Welcome to the community supported best of the left podcast with clips today from Al Gore's

Senate testimony, ABC News, PBS, the BBC, the young Turks, democracy now and on the media.

You'll think for a second that this one is a rerun, but it's not.

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. And 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. And from the

early days of that period, there were a few scientists who said, wait a minute, that's going to

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