Solar Storms Affirmative – 4 Week Lab [1/3]
Download 0.93 Mb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Impact – Hegemony
- Impact – Food Scarcity
Impact – TerrorClimate change risks larger anti-American sentiments and terrorist recruitment Carolyn Pumphrey Triangle Institute for Security Studies May 2008 Global Climate Change: National Security Implications “INTRODUCTION” http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB862.pdf Climate Change as a U.S. National Security Concern. What about the United States? Is climate change currently expected to bring catastrophic changes in weather? Violent social upheavals? Intractable strategic problems? Or should we expect more subtle changes, more manageable problems? Here, too, scenarios vary. Some models suggest that the North American continent will be among those most significantly (and negatively) affected by climate change.17 Others suggest considerably less dramatic impacts. They say we might expect some serious flooding of coastal areas and rather serious drought in the Southwest. We might also expect more 8 extreme weather patterns.18 In principle, there seems to be agreement that we have the means to cope with most of these eventualities. Our recent experience with Hurricane Katrina, however, demonstrates that we have not yet learned how to take advantage of our existing assets.19 Even if we dismiss the worst case scenarios and assume that we will be spared the worst of what climate change can bring, we should note that climate change does indirectly pose very real national security concerns. Take terrorism, for example. The “war” against terrorists is very high up on the current list of national priorities. And there is persuasive evidence that extremism draws strength from the presence of poverty and inequality.20 While images of streams of displaced persons swarming across the border are likely exaggerated, we know less than we should about how to integrate migrants into our society.21 In some parts of the world, significant population movements could further destabilize volatile regions which we have a profound interest in keeping peaceful. The Middle East, for example, is vulnerable to water shortages, and climate change promises to exacerbate this problem.22 The United States will also certainly have to deal with a rapidly changing strategic picture which may challenge its efforts to preserve world-wide stability. In short, climate change is likely to be a stressmultiplier, to exacerbate tensions, and to complicate American foreign policy in a wide variety of ways. Impact – HegemonyWarming erodes American hegemony Richard A. Mathew, Associate Professor of International and Environmental Politics at the University of California, Irvine, May, ‘8 (Global Climate Change: National Security Implications, p. google) Against this background, climate change and security can be linked in a number of ways. Where climate changes abruptly, security problems will be immediate and extensive and perhaps even existential. We can easily envision threats on this scale in Bangladesh or other poor low-lying countries, but even here a significant number of Americans would be affected by a sudden barrage of massive flooding, Katrina-sized hurricanes, and tropical disease epidemics—perhaps enough to make climate change a national security issue. Another possible threat that we should take seriously is that of the gradual erosion of American power as endless demands are placed on it due to abrupt changes elsewhere. These are likely to arise as we face humanitarian disasters, as drought intensifies throughout Africa, and as South Asia collapses into conflict over things like fresh water. The greater our sense of interdependence, the greater our sense that national security depends on the welfare of things beyond our borders, and the more likely it is that the climate change will be a real security threat. This poses a big problem today. To what extent should we intervene to assist abroad? When should we use our resources and when should we show restraint? It is going to be difficult to make these decisions. We are playing with a lot of uncertainty. We do not know how other actors in the world will behave. Impact – Food ScarcityWarming will cause mass starvation. AFP, November 22, ‘7 (p. lexis) An agrarian crisis is brewing because of climate change that could jeopardise global food supplies and increase the risk of hunger for a billion poorest of the poor, scientists warned Thursday. South Asia and Africa would be hardest hit by the crisis, which would shift the world's priorities away from boosting food output year after year to bolstering the resilience of crops to cope with warm weather, they said. Rice, the staple for billions of people, is most vulnerable to global warming, said Dyno Keatinge, deputy director general of research at the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. "It is the world's most consumed crop and it makes everything else pale in comparison," Keatinge told reporters in Hyderabad, southern India, where the research institute has organised a conference on the impact of climate change on farming. "We have the opportunity to grow other crops that are more resistant to higher