Political Quotes

“Mr. President, I am here for my usual climate speech. The Presiding Officer has seen this increasingly battered poster many times before. We have had an interesting period in the Senate recently with respect to climate change, and I would like to take a moment to comment on it. Before I do that, I think it is important to kind of frame the backdrop of what is going on and why this matters. This is the measurement of carbon dioxide levels on Earth. This goes back 400,000 years--no agriculture, no wheel, a long, long time ago. We see, over time, this recurring pattern in which CO<INF>2</INF> levels stay between 180 and 300 ppm. You can go back and people can see that these are--there are temperature shifts that correlate with these CO<INF>2</INF> levels. We know this--I saw Senator Brown from Ohio here. We know this because people have gone out--including two scientists from Ohio State. They have gone out to glaciers in the farthest and highest reaches of the planet, and they have drilled out cores of ice that go back tens of hundreds of thousands of years, and they are able to figure out, from the characteristics of the ice of that period, what the CO<INF>2</INF> concentrations were--that and a lot of other data as well. This is very well scientifically established. It is a little bit hard to see because it gets lost in the 0 year line, but this is what has happened. This is the highest level ever right there--highest historic CO<INF>2</INF> level. We shot up to here.…”