Globalization has eradicated great power war, dedev reverses
Growth Good – Biodiversity
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- Kuznet’s curve applies to biodiversity
- Growth key to biodiversity—multiple indicators prove
- Their ev assumes 20 th century dynamics—21 st century improvements are helping biodiversity
- Growth Good – Deforestation
- UQ – Environment Improving / Pollution Down
- Tons of environmental improvements now --- not on the brink of collapse
- Environmental improvements now – their evidence ignores long term trends
- The status quo is structurally improving
- Tech solves --- their evidence is media alarmism
- UQ – Biodiversity Improving
- Species extinctions are slowing—not on the brink
- Biodiversity Impact Defense
- Biodiversity is resilient and inevitable
Growth Good – BiodiversityGrowth key to biodiversity restoration—multiple trends proveThe Economist, ’13 (9/14, “The effects of growth: the long view” special report on biodiversity, http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21585100-contrary-popular-belief-economic-growth-may-be-good-biodiversity-long-view, jj) Contrary to popular belief, economic growth may be good for biodiversity COMPARISONS BETWEEN ADJOINING countries separated by politics or economics can be instructive. North Korea’s forests have been shrinking by around 2% a year for 20 years; South Korea’s are stable. Satellite pictures of the island of Hispaniola in the Antilles show that the western side (Haiti, with a GDP per person of $771 a year) is barren, whereas the eastern side (Dominican Republic, GDP per person $5,736) still has plenty of dense forest. Economic growth is widely believed to damage species other than Kuznet’s curve applies to biodiversityThe Economist, ’13 (9/14, “Biodiversity: Hang On” special report on biodiversity, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21586346-more-growth-not-less-best-hope-averting-sixth-great-extinction-hang, jj) *gender modified Over the past few centuries Growth key to biodiversity—multiple indicators proveDuncan, 13 (Emma Duncan is the Deputy Editor of The Economist, 9/14/13, The Economist, “All creatures great and small” http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21585091-biodiversity-once-preoccupation-scientists-and-greens-has-become-mainstream, jj) *gender modified The change in attitudes has had political consequences. In recent decades, first in the rich world and then increasingly elsewhere, laws to ban the killing of and trade in endangered creatures and to protect areas rich in biodiversity have been enacted. Governments are buying up important natural sites, restoring damaged ecosystems, setting up captive breeding programmes for critically endangered species and so on. Green NGOs and concerned individuals have also been helpful. Endangered species have benefited from some of the concomitants of growth, too. Improved sanitation has made the planet healthier, as has regulation of pesticides. Cleaner air is better for biodiversity. As countries get richer, they tend to become more peaceful and better governed and their population growth slows down. Technological progress has improved life for other species, making conservation efforts more effective. Although these successes can in part be credited to the environmentalist movement, greens tend not to boast of them for fear of damaging their cause. By walking the planet with a sandwich-board predicting impending doom, they have helped reduce the chances of an ecological calamity. If people believe catastrophe has receded, they may stop making an effort to avert it. And they are right that the future for many species is by no means assured. Although things are improving in most of the rich world, in most of the emerging world—which is where the greatest number of species live—they are still deteriorating. Mass extinction remains a real danger. Whether or not it actually comes about depends in part on what happens to the climate, which remains the subject of much guesswork. This newspaper has written about climate at length and this special report will not go over that ground again, except to say that if warming turns out to be at the upper end of the scale envisaged by the International Panel on Climate Change, the consequences for biodiversity—as well as for people—will be calamitous. If it remains at the lower end of the scale—as slower temperature increases over the past decade suggest it may—then most species will not be adversely affected. Instead, this special report will focus on the relationship between humanity and the rest of the planet’s species in recent years. It will argue that thanks to a combination of environmental activism and economic growth the outlook for other species has improved, and that if growth continues, governments do more to regulate it and greens embrace technological progress, there is a decent chance of *[hu]man[ity] undoing the damage Their ev assumes 20th century dynamics—21st century improvements are helping biodiversityThe Economist, 9/14/13 (“Public attitudes: What’s the use?” http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21585093-reasons-preserving-biodiversity-are-becoming-more-widely-understood-whats-use, jj) In the 20th century it was certainly true that economic growth was destroying nature at an unprecedented rate. But the prosperity that the growth created also gave people more freedom to think about things beyond their material welfare. Those well supplied with the necessities of life can use their resources on luxuries, be they handbags or bird-watching. Prosperity also gave people more leisure, and enjoying nature is one of humanity’s most popular pastimes. Some 71m Americans say they watch, feed or photograph wildlife in their spare time, more than play computer games, and 34m are hunters or anglers who also, in their own way, enjoy