected by things cooling is affected by more than just carbon dioxide and we need to recognise that broader perspective and apparently decided not to do that something i just said i'd be glad to comment on the issue you raised and go right ahead i'm sorry i'm a hard of hearing so someone want to have a joke over that that's their problem sure i'm happy to clarify the issue of the timing of carbon dioxide increases that you mention in the antarctic the ocean in a warming period of the atmosphere in a cooling period so it's an amplifier probably thirty percent to the effect of the orbital forcing but it's not a primary cause but it's an amplifying effect thank you thank you mistranslate recognise five minutes thank you thank all of you for being here today but i have to express some degree of embarrassment that a nation that went to the moon mapped the human genome established the best software companies in the world is now have one of its great parties adopt a chronic anti science syndrome one of its great parties that is decided to have an allergy to consensus science instead of respect for science and scientists and that's embarrassing and listening to this hearing i am convinced that if we had that is the situation that we're in today and i think it's a pretty sad state of affairs there's one point i want to make particularly and i hope some who are covering this hearing might might pay attention to this there are six people at the table  if this hearing is reported as saying five people or four people said one thing and three people said another and you're missing the big story here and i want to make sure everybody understands i put in put into the record an article a letter dated february night by eight hundred doctors saying that the health of united states citizens is jeopardized by greenhouse gases and i want to put this into the record i want to put a statement by the c d c the centers for disease control  world urging us to to act on this clear science of climate change the data may seventh two thousand and ten i want to put in the record a letter of february two thousand and two thousand five hundred five scientists basically urging us to allow the environmental protection agency to do its job those are four thousand five hundred sixty scientists and what i want to say is standing behind dr field at his table or four thousand five hundred sixty scientists now the republican party has found two people to raise some questions and of course there's a lot of questions about how this is going to go and what's going to do but there is a norm scientific consensus on the planet earth then you see in september two thousand and seven it shrunk by about forty or fifty percent the most recent science predicts it may be absolutely gone in a meaningful sense of the next five to ten years when i understand a few years ago we thought that would happen for twenty or thirty years it appears to me like this is happening a lot faster than many of us thought were going to happen and this is one of the things that are causing not fear dr roberts but i think a rational concern that my two year old grandson that changes in things like arctic ice in the positions of glaciers in the ranges of species and in the water availability for the western u s have changed dramatically now the science tends to keep up with the new observations and so i don't think it's accurate to say that the current scientific consensus is inconsistent with these observations but i do think it's fair to say that as of a few years ago most scientists were projecting that the kinds of events we're seeing now might the half of the century i read yesterday that the algae bloom in the arctic is now fifty days earlier in the season than it was i read that the melting of the greenland ice sheet seems to be much more significant than perhaps we even predicted five or ten years say that's very much a fair assessment and the greenland ice cap is a good example the cautious it's not political at all but it's intellectually conservative it doesn't go beyond the data doesn't do hunches and conjecture and it's said in the last report that you could put a number on how much sea level rise would happen from melting ice on land and thermal expansion of the ocean but it said we don't yet know enough about what might happen to the greenland and antarctic now the newer science says yes there are positive contributions well just as one layperson i had the oyster growers of washington state in my office last week they're having trouble going down because ocean acidification which we haven't talked about carbon goes in the air goes in the ocean makes it more acidic my are having problems today my berry growers have a problem this isn't hypothetical this is a problem today usa so yes i would i think the observations are certainly correct that the arctic sea ice has been diminishing and then these other facts you talk about i think the the proposal that dr christy made that there needs to be an alternative view is analogous in the medical community to basically getting a second opinion and if you had a medical a drug development company and that company is reporting on how well that drug does you certainly would like to have an independent assessment of that and i think that's what we need and i think john suggestion was mr chair would you permit me one question in light of mr comment there yes i'll give you one follow up question and i appreciate your courtesy mr chair the concern that i have and i think many people are that this is a profound physical change in the entire system of the planet earth to have this ice cap disappear and i very concerned about black carbon i actually have authored a bill to deal with black carbon it is a problem but i think it's a fair statement as far as i can tell is that no one in any peer reviewed research that i can find have suggested such a rapid change in a  what is happening and so i'm not sure i will get the answers so if we don't get the answers if you all could submit those to the committee so i can review the information that would be great let me also say that i am concerned that we're shifting jobs  other parts of the world where they're not going to pay attention to this so even if we believe that there is a