Welcome to the Community Supported Best of the Left Podcast with clips today from

Al Gore's Senate Testimony on Global Warming, the Sam Cedar Show, Counter-Spin, ABC News,

Democracy Now, and the Young Turks.

My father served here in this chamber, and I was reflecting this morning on the differences

that have occurred since he first came to Washington in 1938, and there are all kinds of jokes

about the hot air on Capitol Hill. I'm not going to make those jokes, but I am going to

refer to the air on Capitol Hill, because when he came here in 1938, there were around

about 300 parts per million of CO2 in the air that he and his colleagues in this Senate

breathed, and today it's 383 parts per million.

It didn't really go above 300 parts per million for at least a million years back, maybe

longer, but in the Antarctic ice record, that's about as far back as they can go, and even

though the earth has gone through all these big swings and natural cycles, the CO2 content

never went above 300 parts per million in all that time. Just in the short span of

time from my father's first service in the Capitol here, and today it's caught up a dramatic

amount, and more CO2 means warmer temperatures. There really should be no doubt about that.

That's been known for 180 years, and for at least 100 years, they've known roughly how

much the temperature would go up with what concentrations of extra CO2. For most of human

history, we lived on the harvested energy that came from the Sun, and it was a net

energy balance, and then with the beginning of the use of coal, and then oil, and other

fossil fuel supplies, we began to use the accumulated reservoirs of hundreds of millions

of years worth of accumulated solar energy, and of course, that meant returning carbon

to the atmosphere in very large quantities. From the early days of that period, there

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