Making Emergency Supplemental Appropriations for the Fiscal Year Ending September 30, 2014 - Motion to Proceed
Floor Speech
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. Mr. President, I appreciate very much having had the opportunity to hear those words from what I can only describe as an alternate reality from the one I inhabit, any way. First, let me say the very first paragraph of the resolution is this: Whereas, the 2014 National Climate Assessment stated the most recent decade was the Nation's warmest on record--U.S. Temperatures are expected to continue to rise.
There is some evidence that certain temperatures have been flat for a few years--atmospheric temperatures. What that little rhetorical device omits to consider is two things: One, 93 percent of the heat that comes onto the Earth from global warming goes into the oceans. Maybe 3 or 4 percent actually goes into the atmosphere--93 to 3. So if there is any change in the ocean, which regulates the temperature of the Earth, then it is going to have a pronounced effect on atmospheric temperature. And the ocean continues to warm.
People will say: No, the Earth stopped warming. It has not warmed for 12 or 15 years--whatever they say. No, if you actually look at it, the oceans are continuing to warm. There has been this step in atmospheric temperature at a certain level. The other thing that gets left out when our friends say that is this is not the first step. If you look at the history of how this got to be the hottest decade on record, over and over you can look at the graphs and you see these steps. To pretend that each step is the last one runs completely against the science. So to say we have no warming is just not factual. To say that the government--he used the word colluding--is colluding together, that is a fairly tough word to use. Let me tell you some of the government agencies that are so-called colluding together and believe climate change is real and carbon pollution is causing it.
How about NASA? We trust them to send our astronauts into space. We trust them to deliver a rover the size of an SUV to the surface of Mars safely and drive it around, sending data and pictures back from Mars to us. You think these people know what they are talking about?
We trust NOAA with our weather predicting. That is what they tell us. Nobody is saying they are incompetent at weather predicting. Do not listen when people are warning you about storms. But somehow when they talk about climate change, that is colluding.
How about the U.S. Navy? The Commander in Chief of our Pacific Command, Admiral Locklear, has said the No. 1 threat we face in the Pacific theatre comes from climate change. Is he colluding when he says that? This is a career Navy man whom the people of America have trusted with the security of our Pacific theater. It is exactly consistent with what the Department of Defense Quadrennial Defense Review said both last time--4 years ago--and most recently.
If you want to ignore the Federal Government, if you live in a world in which you think the Federal Government colludes with itself to make up things that are not true--OK, but look at the property casualty insurance and reinsurance industry. They are the people with the biggest bet on this. They have billions of dollars riding on getting it right. They say climate change is real. Carbon pollution is causing it. We have to do something about it.
So does the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, because they care about the poor and the effect this will have on the people who have the least. So does every major U.S. scientific society--every single one. So you can take a poll or a petition and say it has 30,000 names on it. I am told that among the names on that petition are the Spice Girls and people from MASH such as Dr. Frank Burns. It is almost a comedic effort.
When you say there are 9,000 who have degrees, that is--what--.00003 percent of our population of 300 million? Maybe I got a zero wrong there. The idea that you cannot find 9,000 people who think the Earth is flat is a bit of a stretch. The idea that we should base our policies on a petition that imaginary people are on rather than on what NASA, NOAA, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, every major scientific society, and the entire property casualty insurance and reinsurance industry are telling us is just extraordinary.
If you want to go into the private sector, you have to look no further than Coke and Pepsi. Look no further than Walmart. Look no further than Mars. You can go over there to the candy drawer and you can get wonderful Mars products. It is a huge company. They are going carbon neutral. They are desperately concerned about climate change. Look at Nike, look at Google, look at Apple--American company after American company.
The only place, other than, of course, the 9,000 people who joined the Spice Girls and MAJ Frank Burns on this petition, where denial is anything credible any longer is here in Congress where the money from the fossil fuel industry still has such a pernicious effect. But even among the Republicans--I will close by saying this and yield to my distinguished chairman. Even among the Republicans, they are losing their young voters on this issue. People know better. You poll Republicans who are under the age of 35 and a majority of them will say that somebody who believes in climate denial is ignorant, out of touch or crazy. That is what the young Republicans think about that position. So time is on our side. The day will come when the Senate can face the fact that climate change is real. I want to thank Senator Klobuchar and salute her effort to bring such a noncontroversial proposition to the floor in the form of a resolution--such a noncontroversial and factual proposition. It is a measure of our times and a measure of this body and a measure of the influence on it that it was not adopted by unanimous consent but was objected to by the Republicans.
