Climate Change

Floor Speech

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Mr. KING. Mr. President, I rise today to join my colleague from Rhode Island to talk about climate change, but I first want to make a comment about my good friend and an important Member of this body, Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island, and what he has done.

In the 1930s, a lonely voice stood on the floor of the Houses of Parliament, warning of the impending catastrophe of the rearmament of Germany in the advent of World War II. People didn't listen. Often, he spoke to a lonely House, but his voice was clear, his voice was prescient, and what he said was important. Of course, I refer to Winston Churchill.

Today and over the past many years, Senator Whitehouse has performed that same function of warning us, of trying to wake us up to a challenge that is impending, that is catastrophic, that is significant, and that is also at least somewhat preventable.

Senator Whitehouse has talked about climate change in terms of ocean acidification, temperature changes, sea level rise, drought, famine, and the effects throughout the world. Often this Chamber is empty, but his warnings are important and should be heeded nonetheless.

The first thing I want to do is thank him and compliment him for the work that he has done over these many years and continues to do. I can see his sign--as I see it on C-SPAN and here on the floor--that says ``Wake Up,'' and wake up is what we need to do.

People often talk about climate change as if it were some abstract thing that is going on, and it is in scientific journals, and it is a kind of environmental movement that doesn't really affect real life that much; it is just sort of something that goes on out there and one of the many issues we have to deal with. But it is real. I will tell you how I know. The fishermen in Maine have told me so.

Just this past Saturday, I spent the evening with a man who has been a fisherman for 40 years in the Gulf of Maine. He said that he has never seen the kinds of changes we have seen in the last 10 years. They are catching fish that have never been seen before in the Gulf of Maine. A lobsterman told me of pulling up a seahorse in his lobster trap. Seahorses aren't supposed to live in the cold water of Maine.

This isn't an abstract question for us. Lobstering is a $1.7-billion- a-year industry for Maine. Lobstering used to be a major industry in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, and now it is largely gone.

There are multiple explanations, but one of them is that the water is warming, and our species, whether they are lobsters or trees or bears, are sensitive to small environmental changes.

We have had record lobster harvests in Maine in the last 5 to 10 years--although I have to say that in the last 2 years, they have been down. We don't know whether the declines are a blip or a trend. We deeply hope that it doesn't represent a trend, but we can't ignore what happened to the lobster population to our south.

The water is getting warmer in the Gulf of Maine. The water in the Gulf of Maine is warming at the fastest rate of any body of water on Earth, except for the Arctic Ocean, and it has already wrought changes in the nature of our natural resource-based economy.

Maine is a natural resource State, dependent largely upon fisheries, lobster, agriculture, farming, and forestry. That is who we are. Of course, another part of our economy is the millions of tourists who come to Maine each summer to visit our incredible coastline. Climate change isn't an abstract for us; it is a very real phenomenon.

I want to emphasize not only what my friend the fisherman told me this weekend, but also that I have heard from fishermen all over Maine for the last 4 or 5 years about the changes they are seeing. This guy isn't a scientist, but he is out on the water, and he knows what he is catching. He knows he is catching fish he has never caught before. He has never seen the tropical, warm water fish now being caught in the Gulf of Maine.

I think the other factor we need to talk about is a dollars-and-cents question that relates to sea level rise. We are talking about millions of dollars on the part of the U.S. Government to preserve the coastal infrastructure that we have in connection with our Armed Forces.

The city of Norfolk is already experiencing what are called sunny day floods. The city of Miami--the Presiding Officer's hometown--is experiencing sunny day floods. These are floods that aren't caused by great storms, by great perturbations in the atmosphere; they are caused just by a high tide. The cost of dealing with this in Miami, New Orleans, New York, or Maine is going to be enormous.

We tend to think of the ocean as a fixed commodity, as something that has always been the way it is now. It turns out that we have been fooled. We have been lulled into a sense of confidence about the level of the sea because for the past 8,000 years, it has been the same. But this is a chart that shows the depth of the Atlantic Ocean over the past 24,000 years.

It turns out that 24,000 years ago, which was the height of the glacial period, the waters off the coast of Maine were 390 feet shallower than they are today--390 feet shallower. What you see here is the melting of the glaciers and the refilling of the oceans.

From our historic point of view, the problem is that it got to a plateau about 10,000 years ago, and that is all we know. That is human history, right here. We don't remember this very much because it appeared before recorded human history.

