Wayne Gilchrest: “I would like to talk for 5 minutes on this issue known as climate change. Are humans affecting the climate or is it the…”

“I would like to talk for 5 minutes on this issue known as climate change. Are humans affecting the climate or is it the natural influence of natural variabilities? Mr. Speaker, if people will look back into their middle school and high school years, they will remember their silence class, their geography class, maybe their geology class, and they learned that the planet Earth over millions of years varied in its climate. Sometimes we had very warm periods and sometimes we had very cold periods. Sometimes the tropics were as far north as Canada and sometimes ice ages covered much of North America. But the point is, what do we remember about the details and the facts on how they occurred? I think maybe Jay Leno should ask that question in a ``Jay Walking'' exercise, ``What do you know about climate change?'' Well, in past eons of times, tens of thousands of years ago, millions of years ago there were very few human beings on the planet and those human beings were not burning fossil fuel. Today we have six billion people on planet Earth and many of those people are burning coal, natural gas, oil, gasoline. They are burning for their energy sources fossil fuel. And the fossil fuel that we are burning in the modern era of time is putting more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in decades than the natural variabilities of planet Earth locked up over millions of years. Why is fossil fuel important when we are looking at the issue of climate change or global warming?…”