E.P.A.’s Authority Is Subject of House Panel Hearing - NYTimes.com

Representative Jay Inslee, Democrat of Washington, is one of Congress’s most ardent advocates of strong action to combat global warming. Mr. Inslee brought to the hearing a two-foot-high stack of books and scientific reports, which he placed on his desk as a sort of totem of the robust science behind climate-change theory.

He used his question time largely to criticize Republicans as suffering from what he called an “allergy to science and scientists.” He said he was embarrassed that a country that sent a man to the moon and mapped the human genome could be on the verge of enacting a law that overturns a scientific finding based on the testimony of a few scientists who question the extent of human responsibility for altering the climate.
...
Representative Cory Gardner, a freshman Republican from Colorado and a skeptic of human-caused global warming, ribbed Mr. Inslee by offering to buy him an e-reader to make his stack of studies more manageable.

“Oh,” Mr. Inslee responded, “would you like to read some? It might be helpful.”

“Maybe you’d like to read some of mine,” Mr. Gardner said.

“Be happy to,” Mr. Inslee said. “It’s a much shorter list.”
...
Dr. Field said that extreme warming could reduce crop yields by more than 60 percent.
...
Mr. Griffith also wanted to know why the ice caps on Mars were melting and why he had been taught 40 years ago in middle school that Earth was entering a cooling period.

“What is the optimum temperature for man?” he asked. “Have we looked at that? These are questions that, believe it or not, I lay awake at night trying to figure out.”

The scientists promised to provide written answers.