Political Quotes

“I rise today for my 151st ``Time to Wake Up'' speech on climate change. I have covered many topics during these speeches--from pulling back the veil on the fossil fuel industry's web of denial to sharing my visits to States from New Hampshire to Florida to Utah to see the effects of climate change there firsthand. But one recurring theme of my speeches and in the scientific literature has been the warning that the effects of climate change will hit home first and hardest along our coasts. The oceans have soaked up more than 90 percent of the excess heat that has been trapped in the atmosphere by greenhouse gasses. That is a lot of heat. The Associated Press has compared the ocean heat we have added since 1997 to a, ``Hiroshima-style bomb being exploded every second in the ocean for 75 straight years.'' That excess energy is warming our oceans at alarming rates, and by the principle of thermal expansion, we know that when water warms it expands. That, coupled with the melting ice sheets, is driving up sea levels worldwide. For my Ocean State that is a big deal. Warming and rising seas carry real consequences for coastal economies. New England is being hit particularly hard on this front. The Gulf of Maine is warming faster than almost any other part of the ocean in the world. Narragansett Bay, in my home state of Rhode Island, has already seen a nearly 4-degree Fahrenheit increase in winter water temperatures since the 1960s.…”