wildlife. George MacKerron and Susana Mourato from University College London and the London School of Economics recently looked at the relationship between happiness and nature. They found that people are happier in all outdoor environments (except in fog or rain) than they are indoors. What makes them happiest is taking exercise or bird-watching by the sea or on a mountain with someone they like. Those seeking to cheer themselves up should avoid bare inland areas, suburbia and children. The second reason why humanity has started paying more attention to nature has nothing to do with fun or morality. It is that as people have messed up bits of the environment, they have come to understand the complexity of ecosystems as well as their importance for human welfare. Two of the sharpest illustrations of this come from China’s Great Leap Forward. In 1958 the Chinese government announced that sparrows were to be targeted as part of the “Four Pests” campaign because they ate grain, offering rewards for killing them. People obediently tore down the birds’ nests, caught them in nets and banged saucepans to stop them landing anywhere. Sparrow numbers collapsed. But the birds, it turned out, ate insects that ate crops, and their slaughter thus contributed to the great famine of 1960 that killed 20m people. At the time China was also stepping up its timber production, increasing the harvest from 20m cubic metres a year in the 1950s to 63m cubic metres in the 1990s. The area covered by forest shrank by more than a third over the period. The resulting soil erosion gummed up the Yangzi River. In 1998 it flooded, killing 3,600 people and doing around $30 billion-worth of damage. The story of Newfoundland’s cod fishery offers a similar tale of self-defeating destructiveness, this time from the capitalist world. Around 1600 English fisherman reported that the cod off Newfoundland were “so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them”. Factory fishing started in the 1950s, and the catch peaked in 1968 at 810,000 tonnes. By 1992, when cod biomass was reckoned to have fallen to 1% of its level before factory fishing started, the government declared a moratorium, but the cod fishery never recovered. The reasons for the decline in populations of pollinators such as bees are less clear. According to a United Nations report, the number of honey-producing bee colonies in America more than halved between 1950 and 2007; European populations have also dropped. Pesticides, habitat loss or the spread of disease through globalisation may be to blame—nobody is sure. Whatever the explanation, the costs are potentially huge. Wild and domesticated bees as well as other insects such as hoverflies are especially important in the production of fruit, vegetables and oilseeds. According to an estimate in 2007, the global value of pollinators to farmers is €153 billion. The potential of biodiversity for the pharmaceuticals industry is not easily quantified but hugely important. Around half of new drugs are derived from natural products. That should not be surprising: as Thomas Lovejoy, who holds the biodiversity chair at the Heinz Centre in Washington, points out, the genome of every living creature is a unique solution to a unique set of problems. So it seems likely that out there in the rainforest genomes exist that would be useful to humanity, if only humanity knew about them before it wiped them out. The gastric brooding frog, for instance, appeared to scientists to hold great promise. This strange creature, endemic to Australia, gestated its offspring in its stomach. That suggested it could turn off production of stomach acids, which would be useful for people with stomach ulcers or recovering from stomach surgery. Research on the frog started in the 1980s, but the only two species of gastric brooding frog went extinct shortly afterwards. A scientist at the University of New South Wales is currently trying to resurrect the frog from surviving DNA. But the services that other species perform for mankind do not stop there. Just as scientists are discovering that the human body is a huge colony of different species, with a large variety of bacteria inside every one of them, so they are finding out that the ecosystem of the soil—bacteria, fungi, protozoa, nematodes, microarthropods—is even more extraordinarily diverse. In a gram of soil there may be as many as a million species of bacteria. Their interactions with the food we eat and the air we breathe are complex and crucial to the production and maintenance of life. The combination of their importance and our ignorance suggests that humans would be wise to show humility in their dealings with other species, even when they are invisible to the naked eye. All these factors have led to a big shift in attitudes towards nature. One of its manifestations has been a boom in green NGOs. Many trace their origins a long way back: Britain’s RSPB, for example, was founded in 1889 to campaign against women using exotic feathers in their hats, and the Sierra Club was established in 1892 to support Yosemite National Park, founded two years earlier. But the 1960s were a particularly fertile period. The World Wildlife Fund (now the Worldwide Fund for Nature) was set up in 1961, the Environmental Defence Fund in 1967, Friends of the Earth in 1969, and Greenpeace came together in the late 1960s. This was also the period when membership of some of the older organisations took off. The NGOs have helped improve other species’ prospects in a couple of ways. Members’ contributions finance programmes, for instance to buy land, restore degraded habitat and protect species. In America and Britain, many big conservation efforts have been backed by NGOs or philanthropists. The NGOs’ lobbying efforts also make an impact. As membership of conventional parties has shrunk, theirs has boomed (see chart 