Warming – Novice
Warming – Novice ......................................................................................................................................... 1
Warming Bad ............................................................................................................................................ 3
Warming = Extinction (Long)................................................................................................................. 4
Warming = Extinction (Short)................................................................................................................ 5
Warming  Wars ................................................................................................................................. 6
Warming is Real (Science) ..................................................................................................................... 8
Warming is Real (Consensus) .............................................................................................................. 10
CO2  Warming ................................................................................................................................. 11
CO2  Warming (A2 Indicts) .............................................................................................................. 13
A2 Heat Islands.................................................................................................................................... 14
A2 Warming Inevitable ....................................................................................................................... 15
Author Indict – Idso............................................................................................................................. 16
Author Indict – Heartland Institute..................................................................................................... 18
A2 Skeptics Suppressed ...................................................................................................................... 19
A2 Scientists are Paid Off .................................................................................................................... 20
A2 Models Flawed ............................................................................................................................... 21
A2 Climategate .................................................................................................................................... 22
Warming Bad – Biodiversity ................................................................................................................ 23
A2 Crops Turn...................................................................................................................................... 25
A2 Ice Age Turn ................................................................................................................................... 28
Warming Good ........................................................................................................................................ 30
CO2 Not Cause – History ..................................................................................................................... 31
CO2 Not Cause – Arctic Records ......................................................................................................... 32
CO2 Not Cause – Alt Causes ................................................................................................................ 33
No Runaway Warming – Arctic Data................................................................................................... 34
Warming isn’t Anthropogenic ............................................................................................................. 35
A2 Climate Models .............................................................................................................................. 36
IPCC Model Bad ................................................................................................................................... 37
A2 Idso Indicts ..................................................................................................................................... 38
A2 Heartland Indicts............................................................................................................................ 39
A2 Oil Companies Corrupt Studies ...................................................................................................... 40
A2 Consensus ...................................................................................................................................... 41
Author Indicts...................................................................................................................................... 42
A2 Warming  Extinction .................................................................................................................. 43
A2 Warming Kills Biodiversity ............................................................................................................. 45
Crops Turn ........................................................................................................................................... 48
Ice Age Turn ........................................................................................................................................ 51
A2 Warming  Ice Age ....................................................................................................................... 52
A2 No Ice Age Now.............................................................................................................................. 53
Warming Bad
Warming = Extinction (Long)
Warming causes extinction
Ahmed 2010 (Nafeez Ahmed, Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and
Development, professor of International Relations and globalization at Brunel University and the
University of Sussex, Spring/Summer 2010, “Globalizing Insecurity: The Convergence of Interdependent
Ecological, Energy, and Economic Crises,” Spotlight on Security, Volume 5, Issue 2, online)
Perhaps the most notorious indicator is anthropogenic global warming. The
landmark 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – which warned that at then-current rates of increase of fossil fuel
emissions, the earth’s global average temperature would likely rise by 6°C by the end of the 21st century creating a largely
uninhabitable planet – was a wake-up call to the international community.[v] Despite the pretensions of ‘climate sceptics,’ the
peer-reviewed scientific literature has continued to produce evidence that the IPCC’s original
scenarios were wrong – not because they were too alarmist, but on the contrary, because they were far too conservative.
According to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, current CO2 emissions are worse than all
six scenarios contemplated by the IPCC. This implies that the IPCC’s worst-case six-degree scenario severely underestimates the
most probable climate trajectory under current rates of emissions.[vi] It is often presumed that a 2°C rise in global average temperatures under
an atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gasses at 400 parts per million (ppm) constitutes a safe upper limit – beyond which further
global warming could trigger rapid and abrupt climate changes that, in turn, could tip the whole earth
climate system into a process of irreversible, runaway warming.[vii] Unfortunately, we are already well past this limit,
with the level of greenhouse gasses as of mid-2005 constituting 445 ppm.[viii] Worse still, cutting-edge scientific data suggests that the safe
upper limit is in fact far lower. James Hansen, director
of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, argues that
the absolute upper limit for CO2 emissions is 350 ppm: “If the present overshoot of this target CO2 is
not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects .”[ix] A wealth of scientific
studies has attempted to explore the role of positive-feedback mechanisms between different climate sub-systems, the
operation of which could intensify the warming process. Emissions beyond 350 ppm over decades are likely to lead to
the total loss of Arctic sea-ice in the summer triggering magnified absorption of sun radiation, accelerating
warming; the melting of Arctic permafrost triggering massive methane injections into the atmosphere ,
accelerating warming; the loss of half the Amazon rainforest triggering the momentous release of billions of
tonnes of stored carbon, accelerating warming; and increased microbial activity in the earth’s soil leading to
further huge releases of stored carbon, accelerating warming; to name just a few. Each of these feedback subsystems alone is sufficient by itself to lead to irreversible, catastrophic effects that could tip the whole
earth climate system over the edge.[x] Recent studies now estimate that the continuation of business-as-usual
would lead to global warming of three to four degrees Celsius before 2060 with multiple irreversible, catastrophic
impacts; and six, even as high as eight, degrees by the end of the century – a situation endangering the survival of all life on
earth.[xi]
Warming = Extinction (Short)
Warming causes extinction
Tickell 2008 (Oliver Tickell, Climate Researcher, The Gaurdian, August 11, 2008, “On a planet 4C hotter, all we can prepare for is
extinction”, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/aug/11/climatechange)
We need to get prepared for four degrees of global warming, Bob Watson told the Guardian last week. At first sight this looks like wise counsel
from the climate science adviser to Defra. But the
idea that we could adapt to a 4C rise is absurd and dangerous.
Global warming on this scale would be a catastrophe that would mean, in the immortal words that Chief Seattle
probably never spoke, "the end of living and the beginning of survival" for humankind. Or perhaps the beginning of
our extinction. The collapse of the polar ice caps would become inevitable, bringing long-term sea level rises of 70-80 metres. All the
world's coastal plains would be lost, complete with ports, cities, transport and industrial infrastructure, and much of the world's most
productive farmland. The world's geography would be transformed much as it was at the end of the last ice age, when sea levels rose by about
120 metres to create the Channel, the North Sea and Cardigan Bay out of dry land. Weather
would become extreme and
unpredictable, with more frequent and severe droughts, floods and hurricanes. The Earth's carrying
capacity would be hugely reduced. Billions would undoubtedly die.
Warming  Wars
It also causes huge resource wars and is a conflict multiplier
Klare 2006 (Michael Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College, March
10, 2006, “The Coming Resource Wars,” http://goo.gl/sPH9D)
It's official: the era of resource wars is upon us. In a major London address, British Defense Secretary John Reid warned that
global climate change and dwindling natural resources are combining to increase the likelihood of violent conflict over land, water and energy.
Climate change, he indicated, "will make scarce resources, clean water, viable agricultural land even
scarcer" -- and this will "make the emergence of violent conflict more rather than less likely." Although not
unprecedented, Reid's prediction of an upsurge in resource conflict is significant both because of his senior rank and the vehemence of his
remarks. "The blunt truth is that the lack of water and agricultural land is a significant contributory factor to the tragic conflict we see unfolding
in Darfur," he declared. "We should see this as a warning sign." Resource conflicts of this type are most likely to arise in the developing world,
Reid indicated, but the more advanced and affluent countries are not likely to be spared the damaging and destabilizing effects of global
climate change. With sea levels rising, water and energy becoming increasingly scarce and prime agricultural lands turning into deserts,
internecine warfare over access to vital resources will become a global phenomenon. Reid's speech, delivered at the prestigious Chatham
House in London (Britain's equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations), is but the most recent expression of a growing trend in strategic
circles to view environmental and resource effects -- rather than political orientation and ideology -- as the most potent source of armed
conflict in the decades to come. With the world population rising, global consumption rates soaring, energy supplies rapidly disappearing and
climate change eradicating valuable farmland, the stage is being set for persistent and worldwide struggles over vital resources. Religious and
political strife will not disappear in this scenario, but rather will be channeled into contests over valuable sources of water, food and energy.
Prior to Reid's address, the most significant expression of this outlook was a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Defense by a
California-based consulting firm in October 2003. Entitled "An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for United States National
Security," the report warned that global climate change is more likely to result in sudden, cataclysmic environmental events than a gradual (and
therefore manageable) rise in average temperatures. Such events could include a substantial increase in global sea levels, intense storms and
hurricanes and continent-wide "dust bowl" effects. This would trigger pitched battles between the survivors of these effects for access to food,
water, habitable land and energy supplies. "Violence
and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt
changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to
today," the 2003 report noted. "Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as
energy, food and water rather than by conflicts over ideology, religion or national honor." Until now, this mode of analysis has
failed to command the attention of top American and British policymakers. For the most part, they insist that ideological and religious
differences -- notably, the clash between values of tolerance and democracy on one hand and extremist forms of Islam on the other -- remain
the main drivers of international conflict. But Reid's speech at Chatham House suggests that a major shift in strategic thinking may be under
way. Environmental perils may soon dominate the world security agenda. This shift is due in part to the growing
weight of evidence pointing to a significant human role in altering the planet's basic climate systems. Recent studies showing the rapid
shrinkage of the polar ice caps, the accelerated melting of North American glaciers, the increased frequency of severe hurricanes and a number
of other such effects all suggest that dramatic and potentially harmful changes to the global climate have begun to occur. More importantly,
they conclude that human behavior -- most importantly, the burning of fossil fuels in factories, power plants, and motor vehicles -- is the most
likely cause of these changes. This assessment may not have yet penetrated the White House and other bastions of head-in-the-sand thinking,
but it is clearly gaining ground among scientists and thoughtful analysts around the world. For the most part, public discussion of global climate
change has tended to describe its effects as an environmental problem -- as a threat to safe water, arable soil, temperate forests, certain
species and so on. And, of course, climate change is a potent threat to the environment; in fact, the greatest threat imaginable. But viewing
climate change as an environmental problem fails to do justice to the magnitude of the peril it poses. As Reid's speech and the 2003 Pentagon
study make clear, the greatest danger posed by global climate change is not the degradation of ecosystems per se, but rather the disintegration
of entire human societies, producing wholesale starvation, mass migrations and recurring conflict over resources. "As famine, disease, and
weather-related disasters strike due to abrupt climate change," the Pentagon report notes, "many countries' needs will exceed their
carrying capacity" -- that is, their ability to provide the minimum requirements for human survival. This "will
create a sense of
desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression" against countries with a greater stock of
vital resources. "Imagine eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations with a falling supply of food, water, and
energy, eyeing Russia, whose population is already in decline, for access to its grain, minerals, and energy supply." Similar scenarios will be
replicated all across the planet, as those
without the means to survival invade or migrate to those with greater
abundance -- producing endless struggles between resource "haves" and "have-nots." It is this prospect, more
than anything, that worries John Reid. In particular, he expressed concern over the inadequate capacity of poor and unstable countries to cope
with the effects of climate change, and the resulting risk of state collapse, civil war and mass migration. "More than 300 million people in Africa
currently lack access to safe water," he observed, and "climate change will worsen this dire situation" -- provoking more wars like Darfur. And
even if these social disasters will occur primarily in the developing world, the wealthier countries will also be caught up in them, whether by
participating in peacekeeping and humanitarian aid operations, by fending off unwanted migrants or by fighting for access to overseas supplies
of food, oil, and minerals. When reading of these nightmarish scenarios, it is easy to conjure up images of desperate, starving people killing one
another with knives, staves and clubs -- as was certainly often the case in the past, and could easily prove to be so again. But these scenarios
also envision the use of more deadly weapons. "In
this world of warring states," the 2003 Pentagon report predicted, "nuclear
arms proliferation is inevitable." As oil and natural gas disappears, more and more countries will rely on nuclear
power to meet their energy needs -- and this "will accelerate nuclear proliferation as countries develop
enrichment and reprocessing capabilities to ensure their national security." Although speculative, these reports make one
thing clear: when thinking about the calamitous effects of global climate change, we must emphasize its social and political consequences as
much as its purely environmental effects. Drought, flooding and storms can kill us, and surely will -- but so will wars among the survivors of
these catastrophes over what remains of food, water and shelter. As Reid's comments indicate, no
escape involvement in these forms of conflict.
society, however affluent, will
Warming is Real (Science)
Warming is a fact
Achenbach 2012 (Joel Achenbach, writer and lecturer at Princeton and Georgetown, July 7, 2012,
“Climate Change: Global Warming is a Fact,” Washington Post,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/achenblog/post/climate-change-global-warming-is-afact/2012/07/09/gJQAAGs6XW_blog.html)
At some point we should stop litigating the basic question of whether climate change is happening.
Climate change is a fact. The spike in atmospheric CO2 is a fact. The dramatic high-latitude warming is
a fact. That the trends aren’t uniform and linear, and that there are anomalies here and there, does not change the
long-term pattern. The warming trend has flattened out in the last decade but probably only because of air
pollution from Chinese coal-fired power plants or somesuch forcing we haven’t fully discovered (smog is hardly the long-term solution we
should be seeking). The broader
patterns are clear. Models show the greatest warming spike down the road still,
decades hence. Thus in a sense, saying that “this is what global warming is like” whenever we have a heat wave actually understates the
problem. Having spent much of my life in Florida, I can tell you, what kills you in summer is not the temperature but the duration of the season,
which lasts basically forever — into November or even December in South Florida. So,
yeah, 100 degrees in July gets my
attention here in DC, but so will a stretch of 85-degree high temperatures in October.
Warming is real- Long-term trends prove
Nordhaus 2012 (William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, research for
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Glaser Foundation, March 22, 2012,
“Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong,” New York Review of Books,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-arewrong/?pagination=false)
The first claim is that the planet is not warming. More precisely, “Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global
warming for well over 10 years now.” It is easy to get lost in the tiniest details here. Most people will benefit from stepping
back and looking at the record of actual temperature measurements. The figure below shows data from 1880 to
2011 on global mean temperature averaged from three different sources.2 We do not need any complicated statistical
analysis to see that temperatures are rising, and furthermore that they are higher in the last decade
than they were in earlier decades.3 One of the reasons that drawing conclusions on temperature trends is tricky is that the
historical temperature series is highly volatile, as can be seen in the figure. The presence of short-term volatility
requires looking at long-term trends. A useful analogy is the stock market. Suppose an analyst says that because real stock prices
have declined over the last decade (which is true), it follows that there is no upward trend. Here again, an examination of the long-term data
would quickly show this to be incorrect. The
last decade of temperature and stock market data is not
representative of the longer-term trends. The finding that global temperatures are rising over the last
century-plus is one of the most robust findings of climate science and statistics.
