Press Conference With Senator Barbara Boxer; Senator Amy Klobuchar; Senator Benjamin Cardin; Senator Bernard Sanders; Senator Frank Lautenberg; And Se

Statement

Press Conference With Senator Barbara Boxer; Senator Amy Klobuchar; Senator Benjamin Cardin; Senator Bernard Sanders; Senator Frank Lautenberg; And Senator Sheldon Whitehouse: Global Warming ANd Greenland Codel

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SEN. KLOBUCHAR: Thank you so much, Senator Boxer. And thank you for putting this trip together.

Thanks to my colleagues. I'm going to Senator Coleman's father's funeral at Arlington Cemetery and I appreciate them allowing me to go before them.

It was a eye-opening trip for me. And I think I've heard it said before that Greenland is truly the canary in the coalmine when it comes to climate change. And that's because you see the effects of it faster than you see in other parts of the world. You see these icebergs. When you go through the water in a little fishing boat like we did, you actually see spigots of water coming off these icebergs. It almost looks like a faucet is turned on.

And basically the ice that's been lost from Greenland -- it's covered by 85 percent ice -- is the size of Texas and Arizona, in just the last few decades. And the chairman went through the effects that this has had on rising sea levels. But it was also interesting to hear from individual families and people that had lived there their whole lives -- people talking about how it used to be an ice sheet in their yard, and now they were planting potatoes, or people talking about polar bears coming into the town that used to get their food out on the -- in the ice and were coming in scavenging for food, and then they had to shoot them, because they were dangerous. So you saw, in a very isolated part of the world, the effect that climate change is having.

One of my biggest thrills of the trip was watching Senator Whitehouse eat muskox, something that anyone would enjoy doing, and I only tried the reindeer. But we were struck by how isolated this area is. Roads don't connect the towns. You basically get there by ship or by plane, small planes with small runways. But it is truly the canary in the coalmine of climate change. And I was honored to be part of this delegation and now to get to Washington and get to work on some serious legislation.

Thank you.

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