Sheldon Whitehouse: “The article begins with two simple sentences: ``Global warming isn't a prediction. It is happening.'' He talks about the…”

“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.…”