Political Quotes

“If I may, let me ask people who are listening to think back in time. Think back in time to many years ago when Abraham Lincoln was President of the United States, when this room was just under construction and soldiers coming down occupied it, camped here, camped in the lounge, and actually made fires in the lounge across the way to cook their bacon. One could hear cannon fire from the Capitol. The Civil War was happening in America. When that took place, there was a scientist named John Tyndall who delivered a paper that showed that when you added carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it warmed the Earth. That is how long it has been that we have known that when you add carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, it warms the Earth. Since that time, we have probably added close on 2,000 gigatons, 2,000 billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. What happens when we do that? This goes back to 800,000 BC. That is nearly 1 million years. We can see that in the time we have measured here, 800,000 years, there has been a very clear range of carbon concentration in the planet. We kicked in around 200,000 years ago as human beings. This is about where homo sapiens showed up. So long before there were homo sapiens, the Earth stayed between about 170 and 300 parts per million of carbon dioxide. For every single year human beings have inhabited this planet, we stayed within that window.…”