2). Whether there is a causal connection—and if there is, which way the causality runs—is moot, but there is no doubt that the influence of green campaigners over mainstream politics has grown. In part, it is manifested through pressure from the NGOs on the big parties, but in some countries, such as Germany, Belgium and Brazil, it has made a difference to mainstream politics. By way of laws, regulation and subsidy, human behaviour towards other species is changing. Growth Good – DeforestationGrowth is key to solve deforestationLomborg, University of Aarhus Statistics Professor and Copenhagen Consensus organizer, 12-17-7, (Bjorn "Worry about the planet, but prioritize what you worry about," http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=87523, accessed 9-4-9) It seems surprising, then, to learn that deforestation is a diminishing problem. The solution wasn't found in condemnation from the West of developing country practices, or in protests by well-meaning environmentalists, but in economic growth. Developed countries generally increase their forested areas because they can afford to do so. Developing countries can't. To encourage less deforestation - and more reforestation - the best thing we can do is help undeveloped nations get richer, faster. UQ – Environment Improving / Pollution Down-- Environment is strong nowBerg 8 (Chris, Columnist – The Age, “Isn't All This Talk of an Apocalypse Getting a Bit Boring?”, The Age, 1-27, http://www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/isnt-all-this-talk-of-an-apocalypse-getting-a-bit-boring/2008/01/26/12011 57736917.html) But there are substantial grounds for optimism — on almost every measure, the state of the world is improving. Pollution is no longer the threat it was seen to be in the 1970s, at least in the developed world. Changes in technology, combined with our greater demand for a clean environment, have virtually eliminated concerns about pungent waterways and dirty forests. Legislation played some role in this, but as Indur Goklany points out in his recent study, The Improving State of the World, the environment started getting better long before such laws were passed. Goklany reveals that strong economies, not environment ministers, are the most effective enforcers of cleanliness in our air and water. Indeed, the world's 10 most polluted places are in countries where strong economic growth has historically been absent — Russia, China, India and Kyrgyzstan have not really been known for their thriving consumer capitalism. Other indices, too, show that humanity's future is likely to be bright. Infant mortality has dramatically declined, as has malnutrition, illiteracy, and even global poverty. And there are good grounds for hope that we can adapt to changing climates as well. History has shown just how capable we are of inventing and adapting our way out of any sticky situation — and how we can do it without crippling our economies or imposing brutal social controls. Environmental alarmists have become more and more like those apocalyptic preachers common in the 19th century — always expecting the Rapture on this date and, when it doesn't come, quickly revising their calculations. Optimism is in too short supply in discussions about the environment. But four decades after The Population Bomb, if we remember just how wrong visions of the apocalypse have been in the past, perhaps we will look to the future more cheerfully. Tons of environmental improvements now --- not on the brink of collapseMandell ’12 – Erik Mandell is an intern for Global Envision and a current graduate student at Portland State University. He graduated from Middlebury College in Vermont and has traveled extensively to numerous countries and six of the seven continent, September 11, 2012, Global Envision, DON'T PANIC, ENVIRONMENTALISTS: A RICHER WORLD CAN BE A BETTER ONE, http://www.globalenvision.org/2012/09/11/dont-panic-environmentalists-richer-world-can-be-better-one, jj 3. Certain threatening pollution trends have halted. Specific pollutants, including DDT, lead, mercury and pesticides, which were predicted to spike in the report, “haven’t gotten more deadly, and the risk of death from air pollution is predicted to continue to drop” due to environmental regulations, Lomborg says.¶ The second problem with “Limits to Growth,” Lomborg argues, is that while its three primary predicted drivers of collapse have proven incorrect, it shaped how people think about environmental policy and behavior in a way that led to responses that actually do little to help, and in fact exacerbate problems by focusing away from economic growth.¶ Supposed solutions are often just “feel-good gestures that provide little environmental benefit at a significant cost,” writes Lomborg. Recycling paper cuts demand for tree farming, he says, tree farming which replants trees because it's profitable to do so. Without that demand, those forests are more likely to be turned into slash-and-burn farming tracts. Organic farming is less efficient and so drives up agricultural costs, which lowers consumption of healthy produce for those who can't afford it.¶ What should we have chosen to focus on for well-being instead? Lomborg puts it in simple terms, writing that “poverty is one of the greatest of all killers, and economic growth is one of the best ways to prevent it.” Painting growth as the antithesis of improved well-being, as he argues that “Limits to Growth” did, caused people to see growth as the core problem, rather than an important part of the solution.