Anthropogenic warming is happening in line with projections
Nordhaus 2012 (William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, research for
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Glaser Foundation, March 22, 2012,
“Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong,” New York Review of Books,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-arewrong/?pagination=false)
A second argument is that warming is smaller than predicted by the models: The lack of warming for
more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much
warming additional CO2 can cause. What is the evidence on the performance of climate models? Do they predict the historical trend
accurately? Statisticians routinely address this kind of question. The
standard approach is to perform an experiment in
which (case 1) modelers put the changes in CO2 concentrations and other climate influences in a climate model and
estimate the resulting temperature path, and then (case 2) modelers calculate what would happen in the
counterfactual situation where the only changes were due to natural sources , for example, the sun and
volcanoes, with no human-induced changes. They then compare the actual temperature increases of the model predictions for all sources
(case 1) with the predictions for natural sources alone (case 2). This experiment has been performed many times using
climate models. A good example is the analysis described in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(for the actual figure, see the accompanying online material4). Several
modelers ran both cases 1 and 2 described above—one
including human-induced changes and one with only natural sources. This experiment showed that the projections of climate
models are consistent with recorded temperature trends over recent decades only if human impacts
are included. The divergent trend is especially pronounced after 1980. By 2005, calculations using natural sources alone underpredict the
actual temperature increases by about 0.7 degrees Centigrade, while the calculations including human sources track the actual temperature
trend very closely. In reviewing the results, the
IPCC report concluded: “No climate model using natural forcings
[i.e., natural warming factors] alone has reproduced the observed global warming trend in the second half of
the twentieth century.”5
Warming is Real (Consensus)
Warming is real and anthropogenic- Prefer scientific consensus to their hack deniers
Lewandowsky and Ashley 2011 (Stephan Lewandowsky, Professor of Cognitive Studies at the
University of Western Australia, and Michael Ashley, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of New
South Wales, June 24, 2011, “The false, the confused and the mendacious: how the media gets it wrong
on climate change,” http://goo.gl/u3nOC)
But despite these complexities, some
aspects of climate science are thoroughly settled. We know that
atmospheric CO2 is increasing due to humans. We know that this CO₂, while being just a small fraction of the
atmosphere, has an important influence on temperature. We can calculate the effect, and predict what is going to
happen to the earth’s climate during our lifetimes, all based on fundamental physics that is as certain as gravity. The consensus
opinion of the world’s climate scientists is that climate change is occurring due to human CO₂ emissions. The changes
are rapid and significant, and the implications for our civilisation may be dire. The chance of these statements being
wrong is vanishingly small. Scepticism and denialism Some people will be understandably sceptical about that last statement. But when they
read up on the science, and have their questions answered by climate scientists, they come around. These people are true sceptics, and a
degree of scepticism is healthy. Other people
will disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change, and will
challenge the science on internet blogs and opinion pieces in the media, but no matter how many times they are shown to
be wrong, they will never change their opinions. These people are deniers. The recent articles in The
Conversation have put the deniers under the microscope. Some readers have asked us in the comments to address the scientific questions that
the deniers bring up. This has been done. Not once. Not twice. Not ten times. Probably more like 100 or a 1000 times. Denier
arguments
have been dealt with by scientists, again and again and again. But like zombies, the deniers keep coming back with the
same long-falsified and nonsensical arguments. The deniers have seemingly endless enthusiasm to post on blogs, write letters to editors, write
opinion pieces for newspapers, and even publish books. What they rarely do is write coherent scientific papers on their theories and submit
them to scientific journals. The few published papers that have been sceptical about climate change have not withstood the test of time. The
phony debate on climate change So if the evidence is this strong, why is there resistance to action on climate change in Australia? At least two
reasons can be cited. First, as The Conversation has revealed, there
are a handful of individuals and organisations who,
by avoiding peer review, have engineered a phony public debate about the science, when in fact that
debate is absent from the one arena where our scientific knowledge is formed. These individuals and
organisations have so far largely escaped accountability. But their free ride has come to an end, as the next few weeks on The Conversation will
continue to show. The second reason, alas, involves systemic failures by the media. Systemic media failures arise from several presumptions
about the way science works, which range from being utterly false to dangerously ill-informed to overtly malicious and mendacious. The false
Let’s begin with what is merely false. A
tacit presumption of many in the media and the public is that climate science is a
brittle house of cards that can be brought down by a single new finding or the discovery of a single
error. Nothing could be further from the truth. Climate science is a cumulative enterprise built upon hundreds of
years of research. The heat-trapping properties of CO₂ were discovered in the middle of the 19th century, pre-dating even Sherlock
Holmes and Queen Victoria.
CO2  Warming
CO2 is causing warming- Groundbreaking new research
Levy 2012 (Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, April 4, 2012, “Carbon Dioxide
Caused Global Warming at Ice Age’s End, Pioneering Simulation Shows,”
http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2012/04/04/carbon-dioxide-caused-global-warming-at-ice-ages-endpioneering-simulation-shows/)
Climate science has an equivalent to the “what came first—the chicken or the egg?” question: What
came first, greenhouse gases
or global warming? A multi-institutional team led by researchers at Harvard, Oregon State University,
and the University of Wisconsin used a global dataset of paleoclimate records and the Jaguar supercomputer at
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to find the answer (spoiler alert: carbon dioxide drives warming). The results, published
in the April 5 issue of Nature, analyze 15,000 years of climate history. Scientists hope amassing knowledge of the causes of
natural global climate change will aid understanding of human-caused climate change. “We constructed the first-ever record of
global temperature spanning the end of the last ice age based on 80 proxy temperature records from
around the world,” said Jeremy Shakun, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Climate and Global Change
postdoctoral fellow at Harvard and Columbia Universities and first author of the paper. “It’s no small task to get at global mean temperature.
Even for studies of the present day you need lots of locations, quality-controlled data, careful statistics. For the past 21,000 years, it’s even
harder. But because the data set is large enough, these proxy data provide a reasonable estimate of global mean temperature.” Proxy records
from around the world—derived from ice cores and ocean and lake sediments—provide estimates of local surface temperature throughout
history, and carbon-14 dating indicates when those temperatures occurred. For example, water molecules harboring the oxygen-18 isotope rain
out faster than those containing oxygen-16 as an air mass cools, so the ratio of these isotopes in glacial ice layers tells scientists how cold it was
when the snow fell. Likewise, the amount of magnesium incorporated into the shells of marine plankton depends on the temperature of the
water they live in, and these shells get preserved on the seafloor when they die. The authors combined these local temperature records to
produce a reconstruction of global mean temperature. Additionally, samples of ancient atmosphere are trapped as air bubbles in glaciers,
Being the
first to reconstruct global mean temperatures throughout this time interval allowed the researchers
to show what many suspected but none could yet prove: “This is the first paper to definitively show
the role carbon dioxide played in helping to end the last ice age,” said Shakun, who co-wrote the paper with Peter
Clark of Oregon State University. “We found that global temperature mirrored and generally lagged behind
rising carbon dioxide during the last deglaciation, which points to carbon dioxide as the major driver
of global warming.” Prior results based on Antarctic ice cores had indicated that local temperatures in Antarctica started warming
before carbon dioxide began rising, which implied that carbon dioxide was a feedback to some other leading driver of warming. The delay
of global temperature behind carbon dioxide found in this study, however, shows that the ice-core
perspective does not apply to the globe as a whole and instead suggests that carbon dioxide was the
primary driver of worldwide warming.
providing a direct measure of carbon dioxide levels through time that could be compared to the global temperature record.
Extremely sophisticated computer models prove
Levy 2012 (Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, April 4, 2012, “Carbon Dioxide
Caused Global Warming at Ice Age’s End, Pioneering Simulation Shows,”
http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2012/04/04/carbon-dioxide-caused-global-warming-at-ice-ages-endpioneering-simulation-shows/)
While the geologic record showed a remarkable correlation between carbon dioxide and global
temperature, the researchers also turned to state-of-the-art model simulations to further pin down the
direction of causation suggested by the temperature lag. Jaguar recently ran approximately 14 million processor hours to
simulate the most recent 21,000 years of Earth’s climate. Feng He of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, a
postdoctoral researcher, plugged the main forcings driving global climate over this time interval into an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC)–class model called the Community Climate System Model version 3, a global climate model that couples interactions between
atmosphere, oceans, lands, and sea ice. The climate science community developed the model with support from the National Science
Foundation (NSF), Department of Energy (DOE), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration and used many codes developed by
“Our model results are the first IPCC-class Coupled General Circulation Model (CGCM)
simulation of such a long duration (15,000 years),” said He, who conducted the modeling with Zhengyu Liu of the University of
university researchers.
Wisconsin–Madison and Bette Otto-Bliesner of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). “This is of particular significance to the
climate community because it
shows, for the first time, that at least one of the CGCMs used to predict future
climate is capable of reproducing both the timing and amplitude of climate evolution seen in the past
under realistic climate forcing.” The group ran simulations that used 4.7 million processor hours in
2009, 6.6. million in 2010, and 2.5 million in 2011. The Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and
Experiment program, jointly managed by leadership computing facilities at Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories, awarded the
allocations. Shaun Marcott and Alan Mix of Oregon State University analyzed data, and Andreas Schmittner, also of Oregon State, interpreted
links between ocean currents and carbon dioxide. Edouard Bard of Centre Européen de Recherche et d’Enseignement des Géosciences de
l’Environnement provided data and expertise about radiocarbon calibration. NSF supported this research through its Paleoclimate Program for
the Paleovar Project and NCAR. The researchers used resources of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, located in the National Center
for Computational Sciences at ORNL, which is supported by DOE’s Office of Science. The paleoclimate community generated the proxy data sets
and provided unpublished results of the DATED Project on retreat history of the Eurasian ice sheets. The NOAA NGDC and PANGAEA databases
were also essential to this work.
New models prove CO2 causes warming
Levy 2012 (Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, April 4, 2012, “Carbon Dioxide
Caused Global Warming at Ice Age’s End, Pioneering Simulation Shows,”
http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2012/04/04/carbon-dioxide-caused-global-warming-at-ice-ages-endpioneering-simulation-shows/)
As the dominant theory goes, the variation of Earth’s orbit around the sun is responsible for the
growth and deterioration of glaciers because it changes insolation, or solar radiation reaching and warming an area. About
21,000 years ago the orbit of the Earth was slightly predisposed to warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and the planet experienced a
general warming. Next comes a plot twist. Geologic
data show that about 19,000 years ago, Northern Hemisphere
glaciers began to melt, and sea levels rose. Melting glaciers dumped so much freshwater into the
ocean that it slowed a system of currents that transports heat throughout the world. Called the Atlantic
meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), this ocean conveyor belt is particularly important in the Atlantic where it flows northward across
the equator, stealing Southern Hemisphere heat and exporting it to the Northern Hemisphere. The AMOC then sinks in the North Atlantic and
returns southward in the deep ocean. A large pulse of glacial meltwater, however, can place a freshwater lid over the North Atlantic and halt
The simulation showed weakening of the AMOC due to the
increase in glacial melt beginning about 19,000 years ago, which decreased ocean heat transport, keeping heat in the
this sinking, backing up the entire conveyor belt.
Southern Hemisphere and cooling the Northern Hemisphere. Other studies suggest this southern warming caused sea ice to retreat and shifted
winds around the Southern Ocean, uncorking carbon dioxide that had previously been stored in the deep ocean and venting it to the
atmosphere around 17,500 years ago. This rise in
carbon dioxide then initiated worldwide warming. The
seesawing of heat between the hemispheres due to the AMOC shutdown explains why Southern Hemisphere
warming led the rise in carbon dioxide while Northern Hemisphere temperatures lagged behind and
reconciles these patterns with the key role played by carbon dioxide in driving global mean warming.
“Differences in the deglacial temperature evolution of the Northern and Southern Hemispheres can largely be explained by variations in the
Before the team’s groundbreaking efforts,
researchers could only simulate single time slices of Earth’s climate. Just as multiple images are stitched together
strength of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation,” said He.
to make an animation, speedy petascale supercomputers, capable of executing a quadrillion calculations each second, enable stitching together
of multiple time slices to produce a continuous simulation. Liu, Otto-Bliesner, and He’s group was the first to continuously capture climate from
21,000 years ago to the present day so that scientists could compare the relationship of carbon dioxide and global mean temperature over
time. The Nature article covers events up to about 6,000 years ago. The group has since extended the simulation through the present day.
“Climate model output housed at Oak Ridge is currently in the hundreds of terabytes [trillion bytes]
and will soon exceed a petabyte, so you need a large facility just to accommodate the large data output,” said He. “Right now the
climate model output is a top consumer of data storage in Oak Ridge. Also, [continuous simulations] definitely cannot be performed at other
sites because the system needs to be quite consistent. This simulation has been run continuously for more than 3 years. Each simulation [step]
depends on what happened earlier.”
CO2  Warming (A2 Indicts)
Newest research validates our models
Levy 2012 (Dawn Levy, Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, April 4, 2012, “Carbon Dioxide
Caused Global Warming at Ice Age’s End, Pioneering Simulation Shows,”
http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/2012/04/04/carbon-dioxide-caused-global-warming-at-ice-ages-endpioneering-simulation-shows/)
The work builds on a continuous simulation by Liu and colleagues of Earth’s climate between 21,000 and 14,000 years ago, reported in a 2009
Science article detailing the first continuous simulation of climate change during Earth’s most recent period of natural global warming. Using
ORNL’s Cray X1E supercomputer named Phoenix and the even faster Cray XT system called Jaguar, the
scientists used nearly a million processor hours in 2008 to run one-third of their simulation, from 21,000
years ago (the most recent glacial maximum) to 14,000 years ago (the most recent major period of natural global warming). The effort
validated the ability to simulate large climate changes in the past and is critical for assessing future
projections of changes, such as the fate of ocean circulation in the face of continued glacial melting in
Greenland and Antarctica.
A2 Heat Islands
Our models are still valid
Borenstein 2011 (Seth Borenstein, October 31, 2011, “Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is
real,” Yahoo, http://news.yahoo.com/skeptic-finds-now-agrees-global-warming-real-142616605.html)
A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream
climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are
rising rapidly. The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to
global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a
British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists. Yet he
found that the land is 1.6 degrees warmer than in the
1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match
those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA. He said he went even
further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a
warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have
been saying for decades. What's different, and why everyone from opinion columnists to "The Daily Show" is paying attention is who
is behind the study. One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder
of skeptic groups and the tea party. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other
Muller's research team carefully examined two chief
criticisms by skeptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create
heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis. "The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a
skeptic two years ago," Muller said in a telephone interview. "And now we have confidence that the temperature rise
that had previously been reported had been done without bias." Muller said that he came into the study "with a
industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.
proper skepticism," something scientists "should always have. I was somewhat bothered by the fact that there was not enough skepticism"
There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote
recently in The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a place friendly to skeptics. Muller did not address in his research the cause of global
before.
warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it's man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his
study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be. Still, Muller said it makes sense
to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels. "Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world," he said. Still, he
contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is. On Monday, Muller was
taking his results — four separate papers that are not yet published or peer-reviewed, but will be, he says — to a conference in Santa Fe, N.M.,
expected to include many prominent skeptics as well as mainstream scientists. "Of course he'll be welcome," said Petr Chylek of Los Alamos
National Lab, a noted skeptic and the conference organizer. "The purpose of our conference is to bring people with different views on climate
together, so they can talk and clarify things." Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of the book "Fool Me Twice" that criticizes science skeptics, said
Muller should expect to be harshly treated by global warming deniers. "Now he's considered a traitor. For the skeptic community, this isn't
about data or fact. It's about team sports. He's been traded to the Indians. He's playing for the wrong team now."
A2 Warming Inevitable
Not inevitable – even if temporarily over the tipping point, can be brought back down.
Dyer 2009 (Gwynne Dyer, MA in Military History and PhD in Middle Eastern History former Senior
Lecturer in War Studies at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, “Climate Wars,”)
There is no need to despair. The slow-feedback effects take a long time to work their way through the
climate system, and if we could manage to get the carbon dioxide concentration back down to a safe
level before they have run their course, they might be stopped in their tracks. As Hansen et al. put it in their paper: A point
of no return can be avoided, even if the tipping level [which puts us on course for an ice-free world] is temporarily
exceeded. Ocean and ice-sheet inertia permit overshoot, provided the [concentration of carbon
dioxide] is returned below the tipping level before initiating irreversible dynamic change .... However, if
overshoot is in place for centuries, the thermal perturbation will so penetrate the ocean that recovery without dramatic effects, such as icesheet disintegration, becomes unlikely. The real, long-term target is 350 parts per million or lower, if we want the
Holocene to last into the indefinite future, but for the remainder of this book I am going to revert to the 450 parts per million ceiling that has
become common currency among most of those who are involved in climate change issues. If
we manage to stop the rise in the
carbon dioxide concentration at or not far beyond that figure, then we must immediately begin the
equally urgent and arduous task of getting it back down to a much lower level that is safe for the long
term, but one step at a time will have to suffice. I suspect that few now alive will see the day when we seriously start work
on bringing the concentration back down to 350, so let us focus here on how to stop it rising past 450.
Author Indict – Idso
Idso is a hack denier paid off by the Heartland institute
Gibson 2012 (C. Gibson, March 30, 2012, “Heartland Institute and ALEC Partner to Pollute Classroom
Science,” Polluterwatch, http://www.polluterwatch.com/category/freetagging/denialgate)
The National Academy of Sciences found that 97% of actual climate researchers understand that
global warming is happening and is primarily caused by humans burning fossil fuels. However, most K-12 students don't
read the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. I certainly didn't--I relied upon my teachers to teach science with unbiased integrity.