problem if we shift all the jobs to some place that's going to create actually more greenhouse gases are we creating a solution or are we making the problem worse by having some of the regulations that being said here so my question has anybody studied what the temperatures were do we know what the temperatures were doing the period in history known as the great optimum which would lead to the rise of the mesopotamian egyptian cultures that was a time in history of global warming we know that but how warm did he get and obviously those were things that led to the rise of our earlier civilizations at some point we also like i'd like to look have somebody look at the lesser optimum which is the closer in time and how much to the temperature rise then we know that that led to the vikings professor needle offered lead to the vikings dominating europe for several hundred years and also led to where the ice cap in the north is melting we're now finding evidence of  nasa and national geographic had reports on this is it in fact and has there been a study a shift in the orbit of mars or is it that the sun is putting out more radiant heat if we have known as you suggest dr somerville for one hundred fifty years the effects of greenhouse gases then why forty years ago when i was in elementary and middle school were we told that an increase in greenhouse gas effect was going to lead to a new ice age in regard to radiant heat the sunspot effects what what do we know about that green one report here that indicates that that by two thousand and twenty will reach a new peak on sunspot activity and this report actually suggests that the earth's temperature may raise be raised by a point five degrees centigrade as a result of the sunspot activity and is could that also be the cause and we were talking about patients earlier somebody said why do you distrust a doctor and then somebody made a comment may get a second opinion i'd like to know if we've looked at maybe the other patients and mars having a similar global warming effect or event going on have we studied what that is and has that p c done done that  and then what is the optimum temperature for man have we looked at that dr somerville you indicated that pre nine hundred hundred industrialized world temperature is where you want to go but in light of the fact that we had a little ice age in the eighteenth century you indicating that we want to return to the little ice age period oriented hitting something between eight hundred twenty and one thousand nine hundred i don't know the answer to that and it's just kind of an interesting these are questions that that i believe are not laying awake at night trying to figure out i'd like to actually hear from dr christine dr pilkey first and then if we have time we can move on to the others but i didn't to support there wouldn't be a lot of time for answers which is why i started my comments by saying if you got info feel free to give it to me and please give it to the comm well i think what you are describing is a natural on force variability creates large excursion temperature that humans have no responsibility for i didn't see up on the chart here when after the arctic sea ice i didn't see the antarctic sea ice which reached its maximum recorded two weeks later after that particular picture was taken i'll be happy to answer those questions there was a boatload of them when you have been in writing i've been i'll be happy to give you notes these are things i've been worrying about for some time and questions that particularly one about why were we told there was a new ice age coming if we'd known about this forty years ago because all of my constituents were taught that now maybe our books in southwest virginia just weren't up is a very poor metric to use to diagnose climate change even global warming is not properly diagnosed by that metric so the question is what was it like in mesopotamia or what was it like in the arctic for example those are the questions we really need to  about that tower of books over there would you like to read it might be helpful oh we've read some of mine and i'd be happy because it's a lot shorter list anyway of what did to just briefly touch base with dr christy we've talked a little bit agriculture this committee hearing in my view farmers are really america's true environmentalists people who work every day in the land and if global warming really threatened to cause extreme weather they'd be the first in line to really to want to stop it because it threatened their livelihood july we have a stake if the speculation is out there that warming reduces crop yields had any real world validation farmers would be on the front lines fighting for global warming regulations encouraging the e pass the regulations encouraging congress to pass the regulation bill but what the agriculture community has been saying is a global warming policies are far worse than global warming itself the farm bureau opposes e p a s regulations for what they would do to energy and fertilizer costs for farmers from an agricultural standpoint is the cure worse than the disease i think so i was just on a farm just two weeks ago working with farmer on something and i'm just surprised that my colleagues here comments about a culture change as we grow corn from north dakota to alabama when it's warm in alabama we still get two hundred forty bushels a neighbor for irrigated corn tremendous amount of corn the temperature is not as critical when you know how to farm and deal with the variations that occur in your particular area but pilkey in your testimony there's a two thousand paper you wrote in the excerpt in your testimony that says therefore the cost benefit analysis regarding the mitigation of c o two and other greenhouse gases need to be considered along with the other human climate forcings in a broader and final context as well as with respect to their role in the climate system do you feel that there hasn't been adequate cost benefit analysis regarding a c o two regulations now actually what we proposed is a bottom up resource base focus where you basically take something like corn and asked what are the threats to that resource which climate is gas and other regulations right now and that we've seen a chart