¶ Alarmism, he said, creates a lot of attention but makes realistic policy solutions hard to achieve. For example, “Limits to Growth” and other publications directed significant attention to specific pesticides like DDT, but led to little action on the broader issue of air pollution. He compares the alarmism triggered by “Limits to Growth” to crying wolf: real, dangerous wolves exist, but they are often overlooked due to false cries. For much of the world, the wolf at the door isn't environmental cataclysm—it's old-fashioned poverty. Environmental improvements now – their evidence ignores long term trendsHayward, 11 [Steven P, american author, political commentator, and policy scholar. He argues for libertarian and conservative viewpoints in his writings. He writes frequently on the topics of environmentalism, law, economics, and public policy.2011 Almanac of Environmental Trends¶ by Steven F. Hayward¶ April 2011¶ ISBN-13: 978-1-934276-17-4, http://www.pacificresearch.org/docLib/20110419_almanac2011.pdf] Quick: What’s the largest public-policy success story in American society over the last generation? The dramatic reduction in the crime rate, which has helped make major American cities livable again? Or welfare reform, which saw the nation’s welfare rolls fall by more than half since the early 1990s? Both of these accomplishments have received wide media attention. Yet the right answer might well be the environment. As Figure 1 displays, the reduction in air pollution is comparable in magnitude to the reduction in the welfare rolls, and greater than the reduction in the crime rate—both celebrated as major public-policy success stories of the last two decades. Aggregate emissions of the six “criteria” pollutants1 regulated under the Clean Air Act have fallen by 53 percent since 1970, while the proportion of the population receiving welfare assistance is down 48 percent from 1970, and the crime rate is only 6.4 percent below its 1970 level. (And as we shall see, this aggregate nationwide reduction in emissions greatly understates the actual improvement in ambient air quality in the areas with the worst levels of air pollution.) Measures for water quality, toxic-chemical exposure, soil erosion, forest growth, wetlands, and several other areas of environmental concern show similar positive trends, as this Almanac reports. To paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of the demise of the environment have been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, there is good reason to believe that these kinds of improvements will be experienced in the rest of the world over the course of this century. We’ll examine some of the early evidence that this is already starting to occur. The chief drivers of environmental improvement are economic growth, constantly increasing resource efficiency, technological innovation in pollution control, and the deepening of environmental values among the American public that have translated to changed behavior and consumer preferences. Government regulation has played a vital role, to be sure, but in the grand scheme of things regulation can be understood as a lagging indicator, often achieving results at needlessly high cost, and sometimes failing completely. Were it not for rising affluence and technological innovation, regulation would have much the same effect as King Canute commanding the tides. INTRODUCTION introduction 3 figure 1 a comparison of crime rate, Welfare, and air Pollution, 1970–2007 -60.0% -40.0% -20.0% 0.0% 20.0% 40.0% 60.0% 1970 1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000 2005 2007 % of Population on Welfare Crime Rate (per 100,000 population) Aggregate Emissions Source: FBI Uniform Crime Reports, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, EPA 4 Almanac of Environmental Trends The American public remains largely unaware of these trends. For most of the last 40 years, public opinion about the environment has been pessimistic, with large majorities—sometimes as high as 70 percent—telling pollsters that they think environmental quality in the United States is getting worse instead of better, and will continue to get worse in the future. One reason for this state of opinion is media coverage, which emphasizes bad news and crisis; another reason is environmental advocacy groups, for whom good news is bad news. As the cliche goes, you can’t sell many newspapers with headlines about airplanes landing safely, or about an oil tanker docking without a spill. Similarly, slow, long-term trends don’t make for good headline copy. INTRODUCTIONintroduction 5Improving Trends:Causes and ConsequencesMost environmental commentary dwells on the laws and regulations we have adoptedto achieve our goals, but it is essential to understand the more important role of technologyand economic growth in bringing about favorable environmental trends. Thebest way to see this is to look at some long-term trends in environmental quality thatpredate modern environmental legislation.To be sure, the earliest phases of the Industrial Revolution led to severe environmentaldegradation. But the inexorable process of technological innovation andthe drive for efficiency began to remedy much of this damage far earlier than iscommonly perceived. In addition, new technologies that we commonly regard as environmentally destructive often replaced older modes of human activity that were far worse by comparison. A good example is the introduction of coal for heating andenergy in Britain. The status quo is structurally improvingIndur Goklany 10, policy analyst for the Department of the Interior – phd from MSU, “Population, Consumption, Carbon Emissions, and Human Well-Being in the Age of Industrialization (Part III — Have Higher US Population, Consumption, and Newer Technologies Reduced Well-Being?)”, April 24, http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/population-consumption-carbon-emissions-and-human-well-being-in-the-age-of-industrialization-part-iii-have-higher-us-population-consumption-and-newer-technologies-reduced-well-being/#more-9194 In my previous post I showed that, notwithstanding the Neo-Malthusian worldview, human well-being has advanced globally since the