Wojick has expertise not in climate science, but the philosophy of science. He has done contract work for the coal industry through the
"Greening Earth Society," a fairy tale organization established to promote the
absurd idea that more CO2 in our atmosphere, such
as from burning coal and other fossil fuels, is unconditionally good for our planet. This fallacy is promoted by other notable nonexperts, such as oil billionaire David Koch and junk scientist Craig Idso, who produced propaganda films for the
Greening Earth Society (a coal industry front group). Idso presented "The Many Atmospheric Benefits of CO2" to ALEC's
Energy and Environment task force at their August, 2011 meeting in New Orleans, where he told ALEC insiders that we “should let CO2 rise
unrestricted, without government intervention” since “CO2 is definitely not a pollutant.” The coal industry clearly wishes this were true, Mr.
Idso. In addition to accepting fossil fuel propaganda money alongside Mr. Wojick at the Greening Earth Society, Craig Idso also consults
for the Heartland Institute. Idso's $140,000 contract with Heartland this year is to coordinate the antiscientific "Climate Change Reconsidered" reports, an admittedly "political" project that includes contracts to
two federal workers and multiple university faculty members. These payments US Interior Department (DOI) contractor Indur Goklany, who is
under investigation by the Interior Department's Inspector General's office at the request of US Representative Raul Grijalva of New Mexico.
While the Heartland Institute is doing its best to make this unraveling scandal disappear, mainly by vilifying scientist Peter Gleick for
embarrassing the Institute, Greenpeace is pushing for more. We continue to seek answers from federal bodies and universities whose
employees are taking money from the Heartland Institute to attack science and disrupt the democratic process on behalf of tobacco
companies, industrial giants and billionaire ideologues like the Koch brothers. Visit PolluterWatch for ongoing results of Greenpeace's
investigation of the Heartland Institute leaked documents.
Leaked documents prove
Pappas 2012 (Stephanie Pappas, February 12, 2012, “Documents reveal Koch-funded group's plot to
undermine climate science,” Christian Science Monitor,
http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0215/Documents-reveal-Koch-funded-group-s-plot-toundermine-climate-science)
Heartland focuses on free-market issues across the board, including promoting charter schools, lobbying for business-friendly finance,
insurance and real estate rules and promoting prescription drug availability before full Food and Drug Administration testing. In the area of
climate change, the leaked documents revealed that the group funds
vocal climate skeptics, including Center for the
Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change founder Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), physicist Fred Singer ($5,000 plus
expenses per month), and New Zealand geologist Robert Carter ($1,667 per month). They've also pledged $90,000 to skeptical meteorologist
The documents also reveal a communications strategy aimed at
"keep[ing] opposing voices out" of publications such as Forbes Magazine, where the audience is "reliably anti-climate."
Anthony Watts, who blogs at WattsUpWithThat.com.
On
the education front, Wojick would be paid $5,000 per module, or $25,000 per quarter, according to the report's tentative estimates, to produce
the Heartland climate curricula. The Institute's anonymous donor has pledged $100,000 to the project, which the Institute hopes to match from
other donors. Each module would inject skepticism into the scientific consensus on climate change. Example statements in the report include:
"Whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy;" "Models are used to explore various hypotheses about how
climate works. Their reliability is controversial;" and "Whether CO2 [carbon dioxide] is a pollutant is controversial." The modules would also
teach that the idea of carbon dioxide as a pollutant is "controversial," arguing that carbon dioxide is crucial to life on Earth and that natural
emissions are 20 times those of human emissions. Creating controversy In fact, while some of these statements may be politically
controversial, they are not particularly scientifically controversial. For example, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, which synthesizes global scientific findings about climate change,
states: "Since the start of the industrial era (about 1750), the overall effect of human activities on climate
has been a warming influence. The human impact on climate during this era greatly exceeds that due to known changes in natural
processes, such as solar changes and volcanic eruptions." Likewise, while models cannot represent the climate system perfectly (thus the
uncertainly in how much the Earth will warm for a given amount of emissions), climate simulations
are checked and re-
checked against real-world observations and are an established tool in understanding the
atmosphere. And while carbon dioxide is crucial for plant life, the carbon balance on Earth is a delicate cycle, with oceans and land able to
absorb only so much CO2. Humans do emit only a fraction of the 750 gigatons of CO2 that move through the atmosphere each year, but small
changes in the total amount can overwhelm so-called carbon "sinks" such as the ocean, resulting in important, and cumulative, changes in the
"These documents are breathtaking, and they reveal what many of us have
there is a campaign afoot by groups directly funded by the fossil fuel industry and
right-wing foundations such as Koch Industries to mislead the public about climate change," Pennsylvania
atmosphere. [10 Ways the Weather Changed History]
long suspected: That
State University climatologist Michael Mann wrote in an email to LiveScience.
Author Indict – Heartland Institute
Heartland is self-interested and anti-science
Anderson 2010 (Theo Anderson, Ph.D. in American history from Yale University, June 6, 2010, “Free-market fundamentalists stoke
fears of a 'Warmist' conspiracy,” In These Times, Lexis)
In truth, the
vast majority of the public is operating on faith when it comes to the science of climate
change. It's also true that both sides have an agenda. For all its talk about doing real science, Heartland is fairly explicit about
its agenda, which has nothing to do with science and everything to do with advocating for "freemarket solutions" to every conceivable problem. According to Heartland, climate "alarmism" is just the entering wedge for
socialism. On one side there is Heartland's promise that future warming will be modest and warmer will be better. On the other side there is a
consensus among scientists that the earth is warming, that human activity is the primary cause, and that the results could be catastrophic. The
surreal thing about being at Heartland's Seventh International Conference on Climate Change was
knowing that Heartland has been exposed as an extremist organization, and might be doomed--yet it's
winning. In the United States, at least, Heartland's free-market fetish has trumped the science. We've heard the warnings of impending
catastrophe and have decided, basically, to do nothing. We've chosen to believe Heartland's comforting "research and reason" rather than hard
truths.
A2 Skeptics Suppressed
Skeptics aren’t suppressed
Nordhaus 2012 (William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, research for
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Glaser Foundation, March 22, 2012,
“Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong,” New York Review of Books,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-arewrong/?pagination=false)
The fourth contention by the sixteen scientists is that skeptical climate scientists are living under a reign of
terror about their professional and personal livelihoods. They write: Although the number of publicly dissenting
scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are
afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse…. This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for
example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed
in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were
condemned to death. While we must always be attentive to a herd instinct, this lurid tale is misleading in the extreme. Some
background on Lysenko will be useful. He was the leader of a group that rejected standard genetics and held that the acquired characteristics of
an organism could be inherited by that organism’s descendants. He exploited the Soviet ideology about heredity, the need for agricultural
production, and the favor of a powerful dictator—Stalin—to attract adherents to his theories. Under his influence, genetics was officially
condemned as unscientific. Once he gained control of Russian biology, genetics research was prohibited, and thousands of geneticists were
fired. Many leading geneticists were exiled to labor camps in Siberia, poisoned, or shot. His influence began to wane after Stalin’s death, but it
The idea that skeptical
climate scientists are being treated like Soviet geneticists in the Stalinist period has no basis in fact. There
are no political or scientific dictators in the US. No climate scientist has been expelled from the US National
Academy of Sciences. No skeptics have been arrested or banished to gulags or the modern equivalents of Siberia.
took many years for Soviet biology to overcome the disastrous consequences of the Lysenko affair.8
Indeed, the dissenting authors are at the world’s greatest universities, including Princeton, MIT, Rockefeller, the University of Cambridge, and
the University of Paris. I can speak personally for the lively debate about climate change policy. There
are controversies about
many details of climate science and economics. While some claim that skeptics cannot get their papers published, working papers
and the Internet are open to all. I believe the opposite of what the sixteen claim to be true: dissident voices and new theories are encouraged
because they are critical to sharpening our analysis. The
idea that climate science and economics are being
suppressed by a modern Lysenkoism is pure fiction.
A2 Scientists are Paid Off
Climate scientists aren’t paid off
Nordhaus 2012 (William D. Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, research for
National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Glaser Foundation, March 22, 2012,
“Why the Global Warming Skeptics Are Wrong,” New York Review of Books,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/mar/22/why-global-warming-skeptics-arewrong/?pagination=false)
A fifth argument is that mainstream climate scientists are benefiting from the clamor about climate change:
Why is there so much passion about global warming…? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or
the modern update, “Follow the money.” Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for
academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes,
taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable
This argument is inaccurate as scientific history and unsupported by
any evidence. There is a suggestion that standard theories about global warming have been put together by the scientific equivalent of
Madison Avenue to raise funds from government agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF). The fact is that the first
precise calculations about the impact of increased CO2 concentrations on the earth’s surface temperature were
made by Svante Arrhenius in 1896, more than five decades before the NSF was founded. The skeptics’ account also
misunderstands the incentives in academic research. IPCC authors are not paid. Scientists who serve on
panels of the National Academy of Science do so without monetary compensation for their time and are
subject to close scrutiny for conflicts of interest. Academic advancement occurs primarily from publication of
original research and contributions to the advancement of knowledge, not from supporting “popular” views. Indeed,
foundations promising to save the planet.
academics have often been subject to harsh political attacks when their views clashed with current political or religious teachings. This is the
case in economics today, where Keynesian economists are attacked for their advocacy of “fiscal stimulus” to promote recovery from a deep
recession; and in biology, where evolutionary biologists are attacked as atheists because they are steadfast in their findings that the earth is
billions rather than thousands of years old. In fact, the argument about the venality of the academy is largely a diversion. The
big money
in climate change involves firms, industries, and individuals who worry that their economic interests
will be harmed by policies to slow climate change. The attacks on the science of global warming are reminiscent of the well-documented
resistance by cigarette companies to scientific findings on the dangers of smoking. Beginning in 1953, the largest tobacco companies launched a
public relations campaign to convince the public and the government that there was no sound scientific basis for the claim that cigarette
smoking was dangerous. The most devious part of the campaign was the underwriting of researchers who would support the industry’s claim.
The approach was aptly described by one tobacco company executive: “Doubt is our product since it is the best means of competing with the
‘body of fact’ that exists in the mind of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”9
A2 Models Flawed
Models aren’t manipulated- Latest studies prove
Tollefson 2011 (Jeff Tollefson, October 20, 2011, Nature, “Different method, same result: global warming is real,”
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/111020/full/news.2011.607.html)
After generating considerable attention with a preview on Capitol Hill last spring, an
independent team of scientists has
formally released their analysis of the land surface temperature record. Led by Richard Muller, a physicist at the
University of California, Berkeley, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study takes a different and more
comprehensive approach than earlier assessments, but reaches the same basic conclusion: global warming is happening.
Nature examines how the new study differs from its predecessors. What is the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study? Until now,
instrumental temperature records dating back to the middle of the nineteenth century have been compiled by three main research groups:
NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Greenbelt, Maryland; the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Washington
DC; and a collaboration between Britain's Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. All three
records were developed in different ways, using separate, but overlapping, sets of data. By and large, all three studies line up fairly well as they
document rising temperatures, particularly the sharp spike in recent decades, but that hasn't halted criticism from climate sceptics regarding
Muller says he
listened to the sceptics and decided that an independent analysis was in order. He and his team decided to
the quality of the data and the rigor of the analysis. What was the research team's goal, and did they achieve it?
tackle the temperature record independently, on the basis of first principles. They say their results line up with previously published studies and
Muller says he is surprised at how
well the findings line up with previous analyses, which he takes as evidence that the various scientific
teams working on these data did indeed go about their work "in a truly unbiased manner". What did the
suggest that the average global land temperature has risen by roughly 0.9 °C since the 1950s.
team do differently? The Berkeley researchers developed their own statistical methods so that they could use data from virtually all of the
temperature stations on land — some 39,000 in all — whereas the other research groups relied on subsets of data from several thousand sites
to build their records. This meant that they also had to figure out ways to handle shorter temperature records from instruments or stations
where the record was interrupted. Muller and his team also used a different approach to analysing the data. Scientists working on the earlier
studies adjusted raw data to account for differences in the time of day when readings were made, for example, or for higher temperatures
caused by the urban heat island effect, in which cities tend to be warmer than natural landscapes. Muller says his team included the raw data in
its analysis and then applied standard statistical techniques to remove outliers. Is there an advantage to tackling the problem this way? The
team claims that this method is more transparent than those used by the
kind of analysis could make it easier for outside groups to reproduce and analyse the study.
other groups. And it may be true that this
A2 Climategate
Climategate is a joke- Case closed
Plait 2011 (Phil Plait, astronomer and lecturer, August 24, 2011, “Case closed: ‘Climategate’ was
manufactured,” Discover, http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/24/case-closedclimategate-was-manufactured/)
It’s not often you can actually say "case
closed", but in this case it’s literally true: climatologist Michael Mann has been
cleared of all wrongdoing by the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation. Did I say "has been
cleared"? I meant has been cleared once again, since there have been several investigations into his research and Dr.
Mann has been cleared of all charges every single time (like here and here). All of this stemmed from the
"ClimateGate" nonsense of the past couple of years, where leaked emails were taken hugely out of context by the press
and climate change deniers, and used to smear scientists. Dr. Mann was at the center of the whole manufactured controversy,
being the biggest target of the people who want to deny the Earth is warming up. This latest, and hopefully last, investigation into Dr.
Mann’s research (PDF) again shows he is not guilty of misconduct. A couple of the report conclusions are worth pointing
out: We found no basis to conclude that the [Climategate] emails were evidence of research misconduct
or that they pointed to such evidence. That’s clear enough, I think. They also said: There is no specific evidence that [Mann]
falsified or fabricated any data and no evidence that his actions amounted to research misconduct. A big claim by the deniers is
that researchers were using "tricks" to falsify conclusions about global warming, but the NSF report is pretty clear that’s not true. The most
damning thing the investigators could muster was that there was "some concern" over the statistical methods used, but that’s not scandalous
at all; there’s always some argument in science over methodology. The vague language of the report there indicates to me this isn’t a big deal,
or else they would’ve been specific. The big point is that the data were not faked. What does this mean for global warming? A lot of these
attacks can be traced back to the famous "hockey stick" diagram, showing how Earth’s temperatures have been increasing rapidly in recent
times. This graph is what really clinches the idea of man-made global warming, and so has been the epicenter of the manufactroversy. The fact
that Dr. Mann has been cleared again, and that his data are good, shows that this graph is even more solid — or at least is not as weak as so
many would lead you to believe. And what
does this mean about "ClimateGate"? That’s clear enough: all the outrage,
all the claims of fraud and fakery, were just — haha — hot air. Not that this will stop or even slow down the denial
machine. Politicians from the Virginia State Attorney General to members of the House of Representatives have been on what I would
characterize as witch hunts. Dr. Mann has been vocal in his opposition, and I applaud him. Still, needless to say, the attacks will continue.
Here are the facts: the Earth is warming up. The rate of warming has increased in the past century or so. This corresponds to
the time of the Industrial Revolution, when we started dumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases warm the planet
(hence the name) — if they didn’t we’d have an average temperature below the freezing point of water. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas
which is dumped into the atmosphere by humans to the tune of 30 billion tons per year, 100 times the amount from volcanoes. And finally,
approximately 97% of climatologists who actually study climate agree that global warming is real, and
caused by humans.
Warming Bad – Biodiversity
Warming collapses biodiversity
Bellard et al 2012 (Ce ́line Bellard, Cleo Bertelsmeier, Paul Leadley, Wilfried Thuiller and Franck
Courchamp, “Impacts of climate change on the future of Biodiversity,” Ecology Letters, 15: 365–377,
online)
Ecologists are developing a better understanding of the mechanisms by which species and ecosystems
can be impacted by
climate change. The timing of species life cycle events is expected to be further altered, species
distributions will change radically, trophic networks will be affected and ecosystem functioning may
be severely impaired, leading in the worst cases to countless species extinctions. Over the past decades, some of this
understanding has been effectively translated into mathematical models that can be used to forecast climate change impacts on species
distributions, abundance and extinctions. These models are characterised by their high diversity of underlying structures and assumptions, with
predictions differing greatly depending on the models used and species studied. Most of these models
indicate alarming
consequences for Biodiversity with worst-case scenarios leading to extinction rates that would qualify
as the sixth mass extinction in the history of the earth (Barnosky et al. 2011). However, all current approaches have
serious weaknesses. An evaluation of known mechanisms of climate impacts on Biodiversity suggests that the lack of several key mechanisms in
models may lead to either very large underestimations or overestimations of risks for Biodiversity. Improvements in existing models and, in
particular, a new generation of models must address the shortcomings of current models to reduce uncertainties. It is also crucial to improve
our understanding of the vulnerability of Biodiversity to climate change, to develop other predictive approaches and to go beyond predictions.