I yield the floor.
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Mr. WHITEHOUSE. I thank Senator Klobuchar. It has been a pleasure working with the Senator.
This was an important step today. It was the most benign, factual, noncontroversial statement of virtually undisputed facts that one could imagine. Yet, here of all places it was unable to achieve consent.
Let me close by mentioning that this is not something that happens off in some other place; it is happening right in our homes.
In Rhode Island, the tide gauge at Naval Station Newport is up 10 inches since the 1930s. We have had big storms before. We have had big hurricanes before. They do a lot of damage to our State, adding 10 inches of more ocean to our shores. That is serious for my State. That is deadly serious for my State. You can't argue with a tide gauge. It is not complicated; it is a measurement.
We can look at the experience of Rhode Island fishermen who are hauling up fish such as tarpon and grouper. Fishermen have told me they started fishing on their granddad's boat and they finished on their dad's boat and in their lives they never saw these fish. But because of the warming seas I talked about earlier, these tropical fish are coming up into Rhode Island waters. When the seas warm, they get bigger. It is called the law of thermal expansion. It is not a law we passed; it is a law of God's Earth. To deny that is to deny the fundamental premises of this planet.
If you think the Rhode Island gauge is weird, go down to Fort Pulaski, GA, where I went on my tour of the southern coast. Tides are up there as well, same thing. The ocean is warming, the seas are rising, and it creates much more risk for our coastal communities.
You can go as far away from Rhode Island as you like. You can go to Utah; how about that. The Park City Foundation, which represents the skiing community--a lot of people go to Utah to ski--says climate change is serious, carbon pollution is causing it, and we are going to lose a lot of business because we are not going to have as much snow. It is going to shorten our season and make life much more difficult.
It is the same in New Hampshire, back on our coast. I went up to New Hampshire a little while ago and met with the ski industry. They are seeing much more need to make snow because they are not getting the snow they used to. If you want to go cross-country skiing or if you want to go on a ski mobile tour, they can't make snow on those trails, so they are getting clobbered.
What is really getting clobbered from the lack of snow is that iconic New Hampshire animal--the moose. Evidently, the way ticks breed, snow kills them off, and when the moose are walking around on snow they are protected from ticks, but when the snow is not there the ticks come at them.
I was told in New Hampshire about young moose calves that had not 1 tick on them, not 100 ticks on them, not 1,000 ticks on them--10,000 ticks on them. Adult moose have been found with 100,000 ticks on them. They are sucking so much blood out of these animals that they can't come up, they sicken, and they die. That is from the New Hampshire scientists, including people at the University of New Hampshire, State universities.
Utah Senators can deny this is real and refuse to talk about it, but Utah State universities both have climate change programs, and they both have people studying climate change. How can their State universities have programs and people studying climate change in their home States and then they come to Washington and pretend it is not real? It doesn't make any sense.
How can a New Hampshire Senator not come here and admit it is real when the University of New Hampshire is so active in all of this?
Florida--I will stop with Florida because Florida is probably the worst of all. Florida is getting hugely hurt by sea level rise. One of our great cities floods at high tide in Florida.
I went down on my visit, and I stopped at the Army Corps of Engineers. People may think that the Army Corps of Engineers is some liberal organization colluding with somebody to do improper stuff and that they can't be trusted, but that is not the way people behave around here on any other subject. When the Army Corps wants to build lakes or dam rivers or build levees or anything else, we have 100 percent confidence in them. We have confidence in the Army Corps of Engineers. So you have to take with a grain of salt some of this skepticism about the Army Corps of Engineers.
The Army Corps of Engineers expert in Florida says that as the sea level rises it shoves saltwater by pressure into the limestone southern Florida is made of. You can actually measure the infiltration of saltwater into what used to be freshwater wells, and the line moves back from the coast as the sea level rises and creates hydraulic pressure. As they try to create counterhydraulic pressure, which they do with freshwater to push back in this hard limestone sponge, they raise the water level for freshwater. They said Florida is in a box. There is no way out. It is either going to flood with sea level or flood with freshwater. There is no way out. This is the Army Corps of Engineers expert in Jacksonville, FL. Why won't our colleague from Florida listen to the Army Corps of Engineers expert from his own State?
We have to get through this, and we will, but it is going take pressure, it is going to take leadership, and it is going to take the kind of leadership Senator Klobuchar showed this evening on the floor. I am immensely grateful to her.
I yield the floor.
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