start of industrialization more than two centuries ago, despite massive increases in population, consumption, affluence, and carbon dioxide emissions. In this post, I will focus on long-term trends in the U.S. for these and other indicators. Figure 1 shows that despite several-fold increases in the use of metals and synthetic organic chemicals, and emissions of CO2 stoked by increasing populations and affluence, life expectancy, the single best measure of human well-being, increased from 1900 to 2006 for the US. Figure 1 reiterates this point with respect to materials use. These figures indicate that since 1900, U.S. population has quadrupled, affluence has septupled, their product (GDP) has increased 30-fold, synthetic organic chemical use has increased 85-fold, metals use 14-fold, material use 25-fold, and CO2 emissions 8-fold. Yet life expectancy advanced from 47 to 78 years. Figure 2 shows that during the same period, 1900–2006, emissions of air pollution, represented by sulfur dioxide, waxed and waned. Food and water got safer, as indicated by the virtual elimination of deaths from gastrointestinal (GI) diseases between 1900 and 1970. Cropland, a measure of habitat converted to human uses — the single most important pressure on species, ecosystems, and biodiversity — was more or less unchanged from 1910 onward despite the increase in food demand. For the most part, life expectancy grew more or less steadily for the U.S., except for a brief plunge at the end of the First World War accentuated by the 1918-20 Spanish flu epidemic. As in the rest of the world, today’s U.S. population not only lives longer, it is also healthier. The disability rate for seniors declined 28 percent between 1982 and 2004/2005 and, despite quantum improvements in diagnostic tools, major diseases (e.g., cancer, and heart and respiratory diseases) now occur 8–11 years later than a century ago. Consistent with this, data for New York City indicate that — despite a population increase from 80,000 in 1800 to 3.4 million in 1900 and 8.0 million in 2000 and any associated increases in economic product, and chemical, fossil fuel and material use that, no doubt, occurred —crude mortality rates have declined more or less steadily since the 1860s (again except for the flu epidemic). Figures 3 and 4 show, once again, that whatever health-related problems accompanied economic development, technological change, material, chemical and fossil fuel consumption, and population growth, they were overwhelmed by the health-related benefits associated with industrialization and modern economic growth. This does not mean that fossil fuel, chemical and material consumption have zero impact, but it means that overall benefits have markedly outweighed costs. The reductions in rates of deaths and diseases since at least 1900 in the US, despite increased population, energy, and material and chemical use, belie the Neo-Malthusian worldview. The improvements in the human condition can be ascribed to broad dissemination (through education, public health systems, trade and commerce) of numerous new and improved technologies in agriculture, health and medicine supplemented through various ingenious advances in communications, information technology and other energy powered technologies (see here for additional details). The continual increase in life expectancy accompanied by the decline in disease during this period (as shown by Figure 2) indicates that the new technologies reduced risks by a greater amount than any risks that they may have created or exacerbated due to pollutants associated with greater consumption of materials, chemicals and energy, And this is one reason why the Neo-Malthusian vision comes up short. It dwells on the increases in risk that new technologies may create or aggravate but overlooks the larger — and usually more certain — risks that they would also eliminate or reduce. In other words, it focuses on the pixels, but misses the larger picture, despite pretensions to a holistic worldview. Tech solves --- their evidence is media alarmismStossel, Journalist, winner of the Peabody Award, anchors ABC News, 07 [John, “Environmental Alarmists Have It Backwards”, http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/04/how_about_economic_progress_da.html] Watching the media coverage, you'd think that the earth was in imminent danger -- that human life itself was on the verge of extinction. Technology is fingered as the perp. Nothing could be further from the truth. John Semmens of Arizona's Laissez Faire Institute points out that Earth Day misses an important point. In the April issue of The Freeman magazine, Semmens says the environmental movement overlooks how hospitable the earth has become -- thanks to technology. "The environmental alarmists have it backwards. If anything imperils the earth it is ignorant obstruction of science and progress. ... That technology provides the best option for serving human wants and conserving the environment should be evident in the progress made in environmental improvement in the United States. Virtually every measure shows that pollution is headed downward and that nature is making a comeback." (Carbon dioxide excepted, if it is really a pollutant.) Semmens describes his visit to historic Lexington and Concord in Massachusetts, an area "lush with trees and greenery." It wasn't always that way. In 1775, the land was cleared so it could be farmed. Today, technology makes farmers so efficient that only a fraction of the land is needed to produce much more food. As a result, "Massachusetts farmland has been allowed to revert back to forest." Human ingenuity and technology not only raised living standards, but also restored environmental amenities. How about a day to celebrate that? Yet, Semmens writes, the environmental movement is skeptical about technology and is attracted to three