Extinction
Young 2010 (Dr Ruth Young, PhD specialising in coastal marine ecology. 2-9-2010, “Biodiversity: what it is and why it’s important”,
http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/Biodiversity/Biodiversity-what-and-why/)
Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they all have a niche. They interact with each
other and the physical environment to provide ecosystem services that are vital for our survival. For example plant species convert
carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and energy from the sun into useful things such as food, medicines and timber. A bee pollinating a
flower (Image: ClearlyAmbiguous Flickr) Pollination carried out by insects such as bees enables the production of ⅓ of our food crops. Diverse
mangrove and coral reef ecosystems provide a wide variety of habitats that are essential for many fishery species. To make it simpler for
economists to comprehend the magnitude of services offered by Biodiversity, a team of researchers estimated their value – it amounted to
$US33 trillion per year. “By protecting Biodiversity we maintain ecosystem services” Certain
species play a “keystone” role in
of these species can result in the
collapse of an ecosystem and the subsequent removal of ecosystem services. The most well known example of
maintaining ecosystem services. Similar to the removal of a keystone from an arch, the removal
this occurred during the 19th century when sea otters were almost hunted to extinction by fur traders along the west coast of the USA. This led
to a population explosion in the sea otters’ main source of prey, sea urchins. Because the urchins graze on kelp their booming population
decimated the underwater kelp forests. This loss of habitat led to declines in local fish populations. Sea otters are a keystone species once
hunted for their fur (Image: Mike Baird) Eventually a treaty protecting sea otters allowed the numbers of otters to increase which inturn
controlled the urchin population, leading to the recovery of the kelp forests and fish stocks. In other cases, ecosystem services are maintained
by entire functional groups, such as apex predators (See Jeremy Hance’s post at Mongabay). During the last 35 years, over fishing of large shark
species along the US Atlantic coast has led to a population explosion of skates and rays. These skates and rays eat bay scallops and their out of
control population has led to the closure of a century long scallop fishery. These are just two examples demonstrating how Biodiversity can
maintain the services that ecosystems provide for us, such as fisheries. One could argue that to maintain ecosystem services we don’t need to
protect Biodiversity but rather, we only need to protect the species and functional groups that fill the keystone roles. However, there are a
couple of problems with this idea. First of all, for most ecosystems we don’t know which species are the keystones !
Ecosystems are so complex that we are still discovering which species play vital roles in maintaining them. In some cases its groups of species
not just one species that are vital for the ecosystem. Second, even if we did complete the enormous task of identifying and protecting all
keystone species, what back-up plan would we have if an unforseen event (e.g. pollution or disease) led to the demise of these ‘keystone’
species? Would there be another species to save the day and take over this role? Classifying some species as ‘keystone’ implies that the others
are not important. This may lead to the non-keystone species being considered ecologically worthless and subsequently over-exploited.
Sometimes we may not even know which species are likely to fill the keystone roles. An example of this was discovered on Australia’s Great
Barrier Reef. This research examined what would happen to a coral reef if it were over-fished. The “over-fishing” was simulated by fencing off
coral bommies thereby excluding and removing fish from them for three years. By the end of the experiment, the reefs had changed from a
coral to an algae dominated ecosystem – the coral became overgrown with algae. When the time came to remove the fences the researchers
expected herbivorous species of fish like the parrot fish (Scarus spp.) to eat the algae and enable the reef to switch back to a coral dominated
ecosystem. But, surprisingly, the shift back to coral was driven by a supposed ‘unimportant’ species – the bat fish (Platax pinnatus). The bat fish
was previously thought to feed on invertebrates – small crabs and shrimp, but when offered a big patch of algae it turned into a hungry
herbivore – a cow of the sea – grazing the algae in no time. So a fish previously thought to be ‘unimportant’ is actually a keystone species in the
recovery of coral reefs overgrown by algae! Who knows how many other species are out there with unknown ecosystem roles! In some cases
it’s easy to see who the keystone species are but in many ecosystems seemingly unimportant or redundant species are also capable of changing
niches and maintaining ecosystems. The
more Biodiversityiverse an ecosystem is, the more likely these species will be present
and the more resilient an ecosystem is to future impacts. Presently we’re only scratching the surface of understanding the
full importance of Biodiversity and how it helps maintain ecosystem function. The scope of this task is immense. In the meantime, a wise
insurance policy for maintaining ecosystem services would be to conserve Biodiversity. In
doing so, we increase the chance of
maintaining our ecosystem services in the event of future impacts such as disease, invasive species and of course, climate change.
This is the international year of Biodiversity – a time to recognize that Biodiversity makes our survival on this planet
possible and that our protection of Biodiversity maintains this service.
A2 Crops Turn
CO2 fert is temporary and offset by negative climate effects
Hatfield 2011 (J.L. Hatfield, Laboratory Director, National Laboratory for Agriculture and the
Environment; K.J. Boote, Agronomy Department, University of Florida; B.A. Kimball, USDA-ARS, U.S.
Arid-Land Agricultural Research Center; L.H. Ziska, USDA Crop Systems and Global Change Laboratory;
R.C. Izaurralde, Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University
of Maryland; D.R. Ort, USDA/ARS, Photosynthesis Research Unit, University of Illinois; A. M. Thomson,
Joint Global Change Research Institute, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Maryland;
David W. Wolfe, Department of Horticulture, Cornell University, 2011, “Climate Impacts on Agriculture:
Implications for Crop Production,” Agronomy Journal, Volume 103, Issue 2)
Climate change, either as increasing trends in temperature, CO2, precipitation (decreasing as well as increasing), and/or O3, will have impacts
on agricultural systems. Production of annual and perennial crops will be affected by changes in the absolute values of these climatic variables
and/or increased variation. Episodic temperature
changes exceeding the thresholds during the pollination stage of development
could be quite damaging to crop production because of the sensitivity of crop plants to temperature
extremes during this growth stage. These changes coupled with variable precipitation that places the plant
under conditions of water stress would exacerbate the temperature effects. Warmer temperatures during the
night, especially during the reproductive period, will reduce fruit or grain size because the rapid rate of development and
increased respiration rates. A recent analysis by Ko et al. (2010), using the CERES–Wheat 4.0 module in the RZWQM2 model, evaluated
the interactions of increasing CO2 obtained from a FACE experiment along with temperature, water, and N. They found the effects of
water and N were greater than CO2 effects on biomass and yield and that temperature effects offset
the CO2 effects. These results further confirm the concept that there are counterbalancing effects from different cli- mate variables and
that development of adaptation or mitigation strategies will have to account for the combined effects of climate variables on crop growth,
development, and yield. In an effort to examine potential solutions to low yields in sub-Saharan Africa, Laux et al. (2010) evaluated planting
dates under climate change scenarios to evaluate the effect of increasing CO2 and higher temperature on groundnut (peanut) and maize. They
found the
positive effect of CO2 would offset the temperature response in the next 10 to 20 yr but would be overcome by
higher temperatures by 2080. Changing planting dates were beneficial for the driest locations because of the more effective use of
precipitation and avoidance of high temperature stresses. Both of these types of analyses will have to be conducted to evaluate potential
adapta- tion strategies for all cropping regions. Increases in CO2 concentrations offer positive impacts to plant growth and increased WUE.
However, these positive impacts
may not fully mitigate crop losses associated with heat stress, increases in
evaporative demand, and/or decreases in water availability in some regions. The episodic variation in extremes
may become the larger impact on plant growth and yield. To counteract these effects will require management systems that offer the largest
degree of resilience to climatic stresses as possible. This will include the development of man- agement systems for rainfed environments that
can store the maximum amount of water in the soil profile and reduce water stress on the plant during critical growth periods.
Warming bad for ag- Already hurting crop yield
Ainsworth and Ort 2010 (Elizabeth A. Ainsworth and Donald R. Ort, Global Change and
Photosynthesis Research Unit, United States Department of Agriculture Agricultural Research Service,
October 2010, “How Do We Improve Crop Production in a Warming World?,” Plant Physiology, Volume
154, Number 2, online)
Future agricultural
production will encounter multifaceted challenges from global climate change. Carbon
dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases are accumulating in the atmosphere at unprecedented rates, causing increased radiative
forcing (Le Quéré et al., 2009; Shindell et al., 2009). Continued emissions of greenhouse gases will increase annual
temperatures by 2.5°C to 4.3°C in important crop-growing regions of the world by 2080 to 2099, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) A1B scenario (Christensen et al., 2007). Growing season temperatures are expected
to warm more than the annual averages, with reduced precipitation expected to accompany higher temperatures in some regions.
Additionally, heat waves are expected to increase in frequency, intensity, and duration (Tebaldi et al., 2006;
Christensen et al., 2007), and end-of-century growing season temperatures in the tropics and subtropics may exceed even the most extreme
seasonal temperatures measured to date (Battisti and Naylor, 2009). Despite these dramatic predictions for rising global temperatures and
extreme temperature events, the latest IPCC assessment report predicts that adaptation of agriculture will result in increased yields of cereal
crops (maize [Zea mays], wheat [Triticum spp.], and rice [Oryza sativa]) in mid- to high-latitude regions with modest increases in temperature
across a range of CO2 concentrations and precipitation changes (Easterling et al., 2007). With warming temperatures of 1°C to 3°C, yields at
IPCC
projections assume that yield improvements from the latter half of the 20th century will continue into the future;
however, based on historical temperature-crop yield relationships, potential ceilings to crop yields,
and limitations to expansion of agricultural lands, that assumption may not be sound (Long and Ort, 2010). In fact,
the relative rates of yield increase for all of the major cereal crops are already declining (Fischer and
Edmeades, 2010). In a global analysis of crop yields from 1981 to 2002, there was a negative response of
wheat, maize, and barley (Hordeum vulgare) yields to rising temperature, costing an estimated $5 billion per year (Lobell and Field,
2007). An analysis of maize and soybean (Glycine max) production in the northern Corn Belt region of the United States found that
productivity was adversely affected by rising growing season temperatures from 1976 to 2006 (Kucharik
lower latitudes are predicted to decrease, although global food production is predicted to increase (Easterling et al., 2007). The
and Serbin, 2008). The response of maize and soybean to temperature is also nonlinear, and the decline in yields above the temperature
optimum is significantly steeper than the incline below it (Schlenker and Roberts, 2009). Based on the nonlinearity of the temperature
response, U.S. maize and soybean yields
were predicted to decrease by 30% to 46% before the end of the
century under the IPCC scenario with the slowest warming trend (Schlenker and Roberts, 2009). In addition to these
historical trends, record crop yield losses were reported in 2003, when Europe experienced a heat wave with
July temperatures up to 6°C above average and annual precipitation 50% below average (Ciais et al., 2005). Such
extreme events are not well characterized in the IPCC assessment simulations (Easterling et al., 2007).
Therefore, increased global temperatures and more frequent temperature extremes will greatly
challenge agriculture in this century. Here, we identify regional priorities and biological targets for adaptation of agriculture to
rising temperature.
Warming hurts agriculture – increase in invasive species, long growing seasons,
increased pests, diseases, and decreased water
Garber 2008 (Kent Garber, May 28, 2008, “How Global Warming Will Hurt Crops Lower yields, more
pests, faster-growing weeds will be just some of the effects of climate change,”
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/2008/05/28/how-global-warming-will-hurtcrops.html?PageNr=2)
Historically, the damage to food supplies by bad weather has been regarded as fleeting: catastrophic in the short term but ultimately remitting.
Droughts ease, floodwaters recede, and farmers replant their crops. But as a new government report indicates, such views are increasingly
narrow and outdated, in that they fail to acknowledge the creeping reach of global climate change.The report, released Tuesday, offers one of
the most comprehensive looks yet at the impact that climate change is expected to have on U.S. agriculture over the next several decades. Not
surprisingly, the prognosis is grim. Temperatures in the United States, scientists say, will rise on average by about 1.2 degrees Celsius by 2040,
with carbon dioxide levels up more than 15 percent. The consequences for American-grown food, the report finds, will most likely be farreaching: Some crop
yields are predicted to drop; growing seasons will get longer and use more water;
weeds and shrubs will grow faster and spread into new territory, some of it arable farmland; and insect and
crop disease outbreaks will become more frequent. The new report, which was produced by more than a dozen agencies
over multiple years and reflects the findings of more than 1,000 scientific studies, offers only predictions, but the predictions reflect a high
degree of confidence. In a sense, there is a vein of fatalism among most scientists about what will happen in the next few decades. Government
actions, they say, may alter the trajectory of climate change 50 to 100 years from now, but the fate of climate change in the short term has
been largely shaped by past behavior, by carbon already released into the atmosphere. The question now is the extent of its impact.Some
agricultural changes are already observable. In the central Great Plains, in states known for their grassy prairies and sprawling
row crops, there are new neighbors: trees and large shrubs, often clustering in islands in the middle of fields. In the Southwest, perennial
grasses have been largely pushed out by mesquite bushes, those long-rooted staples of the desert. And the invasive kudzu vine, formerly a
nuisance only to the South, has advanced steadily northward, forming a staggered line stretching from Connecticut to Illinois. Human practices
in all three cases have abetted the turnover, but climate change, scientists say, has been a primary driver, as invasive species
reproduce more quickly and expand into areas once deemed too cold for their survival. In turn, high-quality pastureland, once ideal for
livestock grazing, has become poor-quality brush, and farmland faces competitors for space.In
the next 30 years these problems
will very likely expand and multiply, as an already taxed food system faces threats on multiple fronts. A rise in temperature—
even as little as 1 degree Celsius—could cause many plantings to fail, the report indicates, since pollen and seeds are sensitive to slight
temperature changes. Yields of corn and rice are expected to decline slightly. Heat-sensitive fruits and vegetables, such as
tomatoes, will most likely suffer. Some of the potential damage will be blunted by higher carbon dioxide levels; soybean yields, for instance, will
probably improve, because soybeans (and several other crops) thrive from higher carbon inputs. But if temperatures keep rising, the balance
will ultimately tip: At some extreme temperature, cells stop dividing, and pollen dies.High ozone levels, which have risen sixfold in the United
States in the past century and are expected to rise further, will suppress yields as well. In fact, ozone levels are already extremely high in the
eastern and midwestern regions of the country, rivaled globally only by eastern China (no model of air quality, to be sure) and parts of western
Europe. One recent study, for instance, found that high ozone levels significantly suppress yields of soybean, wheat, and peanuts in the
Midwest. Eventually, the
effects of climate change, far from being limited to individual plants, could
percolate throughout entire ecosystems. If springs become warmer, as predicted, the crop-growing season will expand. Insects
and pests, thriving in warmer winters, will reproduce more frequently and spread more rapidly. Many, in fact, are proliferating already, as
reflected in reports of abnormally high rates of disease outbreaks in the western half of the United States. Higher
temperatures also
are usually accompanied by declining rainfall, threatening to slowly transform once lush areas into arid expanses. At the
same time, droughts and heavy isolated rainfalls could become more numerous.
A2 Ice Age Turn
Warming causes alterations in the North Atlantic current and stops the ocean
conveyor belt causing an ice age quickly
ABC News 2007 (“New northern ice age could send refugees to Australia”,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/10/05/2052408.htm)
A NU paleoclimatologist Timothy Barrows and his fellow researchers used a new dating technique that measures the radioactive elements in
some rocks. Dr Barrows explains that Europe is at risk of a new ice age as a result of global warming. "There are some fears that warming
in
the Northern Hemisphere, particularly around the Greenland ice sheet, might cause quite a bit of meltwater to
come into the North Atlantic Ocean," he said. "That might change the salinity of the water there and
stop what's called 'the great conveyor belt of the oceans' forming deep water that releases an enormous amount of
heat that keeps Europe out of an ice age, essentially. "So if global warming does stop this circulation from occurring, then we could potentially
have a new ice age in Europe." Dr Barrows says this effect is similar to what happened about 12,900 years ago, when the earth experienced
rapid cooling. "There was
a collapse of an ice sheet over North America, which slowed this circulation
down, and caused a mini ice age for 1,500 years in Europe," he said. He says a new ice age in the Northern Hemisphere
is not far off. "You'd begin to feel the effects almost immediately and certainly within a century," he said.
