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Impact – Warming Causes Extinction
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- Impact – Warming is Man Made
Impact – Warming Causes Extinction[____] [____] Global warming causes extinction. Bill Henderson, district environmental administrator for the Florida DOT, 8/19/2006, “Runaway Global Warming Denial.” Countercurrents.org August 19,. http://www.countercurrents.org/cc-henderson190806.htm The scientific debate about human induced global warming is over but policy makers - let alone the happily shopping general public - still seem to not understand the scope of the impending tragedy. Global warming isn't just warmer temperatures, heat waves, melting ice and threatened polar bears. Scientific understanding increasingly points to runaway global warming leading to human extinction. If impossibly Draconian security measures are not immediately put in place to keep further emissions of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere we are looking at the death of billions, the end of civilization as we know it and in all probability the end of man's several million year old existence, along with the extinction of most flora and fauna beloved to man in the world we share. [____] [____] Global warming will cause civilization to collapse Lester R. Brown, founder of the Worldwatch Institute and the Earth Policy Institute, 2008 “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization,” Beyond what is already happening, the world faces a risk that some of the feedback mechanisms will begin to kick in, further accelerating the warming process. Scientists who once thought that the Arctic Ocean could be free of ice during the summer by 2100 now see it occurring by 2030. Even this could turn out to be a conservative estimate.78 This is of particular concern to scientists because of the albedo effect, where the replacement of highly reflective sea ice with darker open water greatly increases heat absorbed from sunlight. This, of course, has the potential to further accelerate the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. A second feedback loop of concern is the melting of permafrost. This would release billions of tons of carbon, some as methane, a potent greenhouse gas with a global warming effect per ton 25 times that of carbon dioxide.79 The risk facing humanity is that climate change could spiral out of control and it will no longer be possible to arrest trends such as ice melting and rising sea level. At this point, the future of civilization would be at risk. This combination of melting glaciers, rising seas, and their effects on food security and low-lying coastal cities could overwhelm the capacity of governments to cope. Today it is largely weak states that begin to deteriorate under the pressures of mounting environmental stresses. But the changes just described could overwhelm even the strongest of states. Civilization itself could begin to unravel under these extreme stresses. Impact – Warming is Man Made[____][____] Warming is caused by humans – the variation of temperature increase is much higher than normal. Stephanie B. Oshita, Assistant Professor of Environmental Science and Management at the University of San Francisco, 2007, “The Scientific and International Context for Climate Change Initiatives” 42 U.S.F.L. Rev. 1 SummerEven if we recognize that the globe is warming, how do we know that humans are causing the phenomenon? Through a combination of measurements and models, we can discern the human "fingerprint" on the climate system in a number of ways. n27 First, the observed warming goes well beyond natural variation. Paleoclimatology - the sleuthing for indicators of past temperatures in ice cores and coral reefs - indicates that current levels of CO2 in the atmosphere far exceeded the natural range of the last 650,000 years. n28 We know that the atmospheric concentrations of CO2 and temperature are strongly correlated, explaining why temperatures levels are higher than ever before. n29 Second, the rapid increase in levels of CO2 in the atmosphere coincides with the onslaught of the industrial revolution and the release of CO2 from fossil fuels, along with dramatic changes in land use by humans. n30 Third, models of the climate system with and without human emissions show that natural variation alone cannot obtain observed [*7] changes. n31 Natural fluctuations in the Earth's orbit, natural variation in solar activity, and other non-human phenomena cannot account for the rapid rise in atmospheric greenhouse gases and average temperature over the past century. Human activity does explain the observed changes [____] The increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is very predictable, and it has increased dramatically in the last 50 years due to human activity. Lester E. Brown, Director and Founder of the Global Institute of Environment in the U.S. and President and Senior Researcher at the Earth Policy Institute, 2008 [Lester E., “Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilzation”Scientists at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) gath er data from a global network of some 800 climate-monitoring stations to measure changes in the earth's average temperature. Their direct measurements go back to 1880.6 Since 1970, the earth's average temperature has risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius, or 1 degree Fahrenheit. Meteorologists note that the 23 warmest years on record have come since 1980. And the seven warmest years since recordkeeping began in 1880 have come in the last nine years. Four of these-2002, 2003, 2005, and 2006-were years in which major food-producing regions saw their crops wither in the face of record temperatures. The amount of carbon dioxide (C02) in the atmosphere has risen substantially since the start of the Industrial Revolution, growing from 277 parts per million (ppm) to 384 ppm in 2007. The annual rise in the atmospheric C02 level, one of the world's most predictable environmental trends, is the result of the annu al discharge into the atmosphere of 7.5 billion tons of carbon from burning fossil fuels and 1.5 billion tons from deforesta tion. The current annual rise is nearly four times what it was in the 1950s, largely because of increased emissions from burning fossil fuels. As more C02 accumulates in the atmosphere, tem peratures go up. 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