UPDATED

Another Legislative Committee Looks At Global Warming

(Update at 4:58 p.m. adds additional comments from Shafer, notes that his committee was meeting jointly with Tolleson's. New material highlighted.)

(12/6/07) Another legislative committee waded into the question of whether global warming fears are fact or fiction Thursday, this time from the Senate side.

Chairman Ross Tolleson of the Senate’s Natural Resources and The Environment Committee, declared the nearly two-hour session was an opening attempt to look at the question objectively ahead of the session in case legislation on the topic comes up.

But two of the members of his committee were ready to take sides.

Sen. Mitch Seabaugh, the Senate Republican whip, declared after hearing from one witness: “I have not bought into the hysteria of the global warming thing that is ... (being fanned by) a lot of people so they can push their products and their services that they couldn’t otherwise be able to utilize or to sell, so they have to create a hysterical situation so that they can, in fact, be able to ... (push their products) onto other people.”

But Sen. David Shafer, chairman of the Regulated Industries and Utilities Committee which was meeting jointly with Tolleson's group, said: "There is no question that the world is growing warmer, and to a degree, human activity has likely contributed to the warming."

He added later, ""Thousands of years ago, glaciers covered North America. They have steadily retreated for largely natural reasons. But we should carefully consider what global warming means for us, the extent to which human activity contributes to it, and what we should do about it."

The panel heard from two witnesses: Martin Rickerd, the British consul general in Atlanta, who told the panel what the UK has done to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, including incentives and penalties on energy-intensive businesses and on automobile owners, and skeptic Harold Brown, an agricultural scientist and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia.

Rickerd said the overwhelming consensus among the international scientific community supports the global warming theory, but acknowledged that some believe the phenomenon is entirely natural. Even if the minority is right, he said, there will still be substantial benefits from reducing greenhouse gases in terms of cleaner air and water, and greater energy security.

Seabaugh was having none of that, however, and challenged him like a prosecutor cross-examining a hostile witness, at one point asking him to explain why - if the earth is warming - a World War II squadron that crashed in Greenland was found decades later beneath 250 feet of ice. The consul general countered that measurements show a glacier in Greenland has shrunk by 250 feet over recent decades. “It’s not uniform throughout the world,” he said.

Brown said: “Global warming is a wonderful environmental disease. It has a thousand symptoms and a thousand cures ... and it has 10s to 100s of thousands of practitioners with job security for decades to come unless the public and the press get tired of it.”

Tolleson said he plans more such meetings. A House committee held a hearing on the topic back in August.

The hearings apparently are the result of an attempt during a meeting of the National Conference of State Legislatures in Boston this summer to pass a resolution supporting the right of states to move faster than the federal government in imposing tougher measures to combat global warming, and in favor of a national standard on greenhouse emissions gas emissions.

Delegates from Georgia tried to insert language requiring a cost-benefit analysis of any climate change regulations that might affect the states. Seabaugh was one of them.

“We felt it was asinine to ask Congress for legislation that would be rammed down our throats without some analysis of the cost-benefit,” he said at the time.