that shows that what's called the train wreck do you think it's a good idea to do all of what we're talking about greenhouse gas regulations in the middle of a recession and what those effects could be one of us me a political policy question here will it in turn then cause jobs to go overseas where there's little or no regulation we've seen that i've talked to a particular industry that says we've already looked at mexico and china because if our energy costs go up we're going to move period and could you explain you mentioned a thousand we c this issue especially as it relates to broader efforts by the e p a to to regulate greenhouse gases we've had a number of hearings on not only the science in the past but also on economic impacts and the like to talk about both of those with you know one thing we hear a lot by people on the other side is this concept that the science is settled in and i think when we go into past hearings that we've had on this as well as today i think it's clear that the science is not settled you know there's these armies of thousands of scientists somewhere that hide behind these organizations that themselves have been discredited but they try to to in essence diminish countering views in  which all come back to science and dr phil to you've talked about this would you address this yes there is certainly not a consensus in fact let me give you an example a two thousand and five national research council report on expanding the radio forcing concept was coauthored by a range of different people including michael mann for example was on this committee and he signed off on this report as well all of us did in which we show that there were these multiple other types of climate forcings the i p c c basically ignored that report which was available to them  dr somerville and in your in your opening statement terms like the great preponderance of experts agree later on you say nobody should be compressed by these discredited claims later on you use the common it is silly and just accept it and it will take a strong case to go against the i p c c why is there this kind of elitist arrogant view to people that have a contrarian view in the scientific community to that that you hold i'm certainly not trying to be firmly known than others i'm not going to write a research proposal to the national science foundation to find out whether the earth goes around the sun that's pretty firmly established that none of us dispute that however there is dispute over this claim that man is the cause of global warming and  year can you comment on this this concept that the science is settled i don't agree that it is at all and i think dr somerville's comments about being exonerated for these folks in the climate gate thing which is absolutely false because that was not a legal test anything that was not admissible evidence it was not cross examination of the evidence there was not due process and all those things those were not exoneration panels at all that's what they were exoneration paneled they weren't science in this has been a common trend over the last over year well over a year you've got people like al gore the debate is over they literally try to make somebody out to be a flat earth or if they just disagree in a scientific way and again  it seems like people like you and dr pilkey and others who truly do go to the data i think you build models on data they're trying to actually change our economy in the united states in a way that would run millions of jobs out of this country we've already seen real evidence of that by the way there the scientific evidence clearly is not settled on this issue but we do know from testimony we've had about people who have said they'll move they have moved jobs to other countries if you can maybe give me a summary of what carbon leakage means for those companies that go in they'll build a steel plant or they'll build a refinery in another country that doesn't have the standards that we have today where they will actually emit more carbon what does that do to the global atmosphere if if they're concerned about carbon you're actually emitting more carbon in another country because you've sent those jobs out of america instead of keep them here emissions will rise as a result of that kind of unintended consequence poverty will increase in a state like mine in fact i had this very conversation with a plant owner who  said it is ironic that with this legislative action if it were to go forward that they were looking mexico in fact that they would emit four times more emissions if they were to move their operations plus create a pocket of poverty that we don't need in our state that would earlier in the discussion and it's a real nuance here but it's one that i think grass average nonscientific citizens when they're trying to digest all of that many other attribute or causes and it's difficult to kind of unwind man's cause that's the ultimate issue here because we can only control man's caught man's role within the borders of the united states of america so i'm curious what are some of the other factors has there been scientific studies that would enable us to measure more accurately so we can have a more targeted solution here than simply trying to lemonade all of man go to a zero carbon baseline from eighteen to twenty but we have to recognize there's consequences whenever humans do anything but what we have done and it was two thousand and five national research council report i referenced that talks about land use change talks about aerosols talks about nitrogen deposition for example as well as carbon dioxide both the a chemical in the radiative effect and the more we learn about this the more uncertain it becomes and to try to factor out what is the c o two contribution to any of these impacts whether it's floods or heat waves is becoming an increasingly more difficult problem and when we discuss just c o two we focus just on c o two we're ignoring all these other influences and not even then considering what the natural part is if the united states did go to a eighteen twenty carbon baseline for manzi missions within the united states what as a scientific community concluded what globally the like to reiterate if i may sir that the overwhelming