Now, there is an interesting moment in this chart, and it is right in this period about 15,000 years ago, and it is called the meltwater pulse 1A. That is what scientists call it. We see a very steep rise in the ocean level during this period. Interestingly, this rise is about 1 foot per decade. That is what happened during that time about 15,000 years ago.

Well, a year and a half ago I went to Greenland with two climate scientists, one of whom focuses almost exclusively on sea level rise. The estimates vary quite a bit, I will concede, but their estimate was that what we are facing now is 1 foot of sea level rise per decade for the rest of this century. Has it ever happened before? Yes. Is that an outrageous estimate? No, because it has happened before. It can happen again. Why? Because the last remnants of the glaciers are in Antarctica and Greenland, and between the ice sheets on those two areas is 260 feet of additional sea level rise. Greenland is melting at an unprecedented rate, and there is a huge ice shelf in Antarctica that is poised to fall into the ocean. If that happens, it will cause sea level rise, just as dropping an ice cube in a glass of water does.

The indications are overwhelming of what this issue means for the future of this country. This is not an academic question.

Here is another example of what is happening in a relatively short period of time. The volume of ice in the Arctic Ocean has fallen by two-thirds since 1979--a 40-year period. The Arctic Ocean is more clear today than it has ever been in human history. Anybody who says nothing is happening or it is just routine or the weather changes all the time isn't paying attention to the facts. Again, my concern about this is practical: the cost of seawalls, the cost of shoring up our infrastructure, just the cost to the government of protecting the naval facilities in Norfolk. Of course, one of the problems in the State of the Presiding Officer is, the rock is porous limestone so it is very difficult to build a seawall because the water will simply come under it. So we are talking about a very serious practical issue that is going to cost our society billions, if not trillions, of dollars.

Can we stop it? Probably not. Can we slow it? Yes, but it is going to take action today, and every day we wait, it makes the action harder and more expensive. If we wait until the waves are lapping up over the seawall in New York City or over the dikes in New Orleans or over the streets of Miami or along the coast of Maine at our marshes and low points, it will be too late. Then all we can do is defend and not prevent.

I believe we can make changes now that are not totally disruptive to our economy but will be protective of our economy and will be much cheaper now than they will be 10, 15, 20, 30, 40, or 50 years from now. What we are doing is leaving the problem to our kids, just like we are leaving the deficit to our kids, just like we are leaving broken infrastructure to our kids.

Tom Brokaw wrote a book after World War II called ``The Greatest Generation.'' That was the generation that sacrificed in World War II, and then they built the Interstate Highway System, paid for it, and paid down the debt that was accumulated during World War II. We are just the opposite. We are increasing our debt on all levels at a time of relative prosperity. The economy is at low unemployment. Yet we are passing trillion-dollar tax cuts that add to the deficit that these young people are going to have to pay off.

We are not attending to the problem of climate change. Who is going to have to pay to build those seawalls? Not us; our children and our grandchildren. I believe this is a moral and an ethical issue as well as a practical issue.

So I will return to where I began: to compliment my colleague from Rhode Island for raising the alarm, for pointing out what we can do, how we can do it, the consensus of scientific opinion, and the reality of what we are facing. We can do better. We don't have to avoid and ignore and waste the resources and the time we have now.

The most precious resource we have now to confront this problem is time, and every day that goes by is a day of irresponsibility. It is a day where our children and grandchildren are going to say: Where were you when this was happening? Why didn't you listen to that guy from Rhode Island who told you what was going to happen, who told you how we could do something about it? Why didn't we listen? I don't want to be a person who says I didn't listen because I was too busy or because it was inconvenient or because I was afraid it might change a little bit about how we powered our automobiles or got electricity.

I think it is a question we can face. This body can solve big problems. It has done it in the past, but recently our pattern has been, instead of solving problems, avoiding problems--putting them off until next year, next month, or decades from now when this problem is no longer a problem but a catastrophe.

So I salute and thank my colleague from Rhode Island for keeping the focus on this issue. I look forward to continuing to work with him, as we will continue to urge and plead with our colleagues to join us in reasonable steps that can be taken to ameliorate what is coming at us. This is a moment in time when we have it within our power to do something important for the future of our country and for the future of our children. I hope we can seize that moment and serve not only the American people today but the American people who will come after us and will judge us by the extent to which we confronted a problem and saved them from having to solve it themselves.

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