temperatures such as sorgum and millet, but changing people's food habits is very difficult, he said. The rice yield could fall "very quickly in a warmer world" unless researchers find alternative varieties or ways to shift the time of rice flowering, he added, demanding governments allocate more money to research. Environmentalists and agricultural scientists are mounting pressure on governments to act quickly to stem carbon emissions responsible for climate change, ahead of next month's global summit in Bali, Indonesia. They also want bigger budgets to combat damage already done and cope with risks into the future. According to the crop research institute, one billion of the world's poorest are vulnerable to the impact of climate change on agriculture -- from desertification and land degradation to loss of biodiversity and water scarcity. India accounts for about 26 percent of this population, China more than 16 percent, with other Asian countries making up 18 percent and sub-Saharan Africa the remainder. "Climate change will generally reduce production potential and increase the risk of hunger," said Martin Parry, co-chair of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore. "Where crops are grown near their maximum temperature tolerance and where dry land, non-irrigated agriculture predominates, the challenge of climate change could be overwhelming, especially on subsistence farmers," he said. Warming will lead to water and food shortages, destroying crops and increasing starvation Pamela Hess, staff writer for AP, 6-25-08, “Report: Climate Change linked to national security” http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080626/ap_on_go_co/global_warming_security The assessment of global climate change through 2030 is one in a series of periodic intelligence reports that offer the consensus of top analysts at all 16 spy agencies on foreign policy, security and global economic issues. Congress requested the report last year. The assessment is classified as confidential. It predicts that the United States and most of its allies will have the means to cope with climate change economically. Unspecified "regional partners" could face severe problems. Fingar said the quality of the analysis is hampered by the fact that climate data tend not to focus on specific countries but on broad global changes. For that reason, the intelligence agencies have only low to moderate confidence in the assessment. Africa is seen as among the most vulnerable regions. An expected increase in droughts there could cut agricultural yields of rain-dependent crops by up to half over the next 12 years. Parts of Asia's food crops are vulnerable to droughts and floods, with rice and grain crops potentially facing up to a 10 percent decline by 2025. As many as 50 million additional people could face hunger by 2020. The water supply, while larger because of melting glaciers, will be under pressure from a growing population and increased consumption. Between 120 million and 1.2 billion people in Asia "will continue to experience some water stress." Latin America may experience increased precipitation, possibly cutting tens of millions of people from the ranks of those in need of water. But from 7 million to 77 million people could be short of water resources because of population growth. Declining crop yields causes worldwide nuclear war WILLIAM H. CALVIN, prof @ University of Washington [Atlantic Monthy] 98 The population-crash scenario is surely the most appalling. Plummeting crop yields will cause some powerful countries to try to take over their neighbors or distant lands — if only because their armies, unpaid and lacking food, will go marauding, both at home and across the borders. The better-organized countries will attempt to use their armies, before they fall apart entirely, to take over countries with significant remaining resources, driving out or starving their inhabitants if not using modern weapons to accomplish the same end: eliminating competitors for the remaining food. This will be a worldwide problem — and could easily lead to a Third World War — but Europe's vulnerability is particularly easy to analyze. The last abrupt cooling, the Younger Dryas, drastically altered Europe's climate as far east as Ukraine. Present-day Europe has more than 650 million people. It has excellent soils, and largely grows its own food. It could no longer do so if it lost the extra warming from the North Atlantic. Warming causes crop failures and price spikes Verdin et al, 5- US Geological Survey, National Center for Earth Resources Observation and Science (James, “Climate Science and Famine Early Warning,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, Vol. 360, 11/29/05, http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1569579#id454879) Rising concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere are associated with increased global mean surface temperatures, already observed, as well as prospects for further increases in the future. Global warming threatens to undermine the stability of the Earth's climate system, disrupting the human populations and ecosystems that depend upon it (IPCC 2001). Africa is no exception. The continent has warmed in the last 100 