scientific consensus that there's no doubt that land use changes especially have an influence on the local climate but when you talk about the global climate the science community is  contribution of c o two in the united states what that impact would have on global warming congressman by itself it would not solve the problem we're not advocating anybody go back to  and my time is up and that's part of the problem here as we can't get our mind around what we're supposed to be doing if there's really that great of a problem ok we appreciate you all coming from many long this we've had twenty four panels witnesses science and every time basically there's an agreement there's warming there's a disagreement on why it is and we know that we've had warming periods in the past we've had the minoan where i mean period the roman warming period the medieval warming period and during that time there was no industrialization and so c o two carbon emissions were not as high as they are today why we don't exactly know the answer the arctic ice in the arctic is diminishing the ice in the antarctic is growing for lack of a better word so when we're asked to adopt policies unilaterally for america they rejected the cap and trade legislation last time so we can talk about consensus on global warming fine but consensus on why and the questions about the models i don't think repeat the last part of the question that was you know you're you're so new to certain conclusions about the effects of climate change on population centers globally expound on what will the arctic is a fragile environment it is a cold environment and temperature excursions change the arctic in ways that we really are only learning are playing out but certainly in many parts of the arctic permafrost is getting warmer and in some places permafrost which holds the ground firmly in place is is melting and diminishing and so many of our north alaskan communities are compromised there they're building structures are sinking often into thawing  permafrost the climate system interesting that we talked about an arctic there are an arctic ice sheet of course is is very complex system but most of the glaciers that are measured in the antarctic continent are increasing their flow rates into the antarctic ocean and so you know it only makes sense that there may be more ice in the arctic ocean because of the donation from the landscape the antarctic peninsula over the past fifty years has increased more than any place on earth of a comparable size so there are indicators on the antarctic region as well and of course these regions one of the reasons that i and others work in the arctic and my colleagues working in the antarctic is they are bellwethers those are the parts of the earth that in the arctic summer in the antarctic summer face into the sun the real field station i work in in northern alaska  has sunlight continuously from may twentieth to july twentieth and when there is less reflectivity from ice in the summer there is more heat coming into the earth's system in the summer so the arctic system is although sparsely populated feedback and affect the global climate in ways that i think others on the panel could express better than i can but thank you very much for i have another question  and farmer behavior and attitudes in my research however i think one of the things that climate change does for agriculture or one of the ways it impacts agriculture is to increase the uncertainty surrounding extreme events i think farmers could well benefit from talking at high levels with climate scientists and trying to understand the risks involved with with a more variable climate in agricultural reg s would you respond to the question sure i'd like to congratulate john on knowing some very successful farmers the observations are that in warm periods crop yields go down and with corn it's very clear that there's a threshold of about eighty four degrees fahrenheit and when the temperatures are higher than that yields go down found the sense to be of corn is quite dramatic a single day with a temperature of one hundred four as opposed to eighty four can decrease cornelia's by about seven percent evidence about how we are going about diagnosing this problem well as someone who actually builds those datasets what i find is that we have  standard of instrumentation that gives us some answers but there's really more answers to be found we do need a better set of satellites going up like a bird there for a long i will say unfortunately some of the satellites seem to be coming at the very evidence for the climate models so those forty five hundred people to make a simple think the world is warming at point two six degrees right now that is what climate model theory that is what greenhouse theory in these models indicate the data set does not does that mean they are still right and i'm wrong or what is so i'm not here to be a popular popular person i hope i'm providing the numbers of science that make this situation more understandable when you put together these change or global warming carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gases no question about that it will increase the surface temperature but the effect is about one third the best we can what the current item number five data science has its own high standards it does not work by on qualified people making claims and expressing opinions on television or the internet people who are not experts are not trained and experienced in this field who do not do research and publish it following standard scientific practice are not doing science does that statement apply dr christie well let me ask you this and i alluded to it earlier the legislation that was before us in this committee late into the night on may thirty first and then on the house floor late into the night on june twenty sixth why do you think it is if the vast preponderance of done a good job of outreach the i p c c reports are hard to read i think we haven't translated them into plain english i think some people who have done that translating aren't well enough to recognize and put the u s military in that category i highly it's a threat multiplier it's a national security concern we don't claim for perfect information before us to reclaim