at: climate change – wrong/inev

Impact

at: climate change – wrong/inev

No impact or it’s inevitable

Craig, Masters of Public Administration from the State University of New York at Albany, Executive Director and co-founder of Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), “Global Climate Planning: Down But Not Out (Doha’s ‘bitter defeat’ does not mean it’s over)” http://www.masterresource.org/2012/12/doha-defeat-but-not-over/

Only 37 of 194 nations signed the treaty that replaces the Kyoto Protocol, which expires December 31 – and several countries may withdraw their consent. That means the new agreement is legally non-binding and covers only at best 15% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

While the European Union joined in and remains committed to “carbon trading” (making former UNFCC chair Yvo DeBoer happy in his new role as a carbon trader, á la Al Gore), the United States, Brazil, Russia, India, China, Canada, Japan and other major emitters refused to sign, and the new treaty sets no binding emission limits. Atmospheric CO2 levels will thus continue to climb – and climate campaigners will remain distraught over allegedly disastrous weather events, imminent habitat devastation, species extinctions, injustice for the world’s poor, and the disappearance of island nations beneath the waves.

For those who say computer models are meaningless, climate change and weather extremes are natural, and economic growth should be sustained to lift more billions out of poverty – Doha represents a partial success. Few nations signed the treaty, even the Obama Administration did not commit to it, the document is not binding, and countless billions of dollars will be available for continued economic development and disaster relief – instead of being squandered on fruitless attempts to control Earth’s infinitely complex climate and weather.

Even Christina Figueres, DeBoer’s successor at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, could proclaim victory. She wants to keep the planet’s temperature from rising more than the internationally agreed maximum of two degrees Celsius. That goal has arguably been reached already. There has been no detectable increase in average global temperatures for 16 years.

In fact, while last summer was hot and dry in much of the continental USA, nearing records set during the Dust Bowl years of the 1930s, it was a very cold summer in Alaska and parts of Europe. Winter 2012 was snowy and nasty in Central Europe and very cold in South Africa and South America. Britain just had its coldest autumn in nineteen years, Himalayan glaciers are growing, interior Greenland is not melting, summer Antarctic sea ice is near record extent, and seas are not rising any faster.

All this helps explain why climate alarmists keep changing their rhetoric: from global cooling to global warming, to climate change to climate disruption, and now to extreme weather. Indeed, they now try to link every unusual weather event to CO2 (and now methane, or natural gas, the fuel produced through hydraulic fracturing or fracking). However, as Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has noted, when the Atlantic hurricane season starts next June 1, it will have been 2,777 days since a category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane made landfall along the U.S. coast – the longest such period since 1900. 2012 also marked the quietest U.S. tornado season on record; only twelve tornadoes touched down in the United States in July 2012.

Of course, there are always disasters and human tragedies at the hands of a not-always-benevolent Mother Nature. Hardly a year has ever gone by without many such weather events somewhere on Planet Earth.

This year, however, climate alarmists have blamed virtually all of them on humans and CO2 emissions – from Sandy in the USA to 2011 and 2012 typhoons in the Philippines, and droughts in Africa. It’s easy to see why. As a Greenpeace director cogently explained, “The key issue is money” – as in the redistribution of wealth from rich, formerly rich and soon-to-be formerly rich nations to still poor countries. The other issue is power and control: as in who gets to make energy, economic, and human health and welfare decisions: individuals, families, communities and nations – or eco-activists and UN bureaucrats.

That brings us to the in-between: the uncharted waters separating “bitter failure” and “partial success.”

As climate activists and media “journalists” have observed, there is no legally binding agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The world’s two biggest CO2 emitters, China and the United States, did not sign. What was agreed to contains only vague promises that, “beginning in 2020, at least $100 billion a year will flow from public, private and other sources” to poor countries, supposedly to help them cope with the “devastating effects” of climate change and “extreme weather.” There is no agreement as to where that $1 trillion per decade will come from, or how much will be available annually between now and 2020, especially if the global economic downturn continues.

But don’t believe the vague promises, bitter failure, bitterly disappointed rhetoric. The climate alarmists got a lot of what they came for, they gave up little or nothing, they’ll be back for more, and in the meantime they will still get billions of dollars annually from taxpayers – to conduct climate change causation, mitigation, adaptation and compensation “research,” issue “balanced reports,” and attend many more conferences (all expenses paid) where virtually no one except alarmists is allowed to speak or participate in official “discussions” and “negotiations.”

More than 7,000 environmental NGO activists attended the Doha confab – and next time around they won’t forget who sent them, now that Jonathan Pershing, chief U.S. negotiator for climate change at Doha, has pointedly reminded them who paid for their presence in Qatar. They and the official delegates will be there for specific objectives: more money, more power, more control.

In Doha, they reached several benchmarks that they had achieved during previous COP events. Most important, they enshrined in the treaty the concept of “loss and damage” supposedly resulting from “manmade climate change” – and secured pledges from “rich” nations that poor countries would receive billions of dollars per year in “aid” to repair any “loss and damage,” as part of a “climate compensation mechanism.” They also incorporated “principles” of “equity” and “justice” and “common but differentiated responsibilities”– to distinguish between nations that “caused” climate change and “extreme weather events” and countries that presumably did not or are “especially vulnerable.”