Warming shuts down conveyor belt – by decreasing ocean salinity, causing an ice age
Pearce 2007 (Fred Pearce, environmental consultant, 2007, With Speed And Violence: Why Scientists
Fear Tipping Points In Climate Change, pages 145-147)
But the crux of the public debate on Broecker's ocean conveyor remains a very simple question: Could
global warming shut the
conveyor down? Broecker seems rarely to have doubted it. And the claim has in recent years seemed almost to have a life of its own.
This struck me most strongly at a conference on "dangerous" climate change held at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, in Exeter in
2005. There I met Michael Schlesinger, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a sharp-suited guy sporting a pastiche of 1950S
clothes and hairstyle. But if there were serious doubts in Exeter about whether his style sense would ever come back into fashion, there was
no doubt that his ideas about climate change had found their moment. For more than a decade, Schlesinger has been making Broecker's case
that a shutdown of the ocean conveyor could be closer than mainstream climate modelers think. Some critics feel that he just doesn't know
when to give up and move on. But he has stuck with it, criticizing the IPCC and its models for systematically eliminating a range of quite
possible dooms¬day scenarios from consideration. "The trouble with trying to reach a con¬sensus is that all the interesting ideas get
eliminated," he said at the conference. Science by committee ends up throwing away the good stuff ¬like the idea of the conveyor's shutting
a global warming of just
3.6°F would melt the Greenland ice sheet fast enough to swamp the ocean with freshwater and shut
down the conveyor. The risk, he said, was "unacceptably large." Although he had been saying much the same for a
down. But in Exeter, Schlesinger was back in vogue. He had been invited to present his model findings that
decade, he was now considered mainstream enough to be invited across the Atlantic to ex¬pound his ideas at a conference organized by the
British government. And he was no longer alone. Later in the day, Peter Challenor, of the British Na¬tional Oceanography Centre, in
Southampton, said he had shortened his own odds about the likelihood of a conveyor shutdown from one in thirty to one in three. He guessed
that a 3-degree warming of Greenland would do it. Given how fast Greenland is currently warming, that seems a near certainty. But all this is
models. What evidence is there on the ground for the state of the conveyor? The truth is that dangerous
change is already afoot
in the North Atlantic. And, whatever the skepticism about some of Broecker's grander claims, the conveyor may already
be in deep trouble. Since the mid-2000s, says Ruth Curry, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institu¬tion, the waters of the far North
Atlantic off Greenland-where Wad¬hams's chimneys deliver water to the ocean floor and maintain Broecker's conveyor-have become
decidedly fresher. In fact, much of the change happened back in the 1960s, when some 8 billion acre-feet of freshwater gushed out of the
Arctic through the Fram Strait. Oceanographers called the event the Great Salinity Anomaly. To this day, nobody is quite sure why it happened.
It could have been ice breaking off the great Greenland ice sheet, or sea ice caught up in unusual circulation patterns, or increased flow from
the great Siberian rivers like the Ob and the Yenisey. Luckily, most of the freshwater rapidly headed south into the North Atlantic proper. Only
3 billion acre-feet remained. Curry's studies of the phenomenon, published in Science in June 2005, con¬cluded that 7 billion acre-feet would
have been enough to "substantially reduce" the conveyor, and double that "could essentially shut it down." So it was a close call. With the
region's water still substantially fresher than it was at the start of the 1960s, the conveyor remains on the critical list. Another single slug of
freshwater anytime soon could be disastrous. In
the coming decades, some combination of increased rainfall,
increased runoff from the land surrounding the Arctic, and faster rates of ice melting could turn off
the conveyor. And there would be no turning back, because models suggest that it would not easily switch back on. "A shift in the
ocean conveyor, once initiated, is essentially irreversible over a time period of many decades to centuries," as Broecker's
colleague Peter deMenocal puts it. "It would per¬manently alter the climatic norms for some of the most densely populated and highly
developed regions of the world." As I prepared to submit this book to the publisher, new research dramat¬ically underlined the risks and fears
for the conveyor. Harry Bryden, of the National Oceanography Centre, had strung measuring buoys in a line across the Atlantic, from the
Canary Islands to the Bahamas, and found that the flow of water north from the Gulf Stream into the North Atlantic had faltered by 30 percent
since the mid-I990S. Less warm water was go¬ing north at the surface, and less cold water was coming back south along the ocean floor. This
weakening of two critical features of the conveyor was, so far as anyone knew, an unprecedented event. Probing further, Bryden found that
the "deep water" from the Labrador Sea west of Greenland still seemed to be flowing south. But the volume of deep water coming south from
the Greenland Sea, the site of Wadhams's chimneys, had collapsed to half its former level. The implication was clear: the disappearing
chimneys that Wadhams had watched with such despair were indeed hobbling the ocean circulation. Broecker seemed on the verge of being
proved right that the ocean conveyor was at a threshold because of global warming.
Most studies conclude no natural ice age coming for 10,000 years
Revkin 2008 (Andrew C. Revkenm, Environment reporter, 2008, “Skeptics on human climate impact seize on cold spell, NEW YORK
TIMES, Lexis)
Despite the recent trend toward global warming, scientists have long wondered whether the Earth is nearing a new ice age, an end to the
12,000-year temperate spell in which civilizations arose. Some have said such a transition is overdue, given that each of the three temperate
intervals that immediately preceded this current one lasted only about 10,000 years. But now, in an eagerly awaited study, a
climate and ice experts
group of
say they have new evidence that Earth is not even halfway through the current
warm era. The evidence comes from the oldest layers of Antarctic ice ever sampled. Some scientists earlier proposed similar hypotheses,
basing them on the configuration of Earth's orbit, which seems to set the metronome that ice ages dance to. Temperature patterns deciphered
in sea sediments in recent years backed the theory. But experts say the
new ice data are by far the strongest
corroborating evidence, revealing many similarities between today's atmospheric and temperature
patterns and those of a warm interval, with a duration of 28,000 years, that reached its peak 430,000 years ago. The findings are
described Thursday in the journal Nature in a report by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica. The evidence comes from a
shaft of ice extracted over five grueling years from Antarctica's deep-frozen innards, composed of
thousands of ice layers formed as each year's snowfall was compressed over time. The deepest ice retrieved
so far comes from 10,000 feet deep and dates back 740,000 years. The relative abundance of certain forms of hydrogen in the ice reflects past
air temperatures. Many ice cores have been cut from various glaciers and ice sheets around the world, but until now none have gone back
beyond 420,000 years. "It's very exciting to see ice that fell as snow three-quarters of a million years ago," said Dr. Eric Wolff, an author of the
paper and ice core expert with the British Antarctic Survey.
We have already burned enough CO2 to keep us out of an ice age for at least 55,000
years
Newkerala 2009 (Newkerala, 2-11-09, “Controlling man made emissions may delay start of next ice
age,” http://www.newkerala.com/topstory-fullnews-91308.html)
Ice ages start when conditions at high northern latitudes allow winter snowfall to persist over the summer for enough years to accumulate and
build ice sheets. Such conditions depend mainly on summer solar radiation there and atmospheric CO2 concentration. This radiation is
modulated on time scales of 20.000, 40.000 and 100.000 years by changes in the Earth's orbit and orientation. Critical summer solar radiation
for initiating ice sheet growth can be significantly lower for higher atmospheric CO2 with its greenhouse warming effect. Professor Shaffer
made long projections over the next 500,000 years with the DCESS Earth System Model to calculate the evolution of
atmospheric CO2 for different fossil fuel emission strategies. He also used results of a coupled climate-ice sheet model
for the dependency on atmospheric CO2 of critical summer solar radiation at high northern latitudes for an ice age onset. The results
show global warming of almost 5 degrees Celsius above present for a "business as usual" scenario
whereby all 5000 billion tons of fossil fuel carbon in accessible reserves are burned within the next
few centuries. According to Professor Shaffer, humanity has already increased atmospheric CO2 enough to keep it out of the next ice age
for at least the next 55,000 years.
Warming Good
CO2 Not Cause – History
CO2 doesn’t cause warming
Jaworowski 2010 [Zbigniew, Ph. D., M.D., D.Sc., has researched the atmospheric pollution of glaciers
and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere for many years, and is the author of numerous publications
on climate change. He serves as the Polish representative in the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation, and is a member of the Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change (NIPCC) January 15, “‘Global Warming’: A Lie Aimed At Destroying Civilization” EIR
Science and Technology
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Jaworowski_interview.pdf]
As you can see, there
is no connection between CO2 , which has been under such fierce attack, and
climate change. Indeed, more than 500 million years ago, according to the geological record, CO2 was
present at 23 times the levels we now have in the atmosphere, and yet, half a billion years ago, the
land was covered by glaciers. Climate change depends on many factors, and now we are fighting against only one
factor, CO2 , which happens to be negligible.
CO2 doesn’t cause warming- its colder now with more of it
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
But could
the higher temperatures of the past four interglacials have been caused by higher CO2
concentrations due to some non-human influence? Absolutely not, for atmospheric CO2 concentrations during all four
prior interglacials never rose above approximately 290 ppm, whereas the air's CO2 concentration
today stands at nearly 390 ppm. Combining these two observations, we have a situation where, compared with the
mean conditions of the preceding four interglacials, there is currently 100 ppm more CO2 in the air
than there was then, and it is currently more than 2°C colder than it was then, which adds up to one
huge discrepancy for the world's climate alarmists and their claim that high atmospheric CO2 concentrations lead to high
temperatures. The situation is unprecedented, all right, but not in the way the public is being led to believe.
CO2 Not Cause – Arctic Records
CO2 doesn’t cause warming- arctic records prove
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
Concentrating wholly on directly-measured temperatures, as opposed to the reconstructed temperatures derived by the proxy
approach of Overpeck et al. (1997), Polyakov et al. (2003) derived a surface air temperature history that stretched
from 1875 to 2000 based on data obtained at 75 land stations and a number of drifting buoys located poleward of 62°N latitude. This effort allowed the
team of eight U.S. and Russian scientists to determine that from 1875 to about 1917, the surface air temperature of the huge
northern region rose hardly at all; but then it took off like a rocket, climbing 1.7°C in just 20 years to
reach a peak in 1937 that has yet to be eclipsed. During this 20-year period of rapidly rising air
temperature, the atmosphere's CO2 concentration rose by a mere 8 ppm. But then, over the next six
decades, when the air's CO2 content rose by approximately 55 ppm, or nearly seven times more than it did throughout the
20-year period of dramatic warming that preceded it, the surface air temperature of the region poleward of 62°N experienced no
net warming and, in fact, may have actually cooled a bit. In light of these results, it is difficult to claim much about the
strength of the warming power of the approximate 75-ppm increase in the atmosphere's CO2
concentration that occurred from 1875 to 2000, other than to say it was miniscule compared to
whatever other forcing factor, or combination of forcing factors, was concurrently having its way with the climate
of the Arctic. One cannot, for example, claim that any of the 1917 to 1937 warming was due to the 8ppm increase in CO2 that accompanied it, even if augmented by the 12-ppm increase that occurred
between 1875 and 1917; for the subsequent and much larger 55-ppm increase in CO2 led to no net
warming over the remainder of the record, which suggests that just a partial relaxation of the forces
that totally overwhelmed the warming influence of the CO2 increase experienced between 1937 and
2000 would have been sufficient to account for the temperature increase that occurred between 1917
and 1937. And understood in this light, the air's CO2 content does not even begin to enter the picture.
But what about earth's other polar region: the Antarctic? Here, too, one can conclude nothing about the influence
of atmospheric CO2 on surface air temperature. Why? Because for the continent as a whole (excepting the Antarctic
Peninsula), there had been a net cooling over the pre-1990 period, stretching back to at least 1966 (Comiso, 2000; Doran et al.,
2002; Thompson and Solomon, 2002). And when the real-world air temperature declines when the theoretical climate
forcing factor is rising, one cannot even conclude that the forcing has any positive effect at all, much less
determine its magnitude. Hence, there is absolutely no substance to the claim that earth's polar regions are
providing evidence for an impending CO2-induced warming of any magnitude anywhere.
CO2 Not Cause – Alt Causes
CO2 doesn’t cause warming- multiple factors offset the greenhouse effect
Idso, Carter and Singer 2011 [Craig D. Ph.D Chairman for the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change, Robert M. Ph.D Adjunct Research Fellow James Cook University, S. Fred Ph.D
President of Science and Environmental Policy Project, Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim
Report” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
All else being equal, rising
levels of atmospheric CO2 would increase global temperatures through its
thermal radiative properties. But CO2 promotes plant growth both on land and throughout the surface waters of the
world‘s oceans, and this vast assemblage of plant life has the ability to affect Earth‘s climate in several ways,
almost all of them tending to counteract the heating or cooling effects of CO2‘s thermal radiative forcing.
atmospheric aerosols, the output of which varies with
temperature and CO2 concentrations. Aerosols serve as condensation nuclei for clouds, and clouds affect
Earth‘s energy budget through their ability to reflect and scatter light and their propensity to absorb
and radiate thermal radiation. The cooling effect of increased emissions of aerosols from plants and
algae is comparable to the warming effect projected to result from increases in greenhouse gases
Similarly, warming-induced increases in the emission of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) from the world‘s
oceans would offset much or all of the effects of anthropogenic warming.
No Runaway Warming – Arctic Data
Arctic data supports the claim that warming will not be runaway
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
With respect to the recent rate at which the earth has warmed, we
examine the results of a number of studies that have
investigated recent temperature changes in the Arctic, which Meadows (2001) described as "the place to watch for global
warming, the sensitive point, the canary in the coal mine." Here, in comparing the vast array of prior Holocene climate
changes with what climate alarmists claim to be the "unprecedented" anthropogenic-induced
warming of the past several decades, White et al. (2010) recently determined that "the human
influence on rate and size of climate change thus far does not stand out strongly from other causes of
climate change." Other scientists preceded White et al. with similar conclusions. Chylek et al. (2006) studied two
century-long temperature records from southern coastal Greenland -- Godthab Nuuk on the west and Ammassalik
on the east -- both of which are close to 64°N latitude, concentrating on the period 1915-2005. And in doing so, as they describe it, they
determined that "two periods of intense warming (1995-2005 and 1920-1930) are clearly visible in the Godthab
Nuuk and Ammassalik temperature records." However, they state that "the average rate of warming was
considerably higher within the 1920-1930 decade than within the 1995-2005 decade." In fact, they report
that the earlier warming rate was 50% greater than the most recent one. And in discussing this fact, they say that
"an important question is to what extent can the current (1995-2005) temperature increase in Greenland coastal regions be interpreted as
evidence of man-induced global warming?" In providing their own answer, they noted that "the
Greenland warming of 1920 to
1930 demonstrates that a high concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not a
necessary condition for [a] period of warming to arise," and that "the observed 1995-2005
temperature increase seems to be within [the] natural variability of Greenland climate." A similar study
was conducted two years later by Mernild et al. (2008), who described "the climate and observed climatic variations and trends in the
Mittivakkat Glacier catchment in Low Arctic East Greenland from 1993 to 2005 ... based on the period of detailed observations (1993-2005) and
supported by synoptic meteorological data from the nearby town of Tasiilaq (Ammassalik) from 1898 to 2004." This work revealed that "the
Mittivakkat Glacier net mass balance has been almost continuously negative, corresponding to an average loss of glacier volume of 0.4% per
year." And during
the past century of general mass loss, they found that "periods of warming were
observed from 1918 (the end of the Little Ice Age) to 1935 of 0.12°C per year and 1978 to 2004 of 0.07°C per
year," with the former rate of warming being fully 70% greater than the most recent rate of warming.
