Political Quotes

“These six U.S. Senators were troubled by testimony they had heard about climate change in three separate hearings of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee. They wrote: The testimony convincingly portrayed a fundamentally altered planet, with shifts in ocean circulation and climate zones; altered precipitation and storm patterns; more frequent and extreme weather events such as droughts, monsoons, and lowland floods. Individually and collectively, these changes bring about others, ranging from disruption of forest, crop, and ocean productivity to shifts in populations. Witnesses before the Committee testified that the Earth is now committed to a substantial greenhouse warming, projected to be about 2 degrees Centigrade, as well as an ozone layer depletion. Well, that was quite a prediction. Who were these six Senators? Quentin Burdick, Democrat from North Dakota; Max Baucus, Democrat from Montana; George Mitchell, Democrat from Maine; Robert Stafford, Republican from Vermont, the chairman then of the committee; Dave Durenberger, Republican of Minnesota; and Rhode Island's Republican Senator, John Chafee. You cannot help but be struck that the prediction back then by these six Senators is now our reality. Everything they predicted is happening. The scientists they listened to had it right. Global temperatures have already risen by around 1 degree Celsius, and we are headed to over 2 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century.…”