It is true that words like “compensation,” “fault” and “liability” were excised from the final treaty language – and that it will be all but impossible to determine how much, if any, loss and damage from a tornado, hurricane, typhoon, flood or drought was due to “manmade climate change” versus how much from natural climate change and natural, normal extreme weather events. Who will pay how much, from existing aid programs versus new programs, and through what UN or other conduits, will likewise have to be decided at one of the presumably many future Conferences Of Parties to the new climate agreement.

“This is just the beginning of the process,” a Greenpeace activist helpfully explained.

at: biodiversity – humans resilient

Fossil fuels and tech has made humans resilient to loss of ecosystems

No impact four reasons why humans have continued to adapt through ecological degradation.

Raudsepp-Hearne et alt 10’

(Ciara Raudsepp-Hearne recently completed her PhD in the Department of Geography, Elena M. Bennett is an assistant professor in the Department of Natural Resource Science, Graham K. MacDonald is a doctoral student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences, and Laura Pfeifer is a master's student in the Department of Natural Resource Sciences and the McGill School of Environment Maria Tengö was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Geography at McGill University when this manuscript was prepared and is currently a researcher at the Department of Systems Ecology and the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Untangling the Environmentalist's Paradox: Why Is Human Well-being Increasing as Ecosystem Services Degrade? BioScience , Vol. 60, No. 8 (September 2010), pp. 576-589 http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/bio.2010.60.8.4)

Environmentalists have argued that ecological degradation will lead to declines in the well-being of people dependent on ecosystem services. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment paradoxically found that human well-being has increased despite large global declines in most ecosystem services. We assess four explanations of these divergent trends: (1) We have measured well-being incorrectly; (2) well-being is dependent on food services, which are increasing, and not on other services that are declining; (3) technology has decoupled well-being from nature; (4) time lags may lead to future declines in well-being. Our findings discount the first hypothesis, but elements of the remaining three appear plausible. Although ecologists have convincingly documented ecological decline, science does not adequately understand the implications of this decline for human well-being. Untangling how human well-being has increased as ecosystem conditions decline is critical to guiding future management of ecosystem services; we propose four research areas to help achieve this goal.

at: marine biod – resilient

Marine ecosystems are resilient – different from the organisms that died out in the past

Dupont 6/27

(Sam Dupont and Hans Portner, Senior post–doctoral fellow – Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences – Kristineberg and coordinator of the Ocean Acidification Infrastructure Facility at Kristineberg, Nature – International Journal of Science, “Marine science: Get ready for ocean acidification,” http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v498/n7455/full/498429a.html, date accessed 6/30, Woojae)

Surprising resilience? We have known for decades that ocean acidification threatens calcifying organisms such as corals, clams, mussels and brittlestars — some to the point of possible extinction within decades. It came as a surprise in the past few years that some calcifier species are resilient to acidification, such as the mussels that thrive in Kiel fjord in Germany despite a seasonal flow of CO2-rich waters1. Other organisms can be both vulnerable and resilient at different times in their life cycles, such as some phytoplankton, fish and sea urchins. Initially, female green sea urchins (Strongylocentrotus droebachiensis) that are exposed to acidification produce around one-fifth the number of eggs produced by urchins in current ocean pH conditions. But after 16 months, adults acclimatize and reproduce as normal.

Ext. marine biod resilient

Marine ecosystems are resilient – studies prove

Craig 12

(Robin Kundis Craig, 5/28/12, Journal, S.J. Quinney College of Law, University of Utah, “Marine Biodiversity, Climate Change, and Governance of the Oceans,” https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=66&ved=0CFgQFjAFODw&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mdpi.com%2F1424-2818%2F4%2F2%2F224%2Fpdf&ei=pNDNUcvyKsuM0QH94oC4Ag&usg=AFQjCNHM4RHKxFJdGdTC3GIRwvV2BykehQ&sig2=puYofPoZgckFm3pBqcQP1w&bvm=bv.48572450,d.dmQ&cad=rja, Woojae)

As the world copes with the climate change era, improved marine governance will be of ever-increasing importance if we are to maintain anything approaching broad and resilient marine biodiversity in the face of pervasive ecological, chemical, and physical changes to the ocean’s environments. Notably, there is already evidence of the ocean’s resilience, because “in enough cases to encourage conservation, the Census of Marine Life documented the recovery of some species”

Ecosystems are resilient adaptation solves

Magnus et al 2000

(Coral reef disturbance and resilience in a human-dominated environment Magnus Nyström Carl Folke Fredrik Moberg Dept of Systems Ecology, Stockholm University, S-106 91, Stockholm, Sweden Volume 15, Issue 10, 1 October 2000, Pages 413–417 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0169-5347(00)01948-0)

