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1		-Nuclear power is critical to stop catastrophic warming
2		-Waldman 15 - Susanne, PhD in Risk Communication at Carleton University (“Why we Need Nuclear Power to Save the Environment” http://energyforhumanity.org/climate-energy/need-nuclear-power-save-environment/) RMT
3		-The idea we might need nuclear power to save the environment may have seen farfetched thirty years ago, at the height of the anti-nuclear movement. But it’s an idea that more and more scientists of all stripes as well as energy experts and even environmentalists are coming to share.
4		-Last month, 75 biodiversity scientists signed an open letter imploring the environmental and conservation communities to rethink “idealistic” opposition to nuclear energy, given the threats to global ecosystems set in motion by climate change. This open letter follows in the wake of another published a year ago in the New York Times by climate scientists with a similar message: “there is no credible path to climate stabilization that does not include a substantial role for nuclear power.”
5		-These scientists who study the earth and the life on it are concerned it is too risky to rely solely on wind, solar and other so-called “green” power to replace fossil fuels, which are still the fastest growing energy sources by a long shot. As these scientists point out, renewable power sources would require enormous amounts of land, materials, and money to meet the world’s current and growing energy needs.
6		-Wind and solar power are especially problematic because they are intermittent and can’t be dispatched to match demand. While the quest is on for grid storage options, there has not yet been a significant storage breakthrough, and any contribution it ends up making may only be modest.
7		-In the meantime other power sources that can run full time are required to take up the slack. Options for doing so are limited to fossil fuels, biomass that is comparatively bulky and limited in scale, hydro power that is largely tapped out in some places, and nuclear power. The advantage of nuclear power is there is no shortage of suitable sites and it is the most low-footprint form of power generation, taking into account land use, materials, carbon footprint, and fuel density.
8		-History has shown the most effective way to replace fossil fuel power over a 15-year-period is to build up nuclear. Ontarians, who rely on nuclear plants to deliver roughly three-fifths of our power every day, and have become coal-free, know this. So do people in France, where nuclear energy supplies around three quarters of power needs.
9		-The problem is that as a complex form of technology, nuclear plants are relatively pricey to build. Few have been constructed of late in the Western world, during an era of cheap coal and gas, liberalized energy markets, cash-strapped governments, and hyped-up renewables. Experienced work forces who can put them up quickly have become hard to assemble on the fly.
10		-These patterns can alter, though, as people come to recognize that once nuclear plants are up they can churn out steady carbon-free power for over half a century. Moreover the power they provide is typically quite cheap and not sensitive to fuel price volatility.
11		-There’s an unquestionable scientific consensus about warming.
12		-Nuccitelli 16 — Dana Nuccitelli, Climate Writer for the Guardian, Environmental Scientist at Tetra Tech—a private environmental consulting firm, holds an M.A. in Physics from the University of California-Davis and a B.A. in Astrophysics from the University of California-Berkeley, 2016 (“It’s settled: 90–100 of climate experts agree on human-caused global warming,” Climate Consensus – The 97—a Guardian blog about climate change, April 13th, Available Online at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2016/apr/13/its-settled-90100-of-climate-experts-agree-on-human-caused-global-warming, Accessed 07-15-2016)
13		-There is an overwhelming expert scientific consensus on human-caused global warming.
14		-Authors of seven previous climate consensus studies — including Naomi Oreskes, Peter Doran, William Anderegg, Bart Verheggen, Ed Maibach, J. Stuart Carlton, John Cook, myself, and six of our colleagues — have co-authored a new paper that should settle this question once and for all. The two key conclusions from the paper are:
15		-1) Depending on exactly how you measure the expert consensus, it’s somewhere between 90 and 100 that agree humans are responsible for climate change, with most of our studies finding 97 consensus among publishing climate scientists.
16		-2) The greater the climate expertise among those surveyed, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming.
17		-Graphic Omitted
18		-Expert consensus is a powerful thing. People know we don’t have the time or capacity to learn about everything, and so we frequently defer to the conclusions of experts. It’s why we visit doctors when we’re ill. The same is true of climate change: most people defer to the expert consensus of climate scientists. Crucially, as we note in our paper:
19		-Public perception of the scientific consensus has been found to be a gateway belief, affecting other climate beliefs and attitudes including policy support.
