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A2: China Add-OnNo China WarHistory proves no risk of China war – their cards are all hypeDyer 9 [Gwynne, Ph.D. in War Studies – University of London and Board of Governors – Canada’s Royal Military College, “China Unlikely to Engage in Military Confrontation”, Jakarta Post, 4-29, http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2005/03/12/china-unlikely-engage-military-confrontation.html] Given America's monopoly or huge technological lead in key areas like stealth bombers, aircraft carriers, long-range sensors, satellite surveillance and even infantry body armor, Goss's warning is misleading and self-serving. China cannot project a serious military force even 200 miles (km) from home, while American forces utterly dominate China's ocean frontiers, many thousands of miles (kilometers) from the United States. But the drumbeat of warnings about China's ""military build-up"" continues. Just the other week U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was worrying again about the expansion of the Chinese navy, which is finally building some amphibious landing ships half a century after Beijing's confrontation with the non-Communist regime on the island of Taiwan began. And Senator Richard Lugar, head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned that if the European Union ends its embargo on arms sales to China, the U.S. would stop military technology sales to Europe. It will come as no surprise, therefore, that the major U.S. defense review planned for this year will concentrate on the rising ""threat"" from China, or that this year for the first time the joint U.S.-Japanese defense policy statement named China as a ""security concern"", or that the Taiwan government urged the ""military encirclement"" of China to prevent any ""foreign adventures"" by Beijing. It comes as no surprise -- but it still makes no sense. China's defense budget this year is 247.7 billion yuan: Around US$30 billion at the official exchange rate. There are those in Washington who will say that it's more like $60 billion in purchasing power, but then there used to be ""experts"" who annually produced hugely inflated and frightening estimates of the Soviet defense budget. Such people will always exist: to justify a big U.S. defense budget, you need a big threat. It's true that 247.7 billion yuan buys an awful lot of warm bodies in military uniform in the low-wage Chinese economy, but it doesn't actually buy much more in the way of high-tech military systems. It's also true that the Chinese defense budget has grown by double-digit increases for the past fourteen years: This year it's up by 12.6 percent. But that is not significantly faster than the Chinese economy as a whole is growing, and it's about what you have to spend in order to convert what used to be a glorified peasant militia into a modern military force. It would be astonishing if China chose NOT to modernize its armed forces as the rest of the economy modernizes, and the end result is not going to be a military machine that towers above all others. If you project the current growth rates of military spending in China and the United States into the future, China's defense budget catches up with the United States about the same time that its Gross Domestic Product does, in the late 2030s or the early 2040s. As to China's strategic intentions, the record of the past is reassuring in several respects. China has almost never been militarily expansionist beyond the traditional boundaries of the Middle Kingdom (which do include Tibet in the view of most Chinese), and its border clashes with India, the Soviet Union and Vietnam in the first decades of Communist rule generally ended with a voluntary Chinese withdrawal from the disputed territories. The same moderation has usually applied in nuclear matters. The CIA frets that China could have a hundred nuclear missiles targeted on the United States by 2015, but that is actually evidence of China's great restraint. The first Chinese nuclear weapons test was forty years ago, and by now China could have thousands of nuclear warheads targeted on the U.S. if it wanted. (The United States DOES have thousands of nuclear warheads that can strike Chinese targets.) The Beijing regime is obsessed with economic stability, because it fears that a severe downturn would trigger social and political upheaval. The last thing it wants is a military confrontation with its biggest trading partner, the United States. It will go on playing the nationalist card over Taiwan to curry domestic political favor, but there is no massive military build-up and no plausible threat of impending war in East Asia. A2: Coral Reefs Add-OnEnvironment ResilientEnvironment is resilientEasterbrook 95 [Gregg, Distinguished Fellow – Fullbright Foundation, A Moment on Earth, p. 25] In the aftermath of events such as Love Canal or the Exxon Valdez oil spill, every reference to the environment is prefaced with the adjective "fragile." "Fragile environment" has become a welded phrase of the modern lexicon, like "aging hippie" or "fugitive financier." But the notion of a fragile environment is profoundly wrong. Individual animals, plants, and people are distressingly fragile. The environment that contains them is close to indestructible. The living environment of Earth has survived ice ages; bombardments of cosmic radiation more deadly than atomic fallout; solar radiation more powerful than the worst-case projection for ozone depletion; thousand-year periods of intense volcanism releasing global air pollution far worse than that made by any