Last of all, Wood et al. (2010) constructed a two-century (1802-2009) instrumental record of annual surface
air temperature within the Atlantic-Arctic boundary region, using data obtained from recently
published (Klingbjer and Moberg, 2003; Vinther et al., 2006) and historical (Wahlen, 1886) sources that yielded four station-based
composite time series that pertain to Southwestern Greenland, Iceland, Tornedalen (Sweden) and Arkhangel'sk (Russia). This operation
added seventy-six years to the previously available record, the credibility of which result, in Wood et al.'s
words, "is supported by ice core records, other temperature proxies, and historical evidence." And the U.S.
and Icelandic researchers determined that their newly extended temperature history and their analysis of it revealed "an irregular pattern of
decadal-scale temperature fluctuations over the past two centuries," of which the
early twentieth-century warming (ETCW)
event -- which they say "began about 1920 and persisted until mid-century" -- was by far "the most
striking historical example."
Warming isn’t Anthropogenic
Warming is natural- even if it’s the result of the greenhouse effect that is caused by
water vapor
Jaworowski 2004 [Professor Zbigniew M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc. is the chairman of the Scientific Council of
the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw. Winter “Solar Cycles, Not CO2, Determine
Climate” 21st Century Science Tech
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf]
In fact, the recent
climate developments are not something unusual; they reflect a natural course of
planetary events. From time immemorial, alternate warm and cold cycles have followed each other,
with a periodicity ranging from tens of millions to several years. The cycles were most probably dependent on the
extraterrestrial changes occurring in the Sun and in the Sun’s neighborhood. Short term changes—those occurring in
a few years—are caused by terrestrial factors such as large volcanic explosions, which inject dust into the
stratosphere, and the phenomenon of El Niño, which depends on the variations in oceanic currents.
Thermal energy produced by natural radionuclides that are present in the 1-kilometer-thick layer of the Earth’s crust, contributed about 117
kilojoules per year per square meter of the primitive Earth. As a result of the decay of these long-lived radionuclides, their annual contribution
is now only 33.4 kilojoules per square meter.10 This nuclear heat, however, plays a minor role among the terrestrial factors, in comparison
with the “greenhouse effects” caused by absorption by some atmospheric gases of the solar radiation reflected from the surface of the Earth.
Without the greenhouse effect, the average near-surface air temperature would be –18°C, and not +15°C, as it is now. The
most important among these “greenhouse gases” is water vapor, which is responsible for about 96 to 99 percent
of the greenhouse effect. Among the other greenhouse gases (CO2 , CH4 , CFCs, N2O, and O3 ), the most important is CO2 ,
which contributes only 3 percent to the total greenhouse effect.11, 12 The manmade CO2 contribution
to this effect may be about 0.05 to 0.25 percent.13.
Warming isn’t anthropogenic
Idso, Carter and Singer 2011 [Craig D. Ph.D Chairman for the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change, Robert M. Ph.D Adjunct Research Fellow James Cook University, S. Fred Ph.D
President of Science and Environmental Policy Project, Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim
Report” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
New evidence points to a larger role for solar forcing than the IPCC has acknowledged. Likely mechanisms
include perturbation of ocean currents, tropospheric zonal mean-winds, and the intensity of cosmic
rays reaching the Earth The IPCC underestimated the warming effect of chloroflourocarbons (CFCs) prior to
their gradual removal from the atmosphere following the implementation of the Montreal Protocol in 2000. This could mean CO2
concentrations played a smaller role in the warming prior to that year, and could help explain the
global cooling trend since 2000. Other forcings and feedbacks about which little is known (or
acknowledged by the IPCC) include stratospheric water vapor, volcanic and seismic activity, and enhanced
carbon sequestration.
A2 Climate Models
Climate models suck- we cant know all of the things they claim to know
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
As strange as it may seem, these
frightening future scenarios are derived from a single source of information:
the ever-evolving computer-driven climate models that presume to reduce the important physical, chemical and
biological processes that combine to determine the state of earth's climate into a set of mathematical
equations out of which their forecasts are produced. But do we really know what all of those complex and
interacting processes are? And even if we did -- which we don't -- could we correctly reduce them into
manageable computer code so as to produce reliable forecasts 50 or 100 years into the future?
Climate models suck- there is no way there would be runaway warming
Idso, Carter and Singer 2011 [Craig D. Ph.D Chairman for the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change, Robert M. Ph.D Adjunct Research Fellow James Cook University, S. Fred Ph.D
President of Science and Environmental Policy Project, Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim
Report” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
Climate models over-estimate the amount of warming that occurred during the twentieth century,
fail to incorporate chemical and biological processes that may be as important as the physical
processes employed in the models, and often diverge so greatly in their assumptions and findings
that they cannot be said to validate each other. Climate models fail to correctly simulate future
precipitation due to inadequate model resolution on both vertical and horizontal spatial scales, a limitation that forces
climate modelers to parameterize the large-scale effects of processes that occur on smaller scales than their models are capable of
simulating. This is
particularly true of physical processes such as cloud formation and cloud-radiation
The internal variability component of climate change is strong enough to overwhelm any
anthropogenic temperature signal and generate global cooling periods (between 1946 and 1977) and global
warming periods (between 1977 and 2008), yet models typically underestimate or leave out entirely this
component
Climate models fail to predict changes in sea
surface temperature and El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events, two major drivers of the global climate. There has been
little or no improvement to the models in this regard since the late-
real-world data show positive soil moisture trends for regions that have
warmed during the twentieth century. This is a serious problem since accurate simulation of land
surface states is critical to the skill of weather and climate forecasts
of climate sensitivity estimates based on the assumptions of their builders, estimates based on real-world measurements
find that a doubling of the atmosphere‘s CO2 concentration would result in only a 0.4° or 0.5° C rise
in temperature.
with higher temperatures, but
IPCC Model Bad
Even IPCC people think that study proved nothing
Bast, Karnick and Bast 2011 [Joseph L. President of the Heartland Institute, S.T. Research Director
The Heartland Institute, Diane Carol, Executive Editor The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change
Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report: Foreward” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
Mike Hulme (2009), a
professor of climate change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the
University of East Anglia and a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), published in
2009 a book that contained admissions of uncertainty rarely voiced by insiders of the climate
change research community. Hulme wrote, ―the three questions examined above—What is causing climate change? By how
much is warming likely to accelerate? What level of warming is dangerous?— represent just three of a number of contested or uncertain
areas of knowledge about climate change‖ (p. 75). Hulme also admitted, ―Uncertainty pervades scientific predictions about the future
performance of global and regional climates. And uncertainties
multiply when considering all the consequences
that might follow from such changes in climate‖ (p. 83). On the subject of the IPCC‘s credibility, he
admitted it is ―governed by a Bureau consisting of selected governmental representatives, thus
ensuring that the Panel‘s work was clearly seen to be serving the needs of government and policy. The
Panel was not to be a self-governing body of independent scientists‖ (p. 95). These are all basic
―talking points‖ of global warming realists, which invariably result in charges of ―denial‖ and
―industry shill‖ when expressed by someone not in the alarmist camp. To see them written by Hulme reveals how
the debate has changed.
IPCC wrong- they used flawed rainfall models
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
Other studies have continued to demonstrate the difficulties models have in simulating precipitation
properties and trends. Kiktev et al. (2007), for example, analyzed the abilities of five global coupled climate
models that played important roles in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report to simulate temporal trends over the
second half of the 20th century for five annual indices of precipitation extremes. Their results revealed "low skill" or an
"absence" of model skill.
A2 Idso Indicts
Just because the Idsos get paid by Heartland doesn’t mean they are hacks
Plumer 2012 [Brad 02/16 Washington Post “Leaked docs offer insight into how climate-skeptic groups
operate” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/leaked-docs-provide-insight-into-howclimate-skeptic-groups-operate/2012/02/16/gIQAn8BKIR_blog.html]
4) Skeptic money doesn’t necessarily corrupt, but it can amplify marginal viewpoints. It’s
sometimes suggested that climate
skeptics are somehow corrupted because they take money from fossil-fuel interests and groups like
Heartland. But Craig Idso, a skeptical scientist who receives $11,600 a month from the Heartland Institute, according to the documents,
offers a more nuanced defense in his interview with Andy Revkin. Idso says that he has long opposed the overwhelming
scientific consensus on climate change — even before he was getting paid by Heartland. That sounds
plausible. It’s doubtful that many skeptics meaningfully alter their views in order to receive money from groups like Heartland. More likely, the
effect of all this money is to increase the visibility and reach of once-marginalized folks who were
already inclined to criticize climate science. (And, yes, a person’s funding sources have very little bearing
on the actual merits of his or her views.)
The Idsos are qualified
D’Aleo 2010 [Joseph is Executive Director of http://icecap.us, a former professor of meteorology and
climatology, the First Director of Meteorology at the Weather Channel, and a fellow of the American
Meteorology Society. February 14 “Climategate: What Did Phil Jones Actually Admit? Was He Correct?”
http://pjmedia.com/blog/climategate-what-did-phil-jones-actually-admit-was-he-correct/]
The Idsos at CO2 Science have done a very thorough job documenting, using the peer review
literature, the existence of a global MWP. They have found data published by 804 individual scientists from 476
separate research institutions in 43 different countries supporting the global Medieval Warm Period.
A2 Heartland Indicts
Heartland Institute and the NIPCC are qualified
Bast and Taylor 2008 [Joseph L. James M. Heartland Institiute Fri, 19 Dec “Reply to RealClimate's
Attacks on the NIPCC Climate Report” http://www.sott.net/articles/show/171267-Reply-to-RealClimates-Attacks-on-the-NIPCC-Climate-Report]
On November 28, the
global warming alarmist Web site "RealClimate" posted a ridiculously lame attack by
Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt against "Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate," the summary for policymakers of the 2008 report
of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
The NIPCC report was written by S. Fred
Singer, Ph.D. and an additional 23 contributors, including some of the most accomplished atmospheric
scientists in the world. The paper references approximately 200 published papers and scientific
reports in support of its conclusions. It provides strong evidence that human activity is not causing a global warming crisis.
Mann and Schmidt call the NIPCC report "dishonest" and "nonsense," a document "served up" by "S. Fred Singer and his merry band of
contrarian luminaries (financed by the notorious 'Heartland Institute')." But instead of critiquing the scientific arguments presented in the
NIPCC report, Mann and Schmidt simply dismiss and belittle them and refer readers mostly to their own past blog comments. Time spent
following those links reveals a hodgepodge of opinions and superficial comments, a boatload of rhetoric, and very little science--an entirely
unsatisfactory way to support such serious charges. The reference to financing seems intended to imply that the authors of the NIPCC report
were paid by The Heartland Institute, which is not true. RealClimate has been informed of this, but hasn't corrected its false claim. To go on
implying it anyway tells you all you need to know about the integrity of the RealClimate authors. And what
about "the notorious
'Heartland Institute'"? It's a 24-year-old national nonprofit organization that gets 95 percent of its
funding from non-energy-related donors and 84 percent of its funding from non-corporate sources (in 2007). It has a long
history of publishing reliable scientific and economic analysis of global warming. Heartland's credibility is
certainly less questionable than that of RealClimate, a front group created specifically to attack global warming skeptics by Fenton
Communications, a truly "notorious" PR agency.
A2 Oil Companies Corrupt Studies
Warming good authors aren’t paid for the by the oil companies anymore
Plumer 2012 [Brad 02/16 Washington Post “Leaked docs offer insight into how climate-skeptic groups
operate” http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/leaked-docs-provide-insight-into-howclimate-skeptic-groups-operate/2012/02/16/gIQAn8BKIR_blog.html]
2) Big oil companies seem to be increasingly minor players in the skeptic arena. Seven
years ago, most climate-skeptic groups
could be linked to money pouring out of ExxonMobil and the American Petroleum Institute — see Chris
Mooney’s old expose from 2005 for details. One notable point about the Heartland documents, however, is that big oil companies
don’t seem to be major donors. The Koch Charitable Foundation — a conservative charity linked to one of the country’s largest
private oil refineries — chipped in $25,000 in 2011, but that was devoted specifically for a health care research program.* Exxon, for its part,
stopped donating back in 2006 after pressure from environmental groups (up to that point, the oil giant had
chipped in $675,000). Indeed, according to the documents, much of the money comes from individual donors, particularly
a person referred to as “the Anonymous Donor,” who gave $14.26 million over the past six years (nearly half of the group’s revenue). That’s
one possible signal that climate skepticism is no longer the sole concern of self-interested fossil-fuel
companies trying to fend off regulations — instead, it’s become a self-sustaining ideological endeavor,
with no shortage of committed backers.
A2 Consensus
Experts don’t actually think the climate debate is over- their authors manipulate data
too
Bast, Karnick and Bast 2011 [Joseph L. President of the Heartland Institute, S.T. Research Director
The Heartland Institute, Diane Carol, Executive Editor The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change
Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report: Foreward” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
Just months after Hulme‘s book was released, a large cache of emails was leaked by someone at the Climatic Research Unit at the University
of East Anglia. ―Climategate,‖ as
it has come to be known, revealed deliberate efforts by leading
scientific supporters of the IPCC, and of climate alarmism more generally, to hide flaws in their
evidence and analysis, keep ―skeptics‖ from appearing in peer-reviewed journals, and avoid
sharing their data with colleagues seeking to replicate their results (Bell, 2011; Sussman, 2010; Montford, 2010).
The emails reveal that important data underlying climate policy are missing or have been manipulated.
In February 2010, the BBC‘s environment analyst Roger Harrabin posed a series of written questions to Philip D. Jones,
director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia and the person
responsible for maintaining the IPCC‘s all important climate temperature records (BBC, 2010). Jones
appeared to back away from many of the foundational positions of the IPCC, admitting for example:
The rates of global warming from 1860–1880, 1910–1940 and 1975–1998, and 1975–2009 ―are
similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.‖
Your consensus arguments are no longer true
Bast, Karnick and Bast 2011 [Joseph L. President of the Heartland Institute, S.T. Research Director
The Heartland Institute, Diane Carol, Executive Editor The Heartland Institute, “Climate Change
Reconsidered 2011 Interim Report: Foreward” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
German scientists Dennis Bray
and Hans von Storch (2010) released their latest international survey of
climate scientists in 2010. The survey, which was actually conducted in 2007, consisted of 120 questions. Typical is
question 11a, which asked scientists to rank ―data availability for climate change analysis‖ on a scale from 1 (―very inadequate‖) to 7
(―very adequate‖). More respondents said ―very inadequate‖ (1 or 2) than ―very adequate‖ (6 or 7), with most responses ranging between
3 and 5. About 40 percent scored it a 3 or less. This single question and its answers imply that we need to know more about how climates
actually work before we can predict future climate conditions. The roughly bell-shaped distribution of answers is repeated for about a third
of the 54 questions addressing scientific issues (as opposed to opinions about the IPCC, where journalists get their information, personal
identification with environmental causes, etc.). Answers to the other questions about science were divided almost equally between
distributions that lean toward skepticism and those that lean toward alarmism. What this means is that for
approximately twothirds of the questions asked, scientific opinion is deeply divided, and in half of those cases, most
scientists disagree with positions that are at the foundation of the alarmist case. This survey certainly
shows no consensus on the science behind the global warming scare. The questions for which most
scientists give alarmist answers are those that ask for an opinion about the ―big picture,‖ such as
―How convinced are you that climate change poses a very serious and dangerous threat to humanity?‖ These questions ask about beliefs
and convictions, not discrete scientific facts or knowledge. When asked questions about narrower scientific matters, scientists seem quick to
admit their uncertainty. This survey, like previous ones done by Bray and von Storch, provided a fascinating look at cognitive dissonance in
the scientific community. When
asked, majorities of climate scientists say they do not believe the scientific
claims that underlie the theory and predictions of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change, yet
large majorities of those same scientists say they nevertheless believe in the theory and its
predictions. This cognitive dissonance gives rise to and sustains a popular mass delusion.
Author Indicts
There is plenty of money on the warming bad side too
Jaworowski 2004 [Professor Zbigniew M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc. is the chairman of the Scientific Council of
the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw. Winter “Solar Cycles, Not CO2, Determine
Climate” 21st Century Science Tech
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf]
In 1989, Stephen Schneider
advised: “To capture the public imagination . . . we have to . . . make simplified
dramatic statements, and little mention of any doubts one might have. . . . Each of us has to decide the right
balance between being effective and being honest.”3 This turned out to be an “effective” policy: Since 1997, each of
approximately 2,000 American climate scientists (only 60 of them with Ph.D. degrees) received an
average of $1 million annually for research;4, 5 on a world scale, the annual budget for climate research
runs to $5 billion.6 It is interesting that in the United States, most of this money goes toward discovering the change of global climate
and its causes, while Europeans apparently believe that man-made warming is already on, and spend
money mostly on studying the effects of warming.
