Carbon Pollution

Floor Speech

Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I want to speak about the ongoing and deliberately overlooked problem of carbon pollution and what it is doing to our planet.

In the context of these remarks, I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record an article entitled ``Game Over for the Climate,'' written by Jim Hansen and published in yesterday's New York Times.

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record,

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. The article begins with two simple sentences: ``Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.''

He talks about the dangers of the Canada tar sands and what that means for us if we go ahead with that project. His conclusion is this:

If Canada proceeds, and we do nothing, it will be game over for the climate.

Canada's tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history.

He looks at the recent extreme weather that people--not only across the country but across the world--have been noticing. He concludes:

We can say with high confidence that the recent heat waves in Texas and Russia, and the one in Europe in 2003, which killed tens of thousands, were not natural events--they were caused by human-induced climate change.

So the risk we face is a real one, and we are actually seeing it begin to happen in present time. He says:

The tar sands contain enough carbon--240 gigatons--to add 120 parts per million to our atmosphere. As I have said before on the Senate floor, we have lived for 8,000 centuries within a range between 170 and 300 parts per million of carbon in our atmosphere. That is the bandwidth within which the human species has lived on this planet, and we have gone rocketing out of that bandwidth in recent years. We are now at 390 parts per million out of a bandwidth, for 800,000 years, between 170 and 300 parts per million. The tar sands would add 120 parts per million to that. That would take us to 510, if my math is right.

Tar shale--a close cousin of tar sands found mainly in the United States--contains at least an additional 300 gigatons of carbon.

This shows the folly of what Dr. Hansen describes:

..... as a frantic stampede to extract every fossil fuel through mountaintop removal, longwall mining, hydraulic fracturing, tar sands and tar shale extraction, and deep ocean and Arctic drilling.

Jim Hansen is somebody who is worth listening to. He has been writing about this now for more than 30 years,

I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record a posting by Neil Wagner entitled ``Hansen Had It Right in 1981 Climate Report.''

There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in the Record,

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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. He says:

A recently rediscovered 1981 paper, written by NASA atmospheric physicist Jim Hansen and others, has been analyzed and found to be impressively accurate about the course of climate change since its publication.

The 10-page paper ..... which was published in the journal Science, had been overlooked for decades when researchers Geert Jan van Oldenborgh and Rein Haarsma from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, uncovered it and began scouring its contents.

The paper's impressive prognostication is the best kind of vindication for Hansen, who has suffered more than his share of the slings and arrows from climate deniers in the media .....

He concludes:

The complex world of climate science rarely enjoys such clear and simple validation. When such opportunity presents itself, we owe it to ourselves to make some noise about it.

With appreciation to Jim Hansen, how the actual science has borne him out over the past 30 years, and with respect for the predictions he makes, we should as soon as we can begin to address ourselves to this problem.

Jim is not alone. An array of scientific organizations wrote us all a letter back in October of 2009 whose conclusion is pretty clear and stark in scientific language:

Observations throughout the world make it clear that climate change is occurring and rigorous scientific research demonstrates that the greenhouse gasses emitted by human activities are the primary driver. These conclusions are based on multiple independent lines of evidence and contrary assertions are inconsistent with an objective assessment of the vast body of peer reviewed science.

We act as if it is something new, but, in fact, it is not. The determination that carbon dioxide would warm the planet as it increased its concentration in the atmosphere was figured out around the time of the American Civil War by an Irish scientist who worked in England named John Tyndall. What Tyndall discovered we have proven to be true, as since then we have dumped gigaton after gigaton of carbon into our atmosphere, loading it up to the point now, as I said before, that we are well outside the bounds that have protected our species for 800,000 years on this planet.

The scale of what 8,000 centuries means is perhaps best measured against the time that scientists now believe man first began to engage in agriculture, first started scratching the earth and putting seeds into the ground. Before then, we were primarily hunter-gatherers, leading a very primitive life. So we have gone from beginning to scratch the earth and plant things to be, 10,000 years later, the species we are. We lived within this bandwidth of 170 to 300 parts per million for 8,000 centuries. To veer outside of it is significant and hazardous.

I am delighted that Mr. Hansen, despite all the abuse that has been heaped on him, continues his work. I hope the time comes when we start to listen to the voice of what our planet is telling us, the voice of what our scientists are telling us, the voice of what our children are telling us, and not just the voice of what the lobbyists for the polluting industries--particularly the oil and gas industries--are telling us.

Frankly, the lobbyists for the polluting oil and gas industries are not telling us the truth. They are not telling us the truth. The truth is becoming increasingly apparent, and the problem is that as time goes by you can reach tipping points that are irrecoverable. It would be really tragic for us to look back and think, if we had been able to act on time, if we had listened on time to the signals of our Earth, our planet, the signals that are plainly in our face, we could have made a world that was better and safer for our children. But, instead, in our folly, in our greed, in our willingness to listen to the falsehoods of these polluters, we shot past that point, and there is no way to recover it now.

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