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UW ATMS 211 - Study Guide

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THE SCIENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE Senate Floor Statement by U.S. Sen. James M. Inhofe(R-Okla) CHAIRMAN, COMMITTEE ON ENVIRONMENT AND PUBLIC WORKS July 28, 2003As chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, I have aprofound responsibility, because the decisions of the committee havewide-reaching impacts, influencing the health and security of everyAmerican.That’s why I established three guiding principles for all committee work:it should rely on the most objective science; it should consider costs onbusinesses and consumers; and the bureaucracy should serve, not rule, thepeople.Without these principles, we cannot make effective public policydecisions. They are necessary to both improve the environment andencourage economic growth and prosperity.One very critical element to our success as policymakers is how we usescience. That is especially true for environmental policy, which reliesvery heavily on science. I have insisted that federal agencies use thebest, non-political science to drive decision-making. Strangely, I havebeen harshly criticized for taking this stance. To the environmentalextremists, my insistence on sound science is outrageous.For them, a “pro-environment” philosophy can only mean top-down,command-and-control rules dictated by bureaucrats. Science isirrelevant-instead, for extremists, politics and power are the motivatingforces for making public policy.But if the relationship between public policy and science is distorted forpolitical ends, the result is flawed policy that hurts the environment,the economy, and the people we serve.Sadly that’s true of the current debate over many environmental issues.Too often emotion, stoked by irresponsible rhetoric, rather than factsbased on objective science, shapes the contours of environmental policy.A rather telling example of this arose during President Bush’s first daysin office, when emotionalism overwhelmed science in the debate overarsenic standards in drinking water. Environmental groups, including theSierra Club and the Natural Resources Defense Council, vilified PresidentBush for “poisoning” children because he questioned the scientific basisof a regulation implemented in the final days of the ClintonAdministrationThe debate featured television ads, financed by environmental groups, ofchildren asking for another glass of arsenic-laden water. The scienceunderlying the standard, which was flimsy at best, was hardly mentioned orheld up to any scrutiny.The Senate went through a similar scare back in 1992. That year somemembers seized on data from NASA suggesting that an ozone hole wasdeveloping in the Northern Hemisphere. The Senate then rushed into panic,ramming through, by a 96 to 0 vote, an accelerated ban on certainchlorofluorocarbon refrigerants. Only two weeks later NASA produced newdata showing that their initial finding was a gross exaggeration, and theozone hole never appeared.The issue of catastrophic global warming, which I would like to speakabout today, fits perfectly into this mold. Much of the debate over globalwarming is predicated on fear, rather than science. Global warmingalarmists see a future plagued by catastrophic flooding, war, terrorism,economic dislocations, droughts, crop failures, mosquito-borne diseases,and harsh weather-all caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions.Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector, sounded both ridiculous andalarmist when he said in March, “I’m more worried about global warmingthan I am of any major military conflict.”Science writer David Appell, who has written for such publications as theNew Scientist and Scientific American, parroted Blix when he said globalwarming would “threaten fundamental food and water sources. It would leadto displacement of billions of people and huge waves of refugees, spawnterrorism and topple governments, spread disease across the globe.”Appell’s next point deserves special emphasis, because it demonstrates thesheer lunacy of environmental extremists: “[Global warming] would be chaosby any measure, far greater even than the sum total of chaos of the globalwars of the 20th century, and so in this sense Blix is right to beconcerned. Sounds like a weapon of mass destruction to me.”No wonder the late political scientist Aaron Wildavsky called globalwarming alarmism the “mother of all environmental scares.”Appell and Blix sound very much like those who warned us in the 1970s thatthe planet was headed for a catastrophic global cooling. On April 28,1975, Newsweek printed an article titled, “The Cooling World,” in whichthe magazine warned: “There are ominous signs that the earth’s weatherpatterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes mayportend a drastic decline in food production-with serious politicalimplications for just about every nation on earth.”In a similar refrain, Time magazine for June 24, 1974 declared: “Howeverwidely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, whenmeteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they findthat the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past threedecades.”In 1974 the National Science Board, the governing body of the NationalScience Foundation, stated: “During the last 20 to 30 years, worldtemperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over thelast decade.” Two years earlier, the board had observed: “Judging from therecord of the past interglacial ages, the present time of hightemperatures should be drawing to an end...leading into the next glacialage.”How quickly things change. Fear of the coming ice age is old hat, but fearthat man-made greenhouse gases are causing temperatures to rise to harmfullevels is in vogue. Alarmists brazenly assert that this phenomenon isfact, and that the science of climate change is “settled.”To cite just one example, Ian Bowles, former senior science director onenvironmental issues for the Clinton National Security Council, said inthe April 22, 2001 edition of the Boston Globe: “the basic link betweencarbon emissions, accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, andthe phenomenon of climate change is not seriously disputed in thescientific community.”But in fact the issue is far from settled, and indeed is seriouslydisputed. I would like to submit at the end of my remarks a July 8editorial


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