dubious principles: sustainable development, the precautionary principle, and stakeholder participation. The point of sustainable development, Semmens says, "is to minimize the use of nonrenewable natural resources so there will be more left for future generations." Sounds sensible -- who is for "unsustainable" development? But as the great economist Julian Simon often pointed out, resources are manmade, not natural. Jed Clampett cheered when he found oil on his land because it made him rich enough to move to Beverly Hills. But his great-grandfather would have cursed the disgusting black gunk because Canadian geologist Abraham Gesner hadn't yet discovered that kerosene could be distilled from it. President Bush chides us for our "addiction to oil." But under current conditions, using oil makes perfect sense. Someday, if we let the free market operate, someone will find an energy source that works better than oil. Then richer future generations won't need oil. So why deprive ourselves and make ourselves poorer with needless regulation now? Anyway, it's not as if we're running out of oil. That's one of the myths I expose in my new book, "Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity". If the price of a barrel of oil stays high, entrepreneurs will find better ways to suck oil out of the ground. At $50 a barrel, it's even profitable to recover oil that's stuck in the tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Those tar sands alone contain enough oil to meet our needs for a hundred years. The precautionary principle, popular in Europe, is the idea that no new thing should be permitted until it has been proved harmless. Sounds good, except as Ron Bailey of Reason writes, it basically means, "Don't ever do anything for the first time." Stakeholder participation means that busybodies would be permitted to intrude on private transactions. Semmens's example is DDT, which for years would have saved children from deadly malaria, except that "'stakeholders' from the environmental quarter have prevailed on governments to ban the trade in this product." The first victims of these principles are the poor. We rich Westerners can withstand a lot of policy foolishness. But people in the developing world live on the edge, so anything that retards economic progress -- including measures to arrest global warming -- will bring incredible hardship to the most vulnerable on the planet. If we care about human life, we should celebrate Economic Progress Day. UQ – Biodiversity ImprovingBiodiversity conservation is improving—growth is keyThe Economist, 13 (9/14 “Averting the sixth extinction” http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21585095-growth-good-governments-need-continue-regulate-it-and-greens-learn, jj) *gender modified Take a closer look, though, and a more optimistic account of the planet’s trajectory emerges. What limited information on extinctions is available suggests that trends have improved recently. Although the LPI shows a global fall in biodiversity, and a stark decline in poorer countries, in richer countries conditions are improving for other species. That is thanks to the developments covered in this special report—shifting public attitudes to other species, increasing appreciation of natural environments, legislation to stop the killing of endangered species, programmes to eradicate invasive species, more and bigger protected areas for wildlife, subsidies to restore degraded habitat, better sanitation, better regulation of pesticides, decreasing levels of conflict and increasingly effective states implementing conservationist legislation. All of these become more prevalent as countries get richer. Yet the survival of most of the planet’s remaining non-human species is by no means assured. Leaving aside the huge unknown of climate change, whether or not the sixth great extinction is looming depends largely on what happens to growth and how humanity manages that growth. Faster growth will mean higher consumption of resources and more pressure on habitat, which is bad for other species. But as North Korea’s experience shows, the combination of economic stagnation and poverty is even worse. Growth can benefit biodiversity, so long as it is combined with regulation and investment to protect other species. That has happened to some extent; whether it happens enough to prevent biodiversity being drastically reduced depends largely on governments in emerging markets. But the biggest question of all for other species is what happens to land use. With habitat loss the principal threat to biodiversity, and agriculture taking up two-fifths of land compared with 3% for urban areas, the demand for food, and how it is met, will determine how much land is left for other creatures. According to research led by David Tilman of the University of Minnesota, demand for food is likely to double by 2050. The UN’s central estimate is for the world’s population to rise by a third over that period, from 7.2 billion to 9.6 billion, but demand for food will grow faster than that, because as people get richer more of them will get enough to eat and more will be able to afford more meat. Meat consumption per person in China has risen from 4kg a year in 1961 to 58kg in 2009. In Britain it is 84kg. Assuming that current levels of wastage persist, if demand for food were to double and crop yields remained the same, the amount of land cultivated would need to double as well. Since around 40% of the land on the planet is already cultivated, that would not leave much room for other creatures. But if farming were to become twice as productive, there would be no need to till any more land. Over the past 60 years America’s corn farmers have done better than that: production has quadrupled on an area that has increased by half (see chart 7). Loaves and fishes For agriculture to pull off the same trick