Political Quotes

“The bark beetle relates to climate change because what was keeping those trees free from the bark beetle was cold winters that killed off the bark beetle larvae. As temperatures have warmed, the larvae lived through the winters, and they attacked the trees. So trees that were protected by cold winters are no longer protected, and there are literally millions of acres of forest lost in the West. On a smaller scale, but more important to me in my home State of Rhode Island, the preeminent fish that was taken out of Narragansett Bay was called the winter flounder. My wife wrote her Ph.D. thesis about the winter flounder. It was a very significant cash crop for our fishermen and is now virtually gone because the mean water temperature of Narragansett Bay is up nearly 4 degrees. Scientists also predicted we would be loading the dice for extreme weather with climate change, and we are seeing an unusual amount of extreme weather. The number of billion-dollar disasters has hit a record. A recent press clip noted: With an almost biblical onslaught of twisters, floods, snow, drought, heat, and wildfire, the U.S., in 2011, has seen more weather catastrophes that caused at least $1 billion in damage than it did in all of the 1980s, even after the dollar figures from back then are adjusted for inflation. Serious, grown-up corporate entities, like the biggest insurance companies in the world, are noticing this and are concerned.…”