[Congressional Bills 109th Congress]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office]
[S. 245 Introduced in Senate (IS)]
109th CONGRESS
1st Session
S. 245
To provide for the development and coordination of a comprehensive and
integrated United States research program that assists the people of
the United States and the world to understand, assess, and predict
human-induced and natural processes of abrupt climate change.
_______________________________________________________________________
IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES
February 1, 2005
Ms. Collins (for herself, Ms. Cantwell, Ms. Snowe, Mrs. Murray, Mr.
Jeffords, and Mr. DeWine) introduced the following bill; which was read
twice and referred to the Committee on Commerce, Science, and
Transportation
_______________________________________________________________________
A BILL
To provide for the development and coordination of a comprehensive and
integrated United States research program that assists the people of
the United States and the world to understand, assess, and predict
human-induced and natural processes of abrupt climate change.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States of America in Congress assembled,
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the ``Abrupt Climate Change Research Act
of 2005''.
SEC. 2. ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE RESEARCH PROGRAM.
(a) Establishment of Program.--The Secretary of Commerce shall
establish within the Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research of the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and shall carry out, a
program of scientific research on abrupt climate change.
(b) Purposes of Program.--The purposes of the program are as
follows:
(1) To develop a global array of terrestrial and
oceanographic indicators of paleoclimate in order to
sufficiently identify and describe past instances of abrupt
climate change.
(2) To improve understanding of thresholds and
nonlinearities in geophysical systems related to the mechanisms
of abrupt climate change.
(3) To incorporate such mechanisms into advanced
geophysical models of climate change.
(4) To test the output of such models against an improved
global array of records of past abrupt climate changes.
(c) Abrupt Climate Change Defined.--In this section, the term
``abrupt climate change'' means a change in the climate that occurs so
rapidly or unexpectedly that human or natural systems have difficulty
adapting to the climate as changed.
SEC. 3. AUTHORIZATION OF APPROPRIATIONS.
There is authorized to be appropriated to the Department of
Commerce for each of fiscal years 2006 through 2011, to remain
available until expended, $10,000,000 to carry out the research program
required under section 2.
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