Terminating Restrictive Enforcement of Youth Settlements Law

Floor Speech

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Mr. JOHNSON. This is humorous. It would be humorous if it weren't so tragic.

The good Senator from Rhode Island, when he was chairing the Budget Committee, held hearing after hearing about these enormous costs caused by manmade climate change. But what he refuses to acknowledge is the fact that the reaction of the scaremongering, of this alarmism, has been that somewhere between $6 to $10 trillion is what we have spent globally trying to hold back the tides--$6 trillion to $10 trillion. The costs he is talking about pale in comparison to that massive--the largest malinvestment in human history.

So make no mistakes. The simple resolution--by the way, I don't deny climate change. Climate change is real. It has always changed; it always will. The debate is to what extent does man cause it, and I would argue that an even greater debate would be: What can we do about it?

I mean, he is down here, again, scaremongering and--in an alarmist fashion--obviously acknowledging that the $6 trillion to $10 trillion we have already wasted in this greatest malinvestment in human history hasn't even made a dent.

But I want to point out--I am glad he talked about measurements, about science, about a long dataset. Here is a long dataset. These are charts of the Vostok ice core sample. This is about 400-some-thousand years of climate history. I don't know how they do it, but they know how to measure different gas percentages in the atmosphere. They can calculate temperature going back actually more than 800,000 years. This one is 400,000.

The most famous dataset from this occurred in 1999--Petit, et al.

But as you can see--this is in Celsius. But these--it is hard to call them cycles, but we will call them cycles of temperature variation. We have had one, two, three, four of them in 400,000 years. They are approximately 100,000-year cycles. Almost a 23-degree Fahrenheit change in temperature.

Now, what the Senator from Rhode Island is all concerned about is a little moment in time here. Take a look at charts and blowing them up and doing the hockey stick effect and then freaking out about little, minute movements over geologic time.

Now--then he--then he--and all the climate alarmists do this, they blame it on us, fossil fuels. We weren't burning fossil fuels 400,000 years ago. Somehow, temperatures rose and temperatures declined four times over 400,000 years, almost 23 degrees.

That is why I am not freaked out about this. That is why I am not a Chicken Little. That is why I oppose this simple resolution that has all kinds of ideas behind it, all kinds of policy implications, all kinds of new proposed malinvestment, trillions of dollars' worth to try and hold back the tide.

You see this red line underneath here. Not only do they measure temperature over time, they measure CO2 levels over time. There is no doubt about it, it tracks very closely with temperature. Within that dataset of Petit, et al., not very well publicized, kind of understated, they say, well, this doesn't really mean anything is the fact that CO2 isn't the leading indicator; it is the lagging indicator.

First, temperature rises or falls, and then CO2 either rises or falls. There is approximately about an 800- to 1,000-year lag.

So again, they try and--you know, the climate alarmists try and put this--oh, look, the CO2 is up causing temperatures--no. Temperatures rose and then CO2 rose.

And there is actually a pretty easy explanation for it. Most CO2--CO2 is a trace element in our atmosphere, a trace element--not even a percent, a fraction of a percent.

Most CO2 on Earth is locked up in our oceans. So as the temperature rises probably because of solar activity, wobble in our axis, these macrotrends that actually cause climate change, the massive--the majority of climate change, as those factors cause temperatures to rise, temperatures of the ocean rise releasing CO2 and then CO2 raises. It is not the other way around.

It is not: CO2 went up causing temperature to increase. Temperature increased to cause CO2 to rise. These are measurements. This is science. This is a very long dataset. It just shows why--again, I don't know exactly to what extent man certainly can impact the environment. We all want a clean environment.

But the extent that man has caused climate change, obviously we weren't around back here to cause this climate change. Something else was doing it.

So again, I just don't freak out about it, and I certainly am not going to subscribe to any resolution that would cause policy here to spend trillions--misspend, waste, trillions of dollars on a fool's errand trying to hold back the tides.

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