my time and obviously it doesn't take a rocket scientist or a rocket surgeon for that matter to know that members of congress are not held in very high regard right now so anything we say  certainly suspect military is held in very high regard so why again i would pose my question to you why why have you not closed the deal with the public when i go home to my district and have my town halls as a public not clamoring for me to control interesting tower he's constructed there thank you thank you mr waxman you recognize that thank you mr chairman this panel was invited to give us information about the scientific record i don't think that it would be fair to ask any of you to tell us exactly how to solve the problem there are a lot of different alternatives and we could explore those alternatives if we think something needs to be done i think there's a moral to address climate change because of the dead damaging consequences that appear to be occurring we don't have an abstract concern about how many parts per million of carbon dioxide are in the atmosphere we're worried about extreme weather events the reduced crop yields the wildfires the floods the rising sea level and the rest of a long list of impacts and when analyzing the cost of acting to address climate change it would be irresponsible to ignore the cost of inaction but this isn't a pedal to ask about what cause we ought to spend on acting and what are the consequences of the level of science professor field let me just go back to this point earlier you said that corn soybean are very sensitive to increased temperatures what effect does a very high temperature day have on corn you know how much our corn soybean in cotton yields in us expected to decline as a result of climate change for example if you to ten percent for each degree fahrenheit of warming we may be able to do technological fixes that avoid some of those changes but i think that the best way to understand that climate change is like an anchor that we're trying to drag as we advance agricultural technologies through improved breeding and improved practices now if a single day of one hundred four degrees temperature of eighty four reduces corn yields by seven percent is that accurate yes even modest warming over the century is expected to reduce corn soybean and cotton fields by thirty to forty six percent is that an accurate statement that is as well as if we had a severe warming that could reduce us by sixty three to eighty two percent yes  maybe the farmers don't know about it they're not clamoring for the for any legislation on the subject but i could have i could easily imagine they not knowing about it because they're not doing this research as you're doing that the new information is really quite striking what  demonstrates is that for major food crops in the u s and for cotton there's very little temperature sensitivity until you reach a threshold after you reach a threshold temperature i indicated it is eighty two for corn one hundred four for soybeans in about ninety for cotton you'll begin to drop rapidly and that's why people are generally aware of the sensitivity that some of our members represent districts in the western united states as the frequency and your ration of western wildfires been affected by these increasing temperatures since the middle of the  eighty s we've seen a dramatic increase in the area burned in the average length of fires and in the length of fire season across the western u s and these are already happening yes what  expect as temperatures continue to rise and the best estimates based on observations not based on any kind of a simulation is that a warming up about one point eight more or less the same amount of warming that the u s has seen over the last century would increase the annual area consumed in wildfires in the western u s from about one point three million acres a year to about four and a half million acres per year more than three fold increase as a consequence of a very modest warming more or less the amount of warming we've already seen higher frequencies of high heat events and to the extent that those events exceed the critical threshold beyond which crop yield decline qualitatively i can say that it would damage agriculture in the u s is it could decline in illinois by as much as fifty five percent by the end of the century i would not rule that out and we'd induce losses for corn could increase twenty two percent the great lakes states and thirty five percent for soybeans that's within the realm of possibility well i want to mr chairman by saying that we've heard a lot of reasons for members of congress why people are afraid to do anything but for us to do nothing for the rest of the world to do nothing there's a cost of i actually and we ought to recognize that fact and try to figure out what can we do to make things better if we don't want something major to something modest but let's just put our heads in the sand and say answers and we will get the questions in writing to you and and so forth but one of my great concerns in this whole debate is that we shift our jobs and our wealth to other countries asia mexico other countries that are not doing what we're doing if if it turns out that those of you who believe that it's all manmade green house gases manmade effect i worry that we have been crippled ourselves to respond to it later when other countries want to do something about it cause we won't have the money will be a second tier nation at that point that's a great concern of mine and i think we should have you know reasonable rules and regulations but i want to make sure that we're doing it in a reasonable fashion and i'm not sure that that unilaterally stopping the use of carbon fuels does this country or the world any great favors that being said i was interested in the comments by you dr christy in regard to land use and i'm wondering if you can see if you can amplify that as to how that's affecting and what we might be able to do have its effect in global warming what we might be able to do you know  we have shown how that is contaminated by the fact it uses nighttime temperatures which are a clear signal and affected by surface development of all kinds really complicated problem that we published on