again would mean either boosting yields in high-yielding countries yet further or intensifying agriculture in low-yielding countries. The first may be hard to do: agricultural tech companies are struggling to get any more yield out of cereals growing in favourable conditions. But there is clearly scope for the second. In America, for instance, corn (maize) yields are around 7.7 tonnes per hectare, compared with 2.5 tonnes in India. Boosting yields means using more fertiliser, pesticide and GM seeds. Some environmentalists understand this, but few publicly support the intensification of agriculture. Attitudes to GM among the big NGOs range from the RSPB (“maintains an open mind”) and WWF (“precautionary approach”) to Greenpeace (“a serious threat to biodiversity and our own health”) and Friends of the Earth (“unnecessary risks to both humans and nature”). Among green political activists, hostility to the intensification of agriculture is near-uniform. In consequence, GM seeds are, in effect, banned in the European Union (though EU citizens feast on GM products freely imported from other countries) and rich-world activists have exported their opposition to GM crops to Africa and Asia. Hostility to intensive agriculture within the green movement is understandable. Environmentalism was partly a response to “Silent Spring”. Opposition to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta is bred into the green movement. So is hostility to growth: environmentalism’s roots lie in the Romantic movement that sprang up in opposition to the industrial revolution. Deep in the green movement’s soul lies a belief that the wrongs done to the planet were caused by technological change and economic growth, and that more of them can lead only to greater evil. It is true that if man had never sharpened his first spear, the mastodons would probably still be roaming the plains of North America and the aurochs the grasslands of Europe. But it is wrong to conclude from this that more growth and more technological change would compound the disaster. For the first time since he got the upper hand, it looks as though *[humanity] Species extinctions are slowing—not on the brinkThe Economist 9/14/13 (“Extinction: Dead as the moa” special report on biodiversity, http://www.economist.com/news/special-report/21585082-extinction-fact-life-rates-seem-be-slowing-down-dead-moa, jj) In the 1970s scientists started trying to estimate extinction rates based on assumptions, not observation. On the basis that tropical forests are reckoned to be home to around half the animal and plant species on Earth, and that such forests were being chopped down fast, scientists came up with massive figures. In 1979, for instance, Norman Myers, a British environmentalist, suggested that a million species might well go extinct in the last quarter of the 20th century. Such figures filtered into the political arena, too. The Global 2000 Report to the President, published in 1980 by America’s Council for Environmental Quality and the state department, said that “between half a million and 2m species—15-20% of all species on Earth—could be extinct by 2000.” Nobody now thinks that anything remotely on that scale has happened. The number of birds and mammals known to have gone extinct between 1980 and 2000 is just nine, and although some species will undoubtedly have disappeared unnoticed during those two decades, it is unthinkable that a fifth of the planet’s species could had been wiped out while nobody was looking. What is more, among birds and mammals at least (the classes for which data are most reliable), numbers of known extinctions have recently been falling (see chart 1). The discussion about why and how far those early estimates were wrong has been conducted at an emotional pitch that would surprise laymen. Extinction rates have become highly political. A scientist who leans towards the lower end says that he was accused of being “anti-conservation” by another who favours higher numbers. Some scientists fear, not unreasonably, that unless people believe mass extinction is imminent, they will not bother to do anything about it. One possible reason why scientists overestimated extinction rates was put forward by Fangliang He and Stephen Hubbell in 2011. They reckon that the models scientists were working with underestimated species’ ability to survive a lot of deforestation. In Brazil’s Atlantic forest, some 90% of which has been destroyed, not a single species of bird is known to have gone extinct. But there is another explanation which gives more credit to the doomsayers. Since the 1970s humanity has made far greater efforts to protect other species, mainly thanks to a change of attitudes which the pessimists helped to bring about. Biodiversity Impact DefenseEmpirics disprove biodiversity loss impacts - their authors are hystericsCampbell 11 Hank Campbell is the creator of Science 2.0, a community of research professors, post-docs, science book authors and Nobel laureates collaborating over scientific projects. "I Wouldn't Worry About The Latest Mass Extinction Scare," Science 2.0, March 8, http://www.science20.com/science_20/i_wouldnt_worry_about_latest_mass_extinction_scare-76989 You've seen it everywhere by now - Earth's sixth mass extinction: Is it almost here? and other articles discussing an article in Nature (471, 51–57 doi:10.1038/nature09678) claiming the end of the world is nigh. ¶ Hey, I like to live in important times. So do most people. And something so important it has only happened 5 times in 540 million years, well that is really special. But is it real? ¶ Anthony Barnosky, integrative biologist at the University of California at Berkeley and first author of the paper, claims that if currently threatened species, those officially classed as critically endangered, endangered, and vulnerable, actually went extinct, and that rate