Lawmakers debated until nearly 1 a.m. this morning on a global warming bill, which passed, and which I'll blog more about in an hour. But here's an excerpt from one of the floor speeches, from Rep. John Ahern, R-Spokane. His point: that earth's climate has a long history of warming and cooling cycles about every 500 years.

"...We also had global cooling from 250 AD to roughly 750 AD. Prior to that, we had global warming from 350 BC to 250 AD. And during that period, we had some great peoples that had empires, such as your Alexander the Great, now of course it's Greece, Macedonia; we had the Israelites…and we also had the, uh, Persian Empire…that was the warmest period in about half a million years, something like that…"

During this, Democrats began tittering, then openly laughing until House Speaker Pro Tem Jeff Morris gaveled them down. Ahern continued:

"Earth goes through a climate change every 500 years without fail. So mankind, we're not causing that much of a problem."

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