WASHINGTON, DC – Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Chairman of the Environment & Public Works Committee delivered the first of four major speeches today on the issue of climate change. Inhofe, a prominent skeptic of the science behind global warming, plans to debunk what he calls the “four pillars of climate change alarmism.” The first speech today examined the 2001 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) report summarizing the latest science of climate change, requested by the Bush Administration, which has been misused by alarmists. Inhofe stated today: “It’s not surprising that the media distorted and exaggerated the NAS report. The public was told that the NAS categorically accepted that carbon dioxide emissions were the overwhelming factor causing global warming, and that urgent action was needed. Unfortunately, the media wasn’t burdened with any actual knowledge of the report. Rather, it seized on a sentence fragment from the report’s summary, and then jumped to conclusions that, to be charitable, cannot be squared with the full report. That fragment from the summary reads as follows: ‘Temperatures are, in fact, rising. The changes observed over the last several decades are likely mostly due to human activities…’ There’s the smoking gun, we were told then and even now, proving a global warming consensus. However, the second part of the sentence, along with much else in the report, was simply ignored: ‘we cannot rule out that some significant part of these changes is also a reflection of natural variability.’ “And as we have seen, it is amazing how one could conclude that the NAS ‘left no wiggle room’ that ‘global warming is due to man.’ Dr. Richard Lindzen, a professor of meteorology at MIT, and a member of the NAS panel that produced the report, expressed his astonishment in an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on June 11, 2001. Dr. Lindzen wrote that the NAS report showed ‘there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.’ Yet to this day, the media continues to report exactly the opposite.” Future speeches will address the scientific work of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, most especially its Third Assessment Report, released in 2001; the recent report of the international Arctic Climate Impact Assessment; and the data produced by climate models. The full text of Inhofe’s speech is attached and is also available with preceding speeches and whitepapers regarding Inhofe’s position on climate change at: www.epw.senate.gov .