Ask Your Lawmaker

Answer from: U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN)

One of the things that’s been interesting being a member of the Select Committee on Energy, Environment and Global Warming has been the conversation has really changed a lot. You don’t hear much talk of global warming per se. So many of the scientists are talking in terms of climate change. And there are more scientists who are moving to say, well it probably was cyclical, and when you go back and look at El Nino, it was something that we are beginning to move to a cooling era. When I was in high school, they thought there would be a coming Ice Age, and then they relized that this was cyclical and we started to warm up. When my children, who are now in their last 20’s and 30’s were in elementary school, all the talk was about l warming. This year in Tennessee we’ve had the coldest, wettest winter in, I think it was 113 years. So what we’re begging to see and hear more of from scientists is that it is cyclical. Now one of the things that was very interesting to me was how some of the scientists built their models. Instead of building them on generations, they were building them on decades. And if you take a snapshot in looking at it in decades, you would come to one decision. But if you look at the total picture and look at it in terms of a century, you get another picture.

Answered on May 22nd, 2008