but there is clearly a warming turned california you know back one of the things that would we have to turn back to get back to temperatures industrialization in the one nine hundred centuries or excuse me in the one thousand nine hundred it would be to go back to what it was like in the eighteenth century all right and then dr fields if you could i've been very interested in and you may not have it here today have been very interested in and get this right ninety degrees for cotton eighty two for corn eighty four beings that i get that correct can you give me the same number on barley wheat oats rice just picking up some of the other grains right so in the only grains for which the only crops for which we've been able to identify the threshold temperatures are corn soybean and cotton for the others we can detect the sensitivity to warming and we can did that detect the fact that historical warming has put this anchor on yield but as far as we can tell that we are in part of the temperature range that's already responsive where we're already seeing the y decreases ok now let me ask this because as congressman waxman pointed out we want to deal with science here today and that's what i'm trying to do i'm going to have all kinds of questions do we not know the other grains because we haven't studied them or we have not yet reached their threshold we have reached the threshold that we're seeing at the global scale is that there are already yield decreases with historical warming for  wheat corn and barley so that what i said is that there's no evidence from the observations that there's a threshold we're already in the responsive part of the system for wheat barley and corn thank you dr several i'd like to suggest that you've been way too self critical in the scientific community about why there is remain uncertainty in the public's mind about this and i want to suggest that the reason there is some uncertainty is there has been a concerted war on science on this subject just like there was in the tobacco debate this is a movie we have seen before when the when the devastating evidence of the scientific consensus came out the tobacco killed americans there was a very concerted effort to distort and attack that science that lasted for decades until it was finally overwhelmed it was part because there were people with enormous financial stakes that attack that science and it was in part and is part today and here's another reason for i'll suggested maybe it's controversy but i'll suggest that folks in the press report this like a divorce trial he said she said she said that he said that's not the way science how to be reported in this country that people hypothesis about why the arctic is melting other than this phenomenon and we need people in the press to certain reporting that frankly so that americans can make rational decisions and i want to bring in the parameters of what are real scientific discussion here  there is uncertainty about this obviously about how fast this is going to go and what the temperature ranges will be but i want to ask dr christie there was a lawsuit up in vermont and a judge quoted an expert who testified on behalf of the certainties most of the observe warming over the last fifty years is likely to have been due to the increase in concentrations chris i gave it away dr x agrees that the increase in carbon dioxide is real and primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels which changes the radiated balance of the atmosphere and has an impact on the planet's surface temperature torah warming great gave away who dr x was i just want to make clear dr chris you agree do you not that human emissions of some of these pollutant gases is playing at least some role in changes in our climate if you can just say yes or no to that i really transcript and that let me just ask you this do you agree with the eyepiece conclusion assessment that in light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties most of the observed warming over the last of years of likely to have been due to the increase in  so i think it's ok now what we have observed the satellite data and observations on the service is incontrovertibly a massive part of the earth has changed i don't know how many thousands of square miles on there but this is a bunch and we have seen a forty to fifty percent reduction in volume of the arctic sea ice in september in the last couple of decades if current trends continue there will be virtually no arctic and why this is important to us thank you sea ice reflects about ninety percent of the sunlight that hits it water absorbs about ninety percent of the of the sunlight that hits it that's a big difference in the amount of planet this is never existed before while humans are on the planet earth has anyone produced a peer reviewed article to suggest a hypothesis as to why this has happened in the arctic other than the accumulation of greenhouse gases and associated effects has anyone published a peer reviewed article suggesting another i pod this is and i'm not seeing any takers because there are not going to question the two thousand and five n r c report talks about black carbon there's also the issue of natural circulation so black carbon or the other shoot it with burning our fossil fuels and others and other we've got a lot of greenhouse gas well it's good enough to melt the arctic and it's one of the reasons why the e p a should not be stopped from forcing the clean air act like the republicans wan where to stop it john as time has expired you know there was some nodding going on here when we talked about there's not one peer reviewed article relating to the r t diminishing of are any of you aware of any peer reviewed articles that there are articles that talk about the circulation being a dominant component of why that's missing out there you go back several a few thousand years not several just a few thousand years there were times when it was probably completely free of this is not a new situation and i agree with you that there is no question the arctic ice has diminished in the past twenty years antarctic sea ice has increased and it has a greater l b to affect by the way than the starting to see more of the the details that seem to be excluded too