years and faces possible future increases of 2–6 °C (Hulme et al. 2001). Indeed, Hare (2005) recently observed that ‘Africa seems to be consistently among the regions with high to very high projected damages’ across a range of global warming scenarios. These changes will tend to impact the most vulnerable populations first. Home to semi-arid regions where crops are already near their thermal maxima, higher temperatures will depress yields and place increasing limitations on pasture, yields and water availability in semi-arid regions. Increased air temperatures will also raise rates of evapotranspiration and crop water requirements in regions, where rainfall is already scarce. More frequent occurrences of extreme hydroclimatic events are foreseen as well. These changes imply increased occurrence of crop failure and livestock losses due to lack of sufficient pasture and water resources and, consequently, greater food insecurity among subsistence farmers as well as pastoral and agro-pastoral households highly vulnerable to such shocks. Warming damages food supplies Schmidhuber & Tubiello, 7- Schmidhuber, Senior Economist with the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development; Tubiello, Research Scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research, Columbia University (Josef; Francesco, “Global food security under climate change,” PNSA, Vol. 104, 12/11/07, http://www.pnas.org/content/104/50/19703.full.pdf) Global and regional weather conditions are also expected to become more variable than at present, with increases in the frequency and severity of extreme events such as cyclones, floods, hailstorms, and droughts (3, 8). By bringing greater fluctuations in crop yields and local food supplies and higher risks of landslides and erosion damage, they can adversely affect the stability of food supplies and thus food security. Neither climate change nor short-term climate variability and associated adaptation are new phenomena in agriculture, of course. As shown, for instance, in ref. 9, some important agricultural areas of the world like the Midwest of the United States, the northeast of Argentina, southern Africa, or southeast Australia have traditionally experienced higher climate variability than other regions such as central Africa or Europe. They also show that the extent of short-termfluctuations has changed over longer periods of time. In developed countries, for instance, short-term climate variability increased from 1931 to 1960 as compared with 1901 to 1930, but decreased strongly in the period from 1961 to 1990. What is new, however, is the fact that the areas subject to high climate variability are likely to expand, whereas the extent of short-term climate variability is likely to increase across all regions. Furthermore, the rates and levels of projected warming may exceed in some regions the historical experience (3, 8). If climate fluctuations become more pronounced and more widespread, droughts and floods, the dominant causes of shortterm fluctuations in food production in semiarid and subhumid areas, will become more severe and more frequent. In semiarid areas, droughts can dramatically reduce crop yields and livestock numbers and productivity (8). Again, most of this land is in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of South Asia, meaning that the poorest regions with the highest level of chronic undernourishment will also be exposed to the highest degree of instability in food production (13). How strongly these impacts will be felt will crucially depend on whether such fluctuations can be countered by investments in irrigation, better storage facilities, or higher food imports. In addition, a policy environment that fosters freer trade and promotes investments in transportation, communications, and irrigation infrastructure can help address these challenges early on. Impacts of Climate Change on Food Utilization. Climate change will also affect the ability of individuals to use food effectively by altering the conditions for food safety and changing the disease pressure from vector, water, and food-borne diseases. The IPPC WorkingGroup II provides a detailed account of the health impacts of climate change in chapter 8 of its fourth assessment report (3). It examines how the various forms of diseases, including vectorborne diseases such as malaria, are likely to spread or recede with climate change. This article focuses on a narrow selection of diseases that affect food safety directly, i.e., food and water-borne diseases. The main concern about climate change and food security is that changing climatic conditions can initiate a vicious circle where infectious disease causes or compounds hunger, which, in turn, makes the affected populations more susceptible to infectious disease. The result can be a substantial decline in labor productivity and an increase in poverty and even mortality. Essentially all manifestations of climate change, be they drought, higher temperatures, or heavy rainfalls have an impact on the disease pressure, and there is growing evidence that these changes affect food safety and food security (3). 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 0.93 Mb. Share with your friends:
|