Warming bad authors are a product of money and UN mandate
Jaworowski 2010 [Zbigniew, Ph. D., M.D., D.Sc., has researched the atmospheric pollution of glaciers
and CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere for many years, and is the author of numerous publications
on climate change. He serves as the Polish representative in the United Nations Scientific Committee on
the Effects of Atomic Radiation, and is a member of the Nongovernmental International Panel on
Climate Change (NIPCC) January 15, “‘Global Warming’: A Lie Aimed At Destroying Civilization” EIR
Science and Technology
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles_2010/Jaworowski_interview.pdf]
Indeed, these
researchers are guilty of brazen fraud, bringing us into a trap, which has dire
consequences. For many years they have been incredibly confident, ignoring any criticism of their
arguments. But they had the overwhelming support of the United Nations, and specifically the IPCC,
the United Nations group charged with examining the impact of human activities on climate change, which takes the lead in all this confusion.
The IPCC thesis is based on research from the CRU. Scientists from the University of East Anglia have
at their disposal enormous sums of money and political support. In practice, they simply obey the
dictates of the United Nations, which is promoting the global warming initiative, in order to suppress
the development of industry, which they claim is destroying the Biosphere of the Earth.
A2 Warming  Extinction
No catastrophic warming and its not human caused- past temperatures were hotter
and we didn’t cause them nor die from them
Idso, Carter and Singer 2011 [Craig D. Ph.D Chairman for the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change, Robert M. Ph.D Adjunct Research Fellow James Cook University, S. Fred Ph.D
President of Science and Environmental Policy Project, Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim
Report” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
Evidence of a Medieval Warm Period (MWP) approximately 1,000 years ago, when there was about
28 percent less CO2 in the atmosphere than there is currently, would show there is nothing unusual,
unnatural, or unprecedented about recent temperatures. Such evidence is now overwhelming.
New evidence not reported in NIPCC-1 finds the Medieval Warm Period occurred in North America,
Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Antarctica, and the Northern Hemisphere. Despite this evidence, Mann
et al. (2009) continue to understate the true level of warming during the MWP by cherryfrom locations around the world reveals a significant period of elevated air temperatures that immediately preceded the Little Ice Age, during
Recent reconstructions of climate history find
the human influence does not stand out relative to other, natural causes of climate change. While
global warming theory and models predict polar areas would warm most rapidly, the warming of Greenland was 33 percent greater in
magnitude in 1919–1932 than it was in 1994–
(2009) reported ―a decade-long decline (1998–2007) in globally averaged temperatures from the record heat of 1998‖ and noted U.S.
temperatures in 2008 ―not only declined from near-record warmth of prior years, but were in fact colder than the official 30-year reference
New research disputes IPCC‘s claim that it has
ferreted out all significant influences of the world‘s many and diverse urban heat islands from the
temperature databases they use to portray the supposedly unprecedented warming of the past few
decades.
climatology … and further were the coldest since at least 1996.‖
Current temperatures are historically low- your evidence is only a shapshot of a
broader trend
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
The claim: With respect to air temperature, the
climate-alarmist contention is multifaceted. It is claimed that over the past several
decades: (a) earth's temperature has risen to a level that is unprecedented over the past millennium or more, (b) the
world has been warming at a rate that is equally unprecedented, and (c) both of these dubious achievements have been made possible by the
similarly unprecedented magnitude of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, due to humanity's ever-increasing burning of fossil fuels such as coal, gas
and oil. With respect to the level of warmth the earth has recently attained, it is
important to see how it compares with
prior temperatures experienced by the planet, in order to determine the degree of
"unprecedentedness" of its current warmth. Taking a rather lengthy view of the subject, Petit et al. (1999)
found that peak temperatures experienced during the current interglacial, or Holocene, have been the
coldest of the last five interglacials, with the four interglacials that preceded the Holocene being, on average,
more than 2°C warmer (see figure at right). And in a more recent analysis of the subject, Sime et al. (2009)
suggested that the "maximum interglacial temperatures over the past 340,000 years were between
6.0°C and 10.0°C above present-day values." If anything, therefore, these findings suggest that temperatures of the
Holocene, or current
interglacial, were indeed unusual, but not unusually warm. Quite to the contrary, they have been unusually
cool.
Warming will not cause extinction- the Medieval Warm period was just as badmodels that say otherwise are wrong
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
Zooming in a little closer to the present, we
compare earth's modern temperatures with those of the past 1000
years, where the IPCC bases its claim for recent heretofore-unreached high temperatures on the
infamous "hockey stick" temperature history of Mann et al. (1998, 1999). There is a problem with this
history, however, in that reconstructed temperatures derived from a variety of proxy data (which make up
the bulk of the temperature history) are replaced near its end with the historical record of directly-measured
temperatures, resulting in an "apples vs. oranges" type of comparison, where the latter cannot be validly
compared with the former, because the two types of data are not derived in the same way and are, therefore, not perfectly compatible with
each other. In addition, subsequent
evidence indicated that the reconstructed temperatures of some regions
did not rise as dramatically as their directly-measured values did over the latter part of the 20th century (Cook et al.,
2004), demonstrating the importance of the problem and suggesting that if there had been any directlymeasured temperatures during the earlier part of the past millennium, they may also have been higher than the
reconstructed temperatures of that period. Therefore, due to this divergence problem, as D'Arrigo et al. (2008) have
described it, reconstructions based on tree-ring data from certain regions "cannot be used to directly compare past natural warm periods
(notably, the Medieval Warm Period) with recent 20th century warming, making it more difficult to state unequivocally that the recent
In a much improved method of temperature reconstruction based on tree-ring
analysis, Esper et al. (2002) employed an analytical technique that allows accurate long-term climatic
trends to be derived from individual tree-ring series that are of much shorter duration than the potential climatic
warming is unprecedented."
oscillation being studied; and they applied this technique to over 1200 individual tree-ring series derived from fourteen different locations
scattered across the extratropical region of the Northern Hemisphere. This work revealed, as they describe it, that "past
comparisons of
the Medieval Warm Period with the 20th-century warming back to the year 1000 have not included all
of the Medieval Warm Period and, perhaps, not even its warmest interval." And in further commenting on this
important finding, Briffa and Osborn (2002) revealed that "an early period of warmth in the late 10th and early 11th
centuries is more pronounced than in previous large-scale reconstructions." In addition, the Esper et al.
record made it abundantly clear that the peak warmth of the Medieval Warm Period was fully
equivalent to the warmth of the present. In another important study, von Storch et al. (2004) demonstrated that past
variations in real-world temperature "may have been at least a factor of two larger than indicated by
empirical reconstructions," and in commenting on their findings, Osborn and Briffa (2004) stated that "if the true natural variability
of Northern Hemisphere temperature is indeed greater than is currently accepted," which they appeared to suggest is likely the case, "the
extent to which recent warming can be viewed as 'unusual' would need to be reassessed." And more
recently, Mann et al. (2009)
have had to admit that even using the "apples vs. oranges" approach, the warmth over a large part of
the North Atlantic, Southern Greenland, the Eurasian Arctic, and parts of North America during the
Medieval Warm Period was "comparable to or exceeds that of the past one-to-two decades in some
regions."
A2 Warming Kills Biodiversity
Warming helps Biodiversity- gives plants and animals more places to go
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
With respect to plants and their amazing resilience, we begin with the study of Holzinger et al. (2008), who revisited
areas of
twelve mountains having summits located between elevations of 2844 and 3006 meters in the canton of Grisons,
Switzerland, where in 2004 they assembled complete inventories of vascular plant species that they
compared with similar inventories made by other researchers in 1885, 1898, 1912, 1913 and 1958,
following the ascension paths of the earlier investigators "as accurately as possible," where mean summer temperature
increased by at least 0.6°C between the time of the first study and their most recent one. This effort
revealed upward migration rates on the order of several meters per decade; and the data suggested that vascular plant
species richness had increased, and by 11% per decade, over the last 120 years on the mountain
summits (defined as the upper 15 meters of the mountains) in the alpine-nival ecotone, where not a single species had been
"pushed off the planet." What is more, this finding, in the words of the four researchers, "agrees well with other
investigations from the Alps, where similar changes have been detected (Grabherr et al., 1994; Pauli et al., 2001;
Camenisch, 2002; Walther, 2003; Walther et al., 2005)." Contemporaneously, Kelly and Goulden (2008) compared two vegetation surveys (one
made in 1977 and the other in 2006-2007) of the Deep Canyon Transect in Southern California's Santa Rosa Mountains, which spans several
plant communities and climates, rising from an elevation of 244 meters to 2560 meters over a distance of 16 km, while "climbing through
desert scrub, pinyon-juniper woodland, chaparral shrubland, and conifer forest." This work revealed that "the average elevation of the
dominant plant species rose by ~65 meters," when the 30-year mean temperature measured at seven stations around Deep Canyon rose by
0.41°C between 1947-1976 and 1977-2006, and when the same metric rose by 0.63°C in the climate regions straddled by the transect, and by
0.77°C at the two weather stations nearest Deep Canyon. In commenting on their observations, the two researchers said they implied that
"surprisingly
rapid shifts in the distribution of plants can be expected with climate change," and it
should be noted that those rapid shifts appear to be fully capable of coping with even the supposedly
unprecedented rate of warming climate alarmists have long claimed was characteristic of the last
decades of the 20th century. Also publishing in the same year, Le Roux and McGeoch (2008) examined patterns
of altitudinal range changes in the totality of the native vascular flora of sub-Antarctic Marion Island
(46°54'S, 37°45'E) in the southern Indian Ocean, which warmed by 1.2°C between 1965 and 2003. The work of these
South African researchers revealed that between 1966 and 2006, there was "a rapid expansion in altitudinal range,"
with species expanding their upper-elevation boundaries by an average of 70 meters. And because, as they
described it, "the observed upslope expansion was not matched by a similar change in lower range
boundaries," they emphasized the fact that "the flora of Marion Island has undergone range
expansion rather than a range shift." In addition, they appropriately noted that "the expansion of species
distributions along their cooler boundaries in response to rising temperatures appears to be a
consistent biological consequence of recent climate warming," citing references to several other
studies that have observed the same type of response. Another consequence of the stability of lower
range boundaries together with expanding upper range boundaries is that there is now a greater
overlapping of ranges, resulting in greater local species richness or Biodiversity everywhere up and down
various altitudinal transects of the island. And as a further consequence of this fact, le Roux and McGeoch indicated that "the
present species composition of communities at higher altitudes is not an analogue of past community composition at lower altitudes, but
rather constitutes a historically unique combination of species," or what we could truly call a "brave new world," which is significantly richer
than the one of the recent past.
Warming increases Biodiversity- allows animals to adapt to the other things we do
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
"Given
the strong positive correlation between diversity and temperature," the six scientists went on to say that
"local copepod diversity, especially in extra-tropical regions, is likely to increase with climate change as their
large-scale distributions respond to climate warming." This state of affairs is much the same as what
has typically been found on land for birds, butterflies and several other terrestrial lifeforms, as their ranges
expand and overlap in response to global warming. And with more territory thus available to them,
their "foothold" on the planet becomes ever stronger, fortifying them against forces (many of them humaninduced) that might otherwise lead to their extinction.
Warming solves Biodiversity- studies
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
Last of all (but happening some time ago), Pockley (2001) reported the results of a survey of the plants and animals on Australia's Heard Island,
a little piece of real estate located 4,000 kilometers southwest of Perth. Over the prior fifty years this sub-Antarctic island had experienced a
local warming of approximately 1°C that had resulted in a modest (12%) retreat of its glaciers; and hence, for
the first time in a
decade, scientists were attempting to document what this warming and melting had done to the
ecology of the island. Pockley began by stating the scientists' work had unearthed "dramatic evidence of
global warming's ecological impact," which obviously consisted of "rapid increases in flora and fauna."
He quoted Dana Bergstrom, an ecologist at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, as saying that areas that previously had been
poorly vegetated had become "lush with large expanses of plants." And he added that populations of
birds, fur seals and insects had also expanded rapidly. One of the real winners in this regard was the king penguin, which,
according to Pockley, had "exploded from only three breeding pairs in 1947 to 25,000." Eric Woehler of Australia's environment department
was listed as a source of other equally remarkable information, such as the Heard Island cormorant's comeback from "vulnerable" status to a
substantial 1,200 pairs, and fur seals emergence from "near extinction" to a population of 28,000 adults and 1,000 pups. Yes, the regional
warming experienced at Heard Island actually saved these threatened animal populations from the jaws of extinction. So it's time to celebrate!
Responsibility clearly cuts both ways; and if emitters of CO2 are being excoriated, and in advance, for
presumably promoting future hypothetical extinctions, they should surely be thanked, even in
retrospect, for preventing imminent real-world extinctions.
Warming helps Biodiversity- their evidence assumes that animals don’t try to adapt to
their changing environment
Idso, Carter and Singer 2011 [Craig D. Ph.D Chairman for the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change, Robert M. Ph.D Adjunct Research Fellow James Cook University, S. Fred Ph.D
President of Science and Environmental Policy Project, Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim
Report” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
The basis of the IPCC‘s forecasts of impending extinctions and range retractions is an assumption
that temperatures will rise so rapidly that many animal species will not be able to migrate poleward
in latitude or upward in elevation rapidly enough to avoid extinction. New research and
observational data contradict this assumption The shortcomings associated with models
predicting the impact of climate on distributions of species ―are so numerous and fundamental that
common ecological sense should caution us against putting much faith in relying on their findings for
further extrapolations‖
Empirical data on amphibians, birds, butterflies, other insects, lizards, mammals, and even
worms find global warming and its myriad ecological effects more often expand than contract animal
habitats, ranges, and populations. Many species thrive with warmer temperatures, and while
southern borders of ranges may remain stable, northern borders move poleward into previously
uninhabitable regions.
Crops Turn
CO2 is key to agricultural yields- key to preserve Biodiversity- the alternative is using
more land for crops- no other alternative is sufficient to solve
Idso and Idso 2011 Craig D. (founder and chairman of the board of the Center for the Study of
Carbon Dioxide and Global Change) Sherwood B. (president of the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change) February “Carbon Dioxide and Earth’s Future Pursuing the Prudent Path”
http://www.co2science.org/education/reports/prudentpath/prudentpath.pdf.
How much land can ten billion people spare for nature? This provocative question was posed by Waggoner (1995) in the title of an essay
designed to illuminate the dynamic tension that exists between the need for land to support the agricultural enterprises that sustain mankind
and the need for land to support the natural ecosystems that sustain all other creatures. As noted by Huang et al. (2002), human
populations "have encroached on almost all of the world's frontiers, leaving little new land that is
cultivatable." And in consequence of humanity's ongoing usurpation of this most basic of natural
resources, Raven (2002) has stated that "species-area relationships, taken worldwide in relation to
habitat destruction, lead to projections of the loss of fully two-thirds of all species on earth by the end
of this century," which problem has been noted and discussed by a number of other scientists as well, including Conway and Toenniessen
(1999), Wallace (2000), Pretty et al. (2003), Foley et al. (2005), Green et al. (2005), Khush (2005), Hanjra and Qureshi (2010), Lele (2010) and
If one were to pick the most significant problem currently facing the biosphere, this
would probably be it: a single species of life, Homo sapiens, is on course to completely annihilate fully
two-thirds of the ten million or so other species with which we share the planet within a mere ninety
years, simply by taking their land. Global warming, by comparison, pales in significance, as its impact
is nowhere near as severe, likely being nil or even positive. In addition, its root cause is highly debated; and actions to thwart it are
much more difficult, if not impossible, to both define and implement. Furthermore, what many people believe to be the cause
of global warming, i.e., anthropogenic CO2 emissions, may actually be a powerful force for preserving
land for nature. So what parts of the world are likely to be hardest hit by this human land-eating machine? Tilman et al. (2001) stated
Zhu et al. (2010)
that developed countries are expected to actually withdraw large areas of land from farming by the mid-point of this century, leaving
developing countries to shoulder essentially all of the increasingly-heavy burden of feeding the still-expanding human population. In addition,
they calculate that the loss of these countries' natural ecosystems to cropland and pasture will amount to about half of all potentially suitable
remaining land, which "could lead to the loss of about a third of remaining tropical and temperate forests, savannas, and grasslands," along
with the many unique species they support. What can be done to alleviate this bleak situation? In another analysis of the problem, Tilman et al.