The concept of ecosystem resilience thus captures the ability to resist, reorganize and re-establish from disturbance, as well as maintaining a diversity of options for development and evolution15. This concept broadens the perspective from recovery at the site impacted by disturbance to include the sources of resilience of the surrounding areas that are required for self-organization and reorganization to sustain the reef in a coral-dominated stable state. Human impacts on ecosystem resilience

Modern reefs might always have possessed several features that favor multiple stable states11. However, studies from the Pleistocene coral reef fossil record suggest that reefs have shown remarkable persistence in their community structure for tens to hundreds of thousands of years, in spite of global environmental change and disturbance16. A unique feature of recent decades is that shifts from one stable state to another might have become more frequent and less reversible and that shifts are influenced, even driven, by human impact. A growing body of literature addresses phase shifts in coral reefs in relation to human activities

Coral reef recovery is inevitable even in the case of an impact

Nystro ̈m and Folke 2001 Department of Systems Ecology(Magnus Department of Systems Ecology and Carl Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics “Spatial Resilience of Coral Reefs” Ecosystems August 2001, Volume 4, Issue 5, pp 406-417 http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs10021-001-0019-y.pdf)

There is ample literature on coral reef recovery after disturbance, particularly at the level of individual reefs. Although recovery following disturbance can be delayed (for example, see Loya 1990; Wilkinson 1999; Karlson 1999), it has generally been assumed that recovery will eventually occur. The sources of reorganization and reestablishment of reef organ- isms and community interactions in the seascape have, to a lesser extent, been investigated. In the following section, we review spatial links in the seascape that support reef resilience and develop- ment following disturbance. Currents and RecruitmentReorganization of a coral reef is related to the de- gree of openness to its surrounding. Openness de- pends on whether the reef is located in a shallow or semi-enclosed basin, on the margin of a continental shelf, or in the open ocean (for example, atolls). Openness is supported, or discouraged, by the pre- vailing currents (Roberts 1997). The degree to which these currents link areas depends on their magnitude and direction, the distance between eco- systems, and the influence of primarily climatic dis- turbance regimes.

Marine ecosystems are resilient – past spills prove

Hunt – No date cited

(Alex Hunt, no date cited, the senior technical advisor to the International Tanker Owners Pollution Federation Limited, “Effects of Oil Spills,” http://kjpt.msa.gov.cn/ckfinder/userfiles/files/%E6%BA%A2%E6%B2%B9%E7%9A%84%E5%BD%B1%E5%93%8D.pdf, date accessed 6/28/13, Woojae)

Experience from past spills shows that:

Damages may be profound at the individual level

Populations are naturally resilient to acute impacts

Natural recovery processes are capable of repairing damage

Ecosystem structure & function is typically restored

Many impacts are documented in the scientific literature

Not all effects of spills are completely understood

Overall scale and duration of impact can usually be deduced

Polarization of the scientific community is common & balanced views are rare

Does significant damage occur?... sometimes yes, sometimes no… depends on many factors

Measures of impact

Breeding success

Productivity

Biodiversity

Overall function

Marine ecosystems are able to cope with severe natural perturbations: tropical storms, tsunamis, el Niño events

Widespread mortalities occur, but systems are able recover

at: hotspot

Their evidence is wrong no way to prove accurate loss of species in hotspots

Brummitt and Lughadha 2003 (Neil Brummitt. Researcher in Botanical Diversity Eimear Nic Lughadha is Head of Science (Operations) at the Royal Botanic Gardens Biodiversity: Where's Hot and Where's Not Volume 17, Issue 5, pages 1442–1448, October 2003 http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1046/j.1523-1739.2003.02344.x/full)

Despite the intuitive appeal of the concept, the selection of hotspots has been criticized in general on several grounds. ( 1 ) Reliable quantitative data are generally only available for the most conspicuous and popular groups of organisms ( vascular plants, vertebrates ), which are by no means the most speciose (  Margules et al. 1994 ), and it is generally assumed rather than proven that areas of diversity for one group will be concordant with areas of diversity of unsampled groups (  Prendergast et al. 1993 ). ( 2 ) Without a measure of complementarity between hotspots there is no way of knowing how many species are conserved twice in adjacent hotspots (  Margules & Pressey 2000 ). ( 3 ) Simply conserving maximum species numbers is not the same as conserving maximum species diversity, because distantly related taxa are worth more in terms of phylogenetic diversity than are numerous closely related species (  Vane-Wright et al. 1991; Williams & Humphries 1994 ). ( 4 ) The huge size of some hotspots makes effective conservation action impractical, because it must involve the coordination of many national governments; designation of such areas as the Mediterranean Basin ( 2,362,000 km² ) or Indo-Burma ( 2,060,000 km² ) as biodiversity hotspots can hardly be said to represent “tight targeting of conservation efforts.” Although no one is taking issue with the assertion that small areas of the world are exceptionally rich biologically, all of the above criticisms may be leveled at the work of Mittermeier et al. ( 1999 )  and Myers et al. ( 2000 ) . ( Mace et al. 2000; Humphries 2001 ).

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