Endi 2011 / Daniel/Jason/Kevin/Marc/MiHe/Parth/Simrun
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- A2: JPS Not Feasible
Impacts – WarmingWarming causes extinction National Geographic 7-12-2004 (“ By 2050 Warming to Doom Million species, study says” http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_extinction_2.html) jc By 2050, rising temperatures exacerbated by human-induced belches of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases could send more than a million of Earth's land-dwelling plants and animals down the road to extinction, according to a recent study. "Climate change now represents at least as great a threat to the number of species surviving on Earth as habitat-destruction and modification," said Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. Thomas is the lead author of the study published earlier this year in the science journal Nature. His co-authors included 18 scientists from around the world, making this the largest collaboration of its type. Townsend Peterson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Kansas in Lawrence and one of the study's co-authors, said the paper allows scientists for the first time to "get a grip" on the impact of climate change as far as natural systems are concerned. "A lot of us are in this to start to get a handle on what we are talking about," he said. "When we talk about the difference between half a percent and one percent of carbon dioxide emissions what does that mean?" The researchers worked independently in six biodiversity-rich regions around the world, from Australia to South Africa, plugging field data on species distribution and regional climate into computer models that simulated the ways species' ranges are expected to move in response to temperature and climate changes. "We later met and decided to pool results to produce a more globally relevant look at the issue," said Lee Hannah, a climate change biologist with Conservation International's Center for Applied Biodiversity Science in Washington, D.C. Study Results According to the researchers' collective results, the predicted range of climate change by 2050 will place 15 to 35 percent of the 1,103 species studied at risk of extinction. The numbers are expected to hold up when extrapolated globally, potentially dooming more than a million species. "These are first-pass estimates, but they put the problem in the right ballpark … I expect more detailed studies to refine these numbers and to add data for additional regions, but not to change the general import of these findings," said Hannah. Writing in an accompanying commentary to the study in Nature, J. Alan Pounds of the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, and Robert Puschendorf, a biologist at the University of Costa Rica, say these estimates "might be optimistic." As global warming interacts with other factors such as habitat-destruction, invasive species, and the build up of carbon dioxide in the landscape, the risk of extinction increases even further, they say. In agreement with the study authors, Pounds and Puschendorf say taking immediate steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is imperative to constrain global warming to the minimum predicted levels and thus prevent many of the extinctions from occurring. "The threat to life on Earth is not just a problem for the future. It is part of the here and now," they write. Climate Scenarios The researchers based their study on minimum, mid-range, and maximum future climate scenarios based on information released by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001. According to the IPCC, temperatures are expected to rise from somewhere between 1.5 and more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 and more than 2 degrees Celsius) by the year 2050. "Few climate scientists around the world think that 2050 temperatures will fall outside those bounds," said Thomas. "In some respects, we have been conservative because almost all future climate projections expect more warming and hence more extinction between 2050 and 2100." In addition, the researchers accounted for the ability of species to disperse or successfully move to a new area, thus preventing climate change-induced extinction. They used two alternatives: one where species couldn't move at all, the other assuming unlimited abilities for movement. "We are trying to bracket the truth," said Peterson. "If you bracket the truth and look at the two endpoints and they give the same general message, then you can start to believe it." Outside of the small group of researchers working directly on the impacts of climate change to species diversity, "the numbers will come as a huge shock," said Thomas. A2: JPS Not FeasibleJPSS is feasible Clark 6-28-10 (Stephen staff writer at spaceflightnow.com http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n1006/28jpss/)jc NASA plans to purchase a clone of a stopgap weather satellite to be the first member of a new civilian fleet of environmental platforms, but the future of U.S. climate-monitoring spacecraft hinges on congressional approval of a White House budget proposal to pay for the new program, a government official said Monday. The new satellite will help replace a troubled program suspended by the Obama administration in February after schedule and budget woes. Scheduled to launch in 2014, the new spacecraft will be identical to the NPOESS Preparatory Project platform under construction at Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp. "NASA will initiate the procurement and has indicated in a synopsis its intent to go with a sole source acquisition from Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corp.," said Mary Kicza, assistant administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's satellite and information service. The craft will be the pioneer of the Joint Polar Satellite System, a fleet of weather satellites conceived in February to replace the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environment Satellite System, or NPOESS, which would have joined civil and military weather satellites into one program. NPOESS was canned by the White House after falling behind schedule and reaching a projected program life-cycle cost of more than $15 billion. The program's tri-agency partnership, consisting of NOAA, NASA and the U.S. Air Force, was criticized by independent review boards. NOAA officials are confident the JPSS program can get off the ground by the time the first NPOESS platform would have launched, and at a fraction of the cost. Set Goals make the JPSS feasible LeMieux - 2-24-10(“CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN THE NASA FISCAL YEAR 2011 BUDGET PROPOSAL” http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CHRG-111shrg64486/html/CHRG-111shrg64486.htm)jc You know, technology develops out of need. As all of you have said, we do have to know where we're going. We want to go to Mars. We can't get there right now, because we don't have the technology to do it. We're sort of in the same conundrum that I and my panel members were with Hubble. Senator LeMieux. Respectfully, when President Kennedy challenged us to go to the Moon, we didn't have the technology, in that year, to go to the Moon. When we decided that we needed to build an atomic bomb, we didn't have the technology when we made that decision, but we pushed forward because we had a goal. And if we don't have a goal to go there by a specific time, it seems to me that the drive, both funding and purposefully, will be lacking. So, I think that's the concern that the folks have here on this committee and others. Directory: file -> view view -> Western Europe after wwii view -> Author study: paul fleischman view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy view -> Table of Contents Lesson # view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad Download 0.51 Mb. Share with your friends:
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