(2002) introduced a few more facts before suggesting some solutions. They noted, for example, that by
2050 the human
population of the globe was projected to be 50% larger than it was in 2000, and that global grain
demand could well double, due to expected increases in per capita real income and dietary shifts
toward a higher proportion of meat. Hence, they but stated the obvious when they concluded that
"raising yields on existing farmland is essential for 'saving land for nature'." So how is it to be done? Tilman et al.
(2002) suggested a strategy that was built around three essential tasks: (1) increasing crop yield per unit of land area, (2) increasing crop yield
per unit of nutrients applied, and (3) increasing crop yield per unit of water used. With respect to the first of these requirements, Tilman et al.
noted that in
many parts of the world the historical rate of increase in crop yields was declining, as the
genetic ceiling for maximal yield potential was being approached. This observation, as they put it,
"highlights the need for efforts to steadily increase the yield potential ceiling ." With respect to the second
requirement, they noted that "without the use of synthetic fertilizers, world food production could not have increased at the rate it did [in the
past], and more natural ecosystems would have been converted to agriculture." Hence, they said that the ultimate solution "will require
significant increases in nutrient use efficiency, that is, in cereal production per unit of added nitrogen, phosphorus," and so forth. Finally, with
respect to the third requirement, Tilman et al. noted that "water
is regionally scarce," and that "many countries in a
band from China through India and Pakistan, and the Middle East to North Africa either currently or
will soon fail to have adequate water to maintain per capita food production from irrigated land."
Increasing crop water use efficiency, therefore, is also a must. Although the impending biological crisis and several
important elements of its potential solution are thus well defined, Tilman et al. (2001) reported that "even the best
available technologies, fully deployed, cannot prevent many of the forecasted problems." This was also the
conclusion of Idso and Idso (2000), who -- although
acknowledging that "expected advances in agricultural
technology and expertise will significantly increase the food production potential of many countries
and regions" -- noted that these advances "will not increase production fast enough to meet the
demands of the even faster-growing human population of the planet." Fortunately, we have a
powerful ally in the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content that can provide what we can't. Since
atmospheric CO2 is the basic "food" of essentially all plants, the more of it there is in the air, the
bigger and better they grow. For a nominal doubling of the air's CO2 concentration, for example, the productivity of earth's
herbaceous plants rises by 30 to 50% (Kimball, 1983; Idso and Idso, 1994), while the productivity of its woody plants rises by 50 to 75% or more
(Saxe et al. 1998; Idso and Kimball, 2001). Hence,
as the air's CO2 content continues to rise, so too will the land
use efficiency of the planet rise right along with it. In addition, atmospheric CO2 enrichment typically
increases plant nutrient use efficiency and plant water use efficiency. Thus, with respect to all three of
the major needs noted by Tilman et al. (2002), increases in the air's CO2 content pay huge dividends,
helping to increase agricultural output without the taking of new lands from nature. In light of these
observations, it would appear that the extinction of two-thirds of all species of plants and animals on the
face of the earth is essentially assured within the current century, if world agricultural output is not
dramatically increased. This unfathomable consequence will occur simply because (1) we will need
more land to produce what is required to sustain us and (2) in the absence of the full productivity
increase required, we will simply take that land from nature to keep ourselves alive. It is also the
conclusion of scientists who have studied this problem in depth that the needed increase in
agricultural productivity is not possible to achieve, even with anticipated improvements in technology
and expertise. With the help of the ongoing rise in the air's CO2 content, however, Idso and Idso (2000)
have shown that we should be able -- but just barely -- to meet our expanding food needs without "bringing
down the curtain" on the world of nature in the process.
Biodiversity loss causes extinction
Young 2010 (Dr Ruth Young, PhD specialising in coastal marine ecology. 2-9-2010, “Biodiversity: what it is and why it’s important”,
http://www.talkingnature.com/2010/02/Biodiversity/Biodiversity-what-and-why/)
Different species within ecosystems fill particular roles, they all have a function, they all have a niche. They interact with each
other and the physical environment to provide ecosystem services that are vital for our survival. For example plant species convert
carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere and energy from the sun into useful things such as food, medicines and timber. A bee pollinating a
flower (Image: ClearlyAmbiguous Flickr) Pollination carried out by insects such as bees enables the production of ⅓ of our food crops. Diverse
mangrove and coral reef ecosystems provide a wide variety of habitats that are essential for many fishery species. To make it simpler for
economists to comprehend the magnitude of services offered by Biodiversity, a team of researchers estimated their value – it amounted to
$US33 trillion per year. “By protecting Biodiversity we maintain ecosystem services” Certain
species play a “keystone” role in
of these species can result in the
collapse of an ecosystem and the subsequent removal of ecosystem services. The most well known example of
maintaining ecosystem services. Similar to the removal of a keystone from an arch, the removal
this occurred during the 19th century when sea otters were almost hunted to extinction by fur traders along the west coast of the USA. This led
to a population explosion in the sea otters’ main source of prey, sea urchins. Because the urchins graze on kelp their booming population
decimated the underwater kelp forests. This loss of habitat led to declines in local fish populations. Sea otters are a keystone species once
hunted for their fur (Image: Mike Baird) Eventually a treaty protecting sea otters allowed the numbers of otters to increase which inturn
controlled the urchin population, leading to the recovery of the kelp forests and fish stocks. In other cases, ecosystem services are maintained
by entire functional groups, such as apex predators (See Jeremy Hance’s post at Mongabay). During the last 35 years, over fishing of large shark
species along the US Atlantic coast has led to a population explosion of skates and rays. These skates and rays eat bay scallops and their out of
control population has led to the closure of a century long scallop fishery. These are just two examples demonstrating how Biodiversity can
maintain the services that ecosystems provide for us, such as fisheries. One could argue that to maintain ecosystem services we don’t need to
protect Biodiversity but rather, we only need to protect the species and functional groups that fill the keystone roles. However, there are a
couple of problems with this idea. First of all, for most ecosystems we don’t know which species are the keystones !
Ecosystems are so complex that we are still discovering which species play vital roles in maintaining them. In some cases its groups of species
not just one species that are vital for the ecosystem. Second, even if we did complete the enormous task of identifying and protecting all
keystone species, what back-up plan would we have if an unforseen event (e.g. pollution or disease) led to the demise of these ‘keystone’
species? Would there be another species to save the day and take over this role? Classifying some species as ‘keystone’ implies that the others
are not important. This may lead to the non-keystone species being considered ecologically worthless and subsequently over-exploited.
Sometimes we may not even know which species are likely to fill the keystone roles. An example of this was discovered on Australia’s Great
Barrier Reef. This research examined what would happen to a coral reef if it were over-fished. The “over-fishing” was simulated by fencing off
coral bommies thereby excluding and removing fish from them for three years. By the end of the experiment, the reefs had changed from a
coral to an algae dominated ecosystem – the coral became overgrown with algae. When the time came to remove the fences the researchers
expected herbivorous species of fish like the parrot fish (Scarus spp.) to eat the algae and enable the reef to switch back to a coral dominated
ecosystem. But, surprisingly, the shift back to coral was driven by a supposed ‘unimportant’ species – the bat fish (Platax pinnatus). The bat fish
was previously thought to feed on invertebrates – small crabs and shrimp, but when offered a big patch of algae it turned into a hungry
herbivore – a cow of the sea – grazing the algae in no time. So a fish previously thought to be ‘unimportant’ is actually a keystone species in the
recovery of coral reefs overgrown by algae! Who knows how many other species are out there with unknown ecosystem roles! In some cases
it’s easy to see who the keystone species are but in many ecosystems seemingly unimportant or redundant species are also capable of changing
niches and maintaining ecosystems. The
more Biodiversityiverse an ecosystem is, the more likely these species will be present
and the more resilient an ecosystem is to future impacts. Presently we’re only scratching the surface of understanding the
full importance of Biodiversity and how it helps maintain ecosystem function. The scope of this task is immense. In the meantime, a wise
insurance policy for maintaining ecosystem services would be to conserve Biodiversity. In
doing so, we increase the chance of
maintaining our ecosystem services in the event of future impacts such as disease, invasive species and of course, climate change.
This is the international year of Biodiversity – a time to recognize that Biodiversity makes our survival on this planet
possible and that our protection of Biodiversity maintains this service.
Resource conflicts are the most likely to escalate
Heinberg 2004 Richard Heinberg. (Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, Author of Eight Books and
widely regarded as one the world's foremost Peak Oil Educators). "Book Excerpt: Powerdown: options
and actions for a post-carbon world." 2004. Online.
Last One Standing – The path of competition for remaining resources. If the leadership of the US continues with current policies, the next
decades will be filled with war, economic crises, and environmental catastrophe. Resource depletion and population pressure are about to
catch up with us, and no one is prepared. The
political elites, especially in the US, are incapable of dealing with the situation. Their
preferred “solution” is simply to commandeer other nations’ resources, using military force. The
worst-case scenario would be the general destruction of human civilization and most of the ecological
life-support system of the planet. That is, of course, a breathtakingly alarming prospect. As such, we might prefer not to
contemplate it – except for the fact that considerable evidence attests to its likelihood. The notion that resource
scarcity often leads to increased competition is certainly well founded. This is general true among nonhuman animals, among which competition for diminishing resources typically leads to aggressive
behaviour. Iraq is actually the nexus of several different kinds of conflict – between consuming nations (e.g.,
France and the US); between western industrial nations and “terrorist” groups; and – most obviously – between a powerful
consuming nation and a weaker, troublesome, producing nation. Politicians may find it easier to persuade
their constituents to fight a common enemy than to conserve and share. War is always grim, but as
resources become more scarce and valuable, as societies become more centralized and therefore
more vulnerable, and as weaponry becomes more sophisticated and widely dispersed, warfare could
become even more destructive that the case during the past century.
Ice Age Turn
Fast Ice age is coming and causes extinction- way worse than warming
Jaworowski 2004 [Professor Zbigniew M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc. is the chairman of the Scientific Council of
the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Warsaw. Winter “Solar Cycles, Not CO2, Determine
Climate” 21st Century Science Tech
http://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/Articles%202004/Winter2003-4/global_warming.pdf]
The climate is constantly changing. Alternate cycles of long cold periods and much shorter interglacial warm periods occur with some
regularity. The typical length of climatic cycles in the last 2 million years was about 100,000 years, divided into 90,000 years for Ice Age periods
and 10,000 years for the warm, interglacial ones. Within a given cycle, the difference in temperature between the cold and warm phases
The present warm phase is probably drawing to an end—the average duration of such a
phase has already been exceeded by 500 years. Transition periods between cold and warm climate
phases are dramatically short: They last for only 50, 20, or even 1 to 2 years, and they appear with virtually no
warning. It is difficult to predict the advent of the new Ice Age—the time when continental glaciers will start to cover Scandinavia, Central
equals 3°C to 7°C.
and Northern Europe, Asia, Canada, the United States, Chile, and Argentina with an ice layer hundreds and thou- sands of meters thick; when
mountain glaciers in the Himalayas, Andes, and Alps, in Africa and Indonesia, once again will descend into the valleys. Some climatologists
What fate awaits the Baltic Sea, the lakes, the forests, animals, cities, nations, and
the whole infrastructure of modern civilization? They will be swept away by the advancing ice and
then covered by moraine hills. This disaster will be incomparably more calamitous than all the
doomsday prophecies of the proponents of the man-made global warming hypothesis. Similarly, as the study of
claim that this will happen in 50 to 150 years.53, 54
Friis-Christensen and Lassen50 shows, observations in Russia established a very high correlation between the average power of the solar
activity cycles (of 10 years to 11.5 years duration) and the surface air temperature, and “leave little room for anthropogenic impact on the
Earth’s climate.”55 Bashkirtsev and Mashnich, Russian physicists from the Institute of Solar-Terrestrial Physics in Irkutsk, found that between
1882 and 2000, the temperature response of the atmospheric air lagged behind the sunspot cycles by approximately 3 years in Irkutsk, and by
2 years over the entire globe.56 They found that the lowest temperatures in the early 1900s corresponded to the lowest solar activity, and
that other temperature variations, until the end of the century, followed the fluctuations of solar activity. The current sunspot cycle is weaker
than the preceding cycles, and the next two cycles will be even weaker. Bashkirtsev and Mishnich expect that the minimum of the secular
cycle of solar activity will occur between 2021 and 2026, which will result in the minimum global temperature of the surface air. The shift from
warm to cool climate might have already started. The average annual air temperature in Irkutsk, which correlates well with the average annual
global temperature of the surface air, reached its maximum of +2.3°C in 1997, and then began to drop to +1.2°C in 1998, to +0.7°C in 1999,
and to +0.4°C in 2000. This prediction is in agreement with major changes observed currently in biota of Pacific Ocean, associated with an
The approaching new Ice Age poses a real challenge for
mankind, much greater than all the other challenges in history. Before it comes—let’s enjoy the warming, this benign
gift from nature, and let’s vigorously investigate the physics of clouds. F. Hoyle and C. Wickramasinghe58 stated recently that “without
some artificial means of giving positive feedback to the climate . . . an eventual drift into Ice Age
conditions appears inevitable.” These conditions “would render a large fraction of the world’s major
food-growing areas inoperable, and so would inevitably lead to the extinction of most of the present
human population.” According to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, “those who have engaged in uncritical
scaremongering over an enhanced greenhouse effect raising the Earth’s temperature by a degree or
two should be seen as both misguided and dangerous,” for the problem of the present “is of a drift
back into an Ice Age, not away from an Ice Age.”
oscillating climate cycle of about 50 years’ periodicity.57
A2 Warming  Ice Age
Warming doesn’t cause ice age
Idso, Carter and Singer 2011 [Craig D. Ph.D Chairman for the Center for the Study of Carbon
Dioxide and Global Change, Robert M. Ph.D Adjunct Research Fellow James Cook University, S. Fred Ph.D
President of Science and Environmental Policy Project, Climate Change Reconsidered 2011 Interim
Report” Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
http://nipccreport.org/reports/2011/pdf/2011NIPCCinterimreport.pdf
In setting out to assess this argument, Baehr
et al. (2007) investigated how quickly changes in the North
Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (MOC) could be detected by projecting simulated
observations onto a time-independent spatial pattern of natural variability, which was derived by regressing
the zonal density gradient along 26°N against the strength of the MOC at 26°N within a model-based control climate simulation, which
pattern was compared against observed anomalies found between the 1957 and 2004 hydrographic occupations of this latitudinal section.
Looking to the future, this exercise revealed that Atlantic MOC changes could likely be detected with 95 percent reliability after about 30
years, using continuous observations of zonal density gradients that can be obtained from a recently deployed monitoring array. Looking to
the past, they
report, ―for the five hydrographic occupations of the 26°N transect, none of the
analyzed depth ranges shows a significant trend between 1957 and 2004, implying that there was
no MOC trend over the past 50 years.‖ The finding is significant because to this point in time, over
which the IPCC claims the Earth has warmed at a rate and to a level of warmth that is
unprecedented over the past two millennia, there has been no observable change in the rate of the
North Atlantic MOC, suggesting either the IPCC is significantly in error in its characterization of Earth‘s current level of warmth
or the North Atlantic MOC is not nearly as sensitive to global warming as many climate models
employed by the IPCC have suggested it is. Since Baehr et al. (2007) have used real-world
hydrographic transect data to demonstrate ―there was no MOC trend over the past 50 years,‖ we
will probably have more time to prepare for any undesirable consequences of a drastic decline in
the Atlantic MOC than did the unfortunate folks in the non-award-winning film The Day After
Tomorrow.
A2 No Ice Age Now
Newest satellite data says Ice Age is coming
Rose 2012 [David, The Daily Mail, January 29, “Forget global warming - it's Cycle 25 we need to worry
about (and if NASA scientists are right the Thames will be freezing over again)”
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2093264/Forget-global-warming--Cycle-25-need-worryNASA-scientists-right-Thames-freezing-again.html]
The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the
release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years. The
figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th
Century. Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without
fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in
1997.