of extinction continued, the sixth mass extinction could arrive in 3-22 centuries. ¶ Wait, what?? That's a lot of helping verbs confusing what should be a fairly clear issue, if it were clear. ¶ If you know anything about species and extinction, you have already read one paragraph of my overview and seen the flaws in their model. Taking a few extinct mammal species that we know about and then extrapolating that out to be extinction hysteria right now if we don't do something about global warming is not good science. Worse, an integrative biologist is saying evolution does not happen. Polar bears did not exist forever, they came into existence 150,000 years ago - because of the Ice Age. ¶ Greenpeace co-founder and ecologist Dr. Patrick Moore told a global warming skepticism site, “I quit my life-long subscription to National Geographic when they published a similar 'sixth mass extinction' article in February 1999. This [latest journal] Nature article just re-hashes this theme” and "The fact that the study did make it through peer-review indicates that the peer review process has become corrupted.” ¶ Well, how did it make it through peer review? Read this bizarre justification of their methodology; "If you look only at the critically endangered mammals--those where the risk of extinction is at least 50 percent within three of their generations--and assume that their time will run out and they will be extinct in 1,000 years, that puts us clearly outside any range of normal and tells us that we are moving into the mass extinction realm." ¶ Well, greater extinctions occurred when Europeans visited the Americas and in a much shorter time. And since we don't know how many species there are now, or have ever been, if someone makes a model and claims tens of thousands of species are going extinct today, that sets off cultural alarms. It's not science, though. ¶ If only 1% of species have gone extinct in the groups we really know much about, that is hardly a time for panic, especially if some 99 percent of all species that have ever existed we don't know anything about because they...went extinct. And we did not. ¶ It won't keep some researchers, and the mass media, from pushing the panic button. Co-author Charles Marshall, also an integrative biologist at UC-Berkeley wants to keep the panic button fully engaged by emphasizing that the small number of recorded extinctions to date does not mean we are not in a crisis. "Just because the magnitude is low compared to the biggest mass extinctions we've seen in half a billion years doesn't mean they aren't significant." ¶ It's a double negative, bad logic and questionable science, though. Biodiversity is resilient and inevitableSagoff 8 Mark, Senior Research Scholar @ Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy @ School of Public Policy @ U. Maryland, Environmental Values, “On the Economic Value of Ecosystem Services”, 17:2, 239-257, EBSCO What about the economic value of biodiversity? Biodiversity represents nature's greatest largess or excess since species appear nearly as numerous as the stars the Drifters admired, except that "scientists have a better understanding of how many stars there are in the galaxy than how many species there arc on Earth."70 Worldwide the variety of biodiversity is effectively infinite; the myriad species of plants and animals, not to mention microbes that arc probably more important, apparently exceed our ability to count or identify them. The "next" or "incremental" thousand species taken at random would not fetch a market price because another thousand are immediately available, and another thousand after that. No one has suggested an economic application, moreover, for any of the thousand species listed as threatened in the United States.77 To defend these species - or the next thousand or the thousand after that - on economic grounds is to trade convincing spiritual, aesthetic, and ethical arguments for bogus, pretextual, and disingenuous economic ones.78 As David Ehrenfeld has written, We do not know how many [plant] species are needed to keep the planet green and healthy, but it seems very unlikely to be anywhere near the more than quarter of a million we have now. Even a mighty dominant like the American chestnut, extending over half a continent, all but disappeared without bring¬ing the eastern deciduous forest down with it. And if we turn to the invertebrates, the source of nearly all biological diversity, what biologist is willing to find a value - conventional or ecological - for all 600,000-plus species of beetles?7* The disappearance in the wild even of agriculturally useful species appears to have no effect on production. The last wild aurochs, the progenitor of dairy and beef cattle, went extinct in Poland in 1742, yet no one believes the beef industry is threatened. The genetic material of crop species is contained in tens of thousands of landraces and cultivars in use - rice is an example - and does not depend on the persistence of wild ancestral types. Genetic engineering can introduce DNA from virtually any species into virtually any other - which allows for the unlimited creation of biodiversity. A neighbor of mine has collected about 4,000 different species of insects on his two-acre property in Silver Spring, Maryland. These include 500 kinds of Lepidoptera (mostly moths) - half the number another entomologist found at his residence.80 When you factor in plants and animals, the amount of "backyard biodiversity" in suburbs is astounding and far greater than you can imagine.8' Biodiversity has no value "at the margin" because nature provides far more of it than anyone could possibly administer. If one kind of moth flies off, you can easily attract hundreds of 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 1.56 Mb. Share with your friends:
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