often in other reports when when some people want an issue or port just to just approve what they're trying to accomplish as opposed to following the data and i want to ask you about this doctor ok because you are referred to the the climate change science programs report and i think you have done an analysis of it maybe with some other doctors i'd like to ask you to comment on but in a few parts of your your statement you talk about the process for completing the  p report excluded valid scientific perspective but you talk about the editor of the report systematically excluded a range of views on the issue of understanding and reconciling the lower atmospheric temperature trends later on you mentioned that the executive summary of the c c s p report ignores critical scientific issues and makes on balance conclusions concerning our current understanding of temperature trends all of your scientists in respect you can disagree with each other if you're trying to come to a conclusion but if you're going to issue a report and deliberately exclude certain things because maybe they don't reach the same conclusion that you're trying to reach that's not science and i think dr b ok what you're what you're talking about here and i and you review this is getting to the heart of that very concern many of us have that there are people running around out there talking about thousands of scientists out there and trying to discredit anybody who comes out against it when in fact some of these reports exclude key data and then the thousands of scientists are basing their assumptions on the report that in itself is factually inaccurate because it excluded key data so if you can talk to me about maybe specifically the c s p report it was excluded in the broader picture are there other scientists like you that have reviewed these kind of reports and said wait a minute they're leaving out the data exactly they certainly are and c c s to report i documented brother in a series of e mail exchanges i had that's actually on my web log what you quoted was out of a public comment that i responded to and an outgrowth of that was that we published several papers with money many authors in the peer reviewed literature that showed unresolved issues with the surface temperature record as a not going to go through them here obviously but one of them is how quality the sighting you know how good does a sighting of these sites they're measured what height do they measure the temperatures that they deliberately excluded this and they want to assume that this surface temperature record is robust and they don't need to look at it only for other and on the c c s b report we raised issues they were excluded and then i finally resigned into the public comment and since then we publish papers on it and have documented that there are serious issues with the use of that metric to diagnose global warming and again i did this should be based on the data i have the data backs it up that's one thing but then then there are people running around using these reports that that in and of themselves are corrupt because they specifically excluded the data as you know the c c s p was used in the preparation of the two thousand and seven i p c c report and also documented peer reviewed papers that were excluded from that report that showed an alternative perspective than what was presented in the report on that issue thank you david let me ask you dr christy because you talk about this in a similar way you talk about widely publicized consensus reports by thousands of scientists are misrepresenting contained overstated confidence in their assertions and rarely representing the range of scientific opinion that attends a relatively murky field of climate science and can you expand upon that falling asleep the line of questioning that i have with fundamentally only a few people can write the report thousands of people don't write the report thousands of people don't approve of everything in the report and so it really comes down to those who are as i call them they're gatekeepers of the information rather than brokers of the information this is the information i present to the android cat and council last summer that they pretty much took to heart and how do you get out of that that was one of the things i was let me ask you this because we've heard this in previous testimony before this committee some scientists who as you talk to others have maybe pointed out some inaccuracies or data that's left out other things they talk about blacklisting that goes on inside the scientific community i don't know if you want to comment on it but i mean what kind of reaction do you get from scientists when you when you do point out these these things that are not necessarily reflective of the full picture they're hard pressed to deal with the numbers because all science is numbers and that's really what we have but when you build your own data model so i take it data on it i looked at it what you would you reviewed on the sierra nevada mountains some other things you found in us in the united states in africa in terms of temperature in the complexities when you get into what really causes it one thing to show that you've got a temperature change over thousands of years you've seen that up and down throughout history what causes it i guess is at the heart of the issue here in the complexities of that so if you can make one final comment there i would just say kind of the thrust of your question if someone to you to meet with preconditions and see if we can come up with well and this was one thank you very much for those comments and you know these are some issues that there are significant on and i know that we have this markup on thursday there'll be a lot of debate a lot of and then months and we'll air it all out at that time and i want to thank the witnesses for being here today very because congress has addressed this issue three separate times and said no each time so we'll go by regular order it will be in the subcommittee for committee and if it's able to get out there for the we'll have plenty of opportunity for debate plenty of opportunity for amendment and we look forward to working with all of you with that the committee's adjourned thank you very much