factory; reversals of the planet's magnetic poles; the rearrangement of continents; transformation of plains into mountain ranges and of seas into plains; fluctuations of ocean currents and the jet stream; 300-foot vacillations in sea levels; shortening and lengthening of the seasons caused by shifts in the planetary axis; collisions of asteroids and comets bearing far more force than man's nuclear arsenals; and the years without summer that followed these impacts. Yet hearts beat on, and petals unfold still. Were the environment fragile it would have expired many eons before the advent of the industrial affronts of the dreaming ape. Human assaults on the environment, though mischievous, are pinpricks compared to forces of the magnitude nature is accustomed to resisting. Long time-frameKay 1 [Jane, “Study Takes Historical Peek at Plight of Ocean Ecosystems”, San Francisco Chronicle, 7-26, Lexis] The collapse of ecosystems often occur over a long period. In one example, when Aleut hunters killed the Alaskan sea otter about 2,500 years ago, the population of their natural prey, the sea urchin, grew larger than its normal size. In turn, the urchins grazed down the kelp forests, important habitat for a whole host of ocean life. Then, when fur traders in the 1800s hunted the otters and sea cows almost to extinction, the kelp forests disappeared and didn't start to regenerate until the federal government protected the sea otters in the 20th century. In California, the diversity of spiny lobsters, sheephead fish and abalone kept down the urchin numbers. At present in Alaska, the kelp beds are declining again in areas where killer whales are preying on sea otters. Biologists think the killer whales switched to otters for food because there are fewer seals and sea lions to eat. Collapse InevitableEnvironmental collapse inevitable because of past pollutionMyers 97 (Norman, Visiting Fellow of Green College – Oxford University and Senior Fellow – World Wildlife Fund, Biodiversity II, Ed. Reaka-Kudla and Wilson, p. 135-136) While formulating our responses to the mass extinction crisis, we need to bear in mind the length of time still available to us. The critical criterion for our efforts is not whether we are doing far more than before, but whether it will be enough—and that in turn raises the question of “enough by when?” How soon might we cross a threshold after which our best efforts could prove to be of little avail? Of course, not all habitats are going to be destroyed outright within the immediate future. But that is hardly the point. What looks set to eliminate many if not most species in the long run will be the “fragmentation effect,” i.e., the break up of extensive habitats into small isolated patches that are too small to maintain their stocks of species into the indefinite future. This phenomenon has been widely analyzed through the theory of island biogeography, and appears to be strongly supported through abundant empirical evidence, albeit with a good number of variations on the general theme. True, the process of ecological equilibriation, with its delayed fall-out effects, will take an extended period to exert its full depletive impact; in some instances, it will be decades and even centuries before species eventually disappear. But the ultimate upshot, which is what we should be primarily concerned with, will be the same. Consider the environmental degradation that already has occurred. Through dynamic inertia, it will continue to exert an increasingly adverse effect for a good way into the future, no matter how vigorously we try to resist the process: much potential damage is already “in the pipeline.” An obvious example is acid rain, which will keep on inflicting injury on biotas by reason of pollutants already deposited though not yet causing apparent harm. Similarly, tropical forests will suffer desiccation through climatic changes induced by deforestation that already has taken place. Desertification will keep on expanding its impact through built-in momentum. Ozone-destroying CFCs now in the atmosphere will continue their work for a whole century even if we were to cease releasing them forthwith. There is enough global warming in store through past emissions of greenhouse gases to cause significant climatic change no matter how much we seek to slow it, let alone halt it. In light of this on-going degradation of the biosphere, let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that in the year 2000 the whole of humankind were to be removed from the face of the Earth in one fell swoop. Because of the many environmental perturbations already imposed, with their impacts persisting for many subsequent decades, gross biospheric impoverishment would continue and thus serve to eliminate further large numbers of species in the long term (Myers, 1990b). Directory: file -> fetch fetch -> 11 th Lit Semester 1 Final Study Guide!!! fetch -> Industrial Revolution Inventors fetch -> Analysis for Galveston Hurricane of 1900 fetch -> The Illuminators (Team 2) 1900 Galveston Hurricane Cycle a team Assignment fetch -> Team csi-utb ruth Reyes Jose Ferrer fetch -> Galveston Hurricane of 1900 Cycle a-teacher as a Problem Solver fetch -> Is Climate Change Starting a New Dust Bowl? Cycle A fetch -> What makes a storm a hurricane fetch -> The 1950s were the "Happy Days" because it was a time of economic prosperity, technology development, new entertainment, new fashion and family growth. The 1950s was a great time fetch -> Sputnik and The Dawn of the Space Age Download 1.05 Mb. Share with your friends:
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