Joe Biden: “President, the climate has changed. It has changed outside these walls: the year just concluded was the warmest on…”

“President, the climate has changed. It has changed outside these walls: the year just concluded was the warmest on record in the United States. And the climate has changed in the halls of the Senate, where the causes and consequences of global warming--and how we should respond--will be a major concern of this new Congress. Outside, the concentration of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere has grown from 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution to 430 parts per million today. We are on a path that could double the pre-industrial levels of greenhouse gases, threatening an increase of as much as 10 degrees in the next century. The physical consequences of global warming are right before our eyes: the shrinking polar ice cap, retreating glaciers, stronger storms driven by warmer ocean waters, changing growing seasons, animal migration, and rainfall patterns. Future consequences if we continue business as usual will include rising sea levels, the spread of diseases, abrupt climate shifts that could shut down the Atlantic cycle that warms Europe, or shrink the Amazon rainforest, which provides twenty percent of the oxygen we breathe. These changes will profoundly alter the assumptions on which the economic, political, and security arrangements of our world have been constructed. Our national borders, our cities, our cultures, are all built around patterns of rainfall, arable land, and coastlines that will be redrawn as global warming proceeds.”