Political Quotes

“Mr. President, we are more aware than ever of the accelerating pace of climate change and of the serious threat that rising seas, higher temperatures, and changing weather poses. I suppose I don't need to lecture the Presiding Officer from Florida on the threat of rising seas. The real-time effects of climate change are becoming clearer and clearer every year. Here is a telling example unfolding right now in the Arctic. In this graphic, we see the mean area of Arctic sea ice over the last several decades. The maximum yearly extent of the ice, which occurs around this time of year, continues to shrink each decade. This line tracks the sea ice in the Arctic in millions of square kilometers, running from February through to May. This is the track of the sea ice extent during the 1980s. If you take all the years in the 1980s and you average them together and you run through the calendar, it is like a clock going this way through these months. You would see the sea ice growing and fading away as spring came to the Arctic. That is where the ice was when averaging the 1980s. This green line is the exact same thing; it is just for the 1990s. So we can see how much sea ice has been lost averaged decade over decade. The blue line here is for 2000. Once again, we see a loss of sea ice--a considerable loss from the levels back as recently as the 1980s. The purple line right here is the average of the years in this decade so far, from 2010 to 2017--that is the average of those 7 years.…”