20		-That’s why those who oppose taking action to curb climate change have engaged in a misinformation campaign to deny the existence of the expert consensus. They’ve been largely successful, as the public badly underestimate the expert consensus, in what we call the “consensus gap.” Only 12 of Americans realize that the consensus is above 90.
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22		-Consensus misrepresentations
23		-Our latest paper was written in response to a critique published by Richard Tol in Environmental Research Letters, commenting on the 2013 paper published in the same journal by John Cook, myself, and colleagues finding a 97 consensus on human-caused global warming in the peer-reviewed literature.
24		-Tol argues that when considering results from previous consensus studies, the Cook 97 figure is an outlier, which he claims is much higher than most other climate consensus estimates. He makes this argument by looking at sub-samples from previous surveys. For example, Doran’s 2009 study broke down the survey data by profession – the consensus was 47 among economic geologists, 64 among meteorologists, 82 among all Earth scientists, and 97 among publishing climate scientists. The lower the climate expertise in each group, the lower the consensus.
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26		-Like several of these consensus surveys, Doran cast a wide net and included responses from many non-experts, but among the experts, the consensus is consistently between 90 and 100. However, by including the non-expert samples, it’s possible to find low “consensus” values.
27		-The flaw in this approach is especially clear when we consider the most ridiculous sub-sample included in Tol’s critique: Verheggen’s 2015 study included a grouping of predominantly non-experts who were “unconvinced” by human-caused global warming, among whom the consensus was 7. The only surprising thing about this number is that more than zero of those “unconvinced” by human-caused global warming agree that humans are the main cause of global warming. In his paper, Tol included this 7 “unconvinced,” non-expert sub-sample as a data point in his argument that the 97 consensus result is unusually high.
28		-By breaking out all of these sub-samples of non-experts, the critique thus misrepresented a number of previous consensus studies in an effort to paint our 97 result as an outlier. The authors of those misrepresented studies were not impressed with this approach, denouncing the misrepresentations of their work in no uncertain terms.
29		-We subsequently collaborated with those authors in this newly-published scholarly response, bringing together an all-star lineup of climate consensus experts. The following quote from the paper sums up our feelings about the critique’s treatment of our research:
30		-Tol’s (2016) conflation of unrepresentative non-expert sub-samples and samples of climate experts is a misrepresentation of the results of previous studies, including those published by a number of coauthors of this paper.
31		-Consensus on consensus
32		-In our paper, we show that including non-experts is the only way to argue for a consensus below 90–100. The greater the climate expertise among those included in the survey sample, the higher the consensus on human-caused global warming. Similarly, if you want to know if you need open heart surgery, you’ll get much more consistent answers (higher consensus) if you only ask cardiologists than if you also survey podiatrists, neurologists, and dentists.
33		-That’s because, as we all know, expertise matters. It’s easy to manufacture a smaller non-expert “consensus” number and argue that it contradicts the 97 figure. As our new paper shows, when you ask the climate experts, the consensus on human-caused global warming is between 90 and 100, with several studies finding 97 consensus among publishing climate scientists.
34		-There’s some variation in the percentage, depending on exactly how the survey is done and how the question is worded, but ultimately it’s still true that there’s a 97 consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on human-caused global warming. In fact, even Richard Tol has agreed:
35		-The consensus is of course in the high nineties.
36		-Is the consensus 97 or 99.9?
37		-In fact, some believe our 97 consensus estimate was too low. These claims are usually based on an analysis done by James Powell, and the difference simply boils down to how “consensus” is defined. Powell evaluated the percentage of papers that don’t explicitly reject human-caused global warming in their abstracts. That includes 99.83 of papers published between 1991 and 2012, and 99.96 of papers published in 2013.
38		-In short, 97 of peer-reviewed climate research that states a position on human-caused warming endorses the consensus, and about 99.9 of the total climate research doesn’t explicitly reject human-caused global warming. Our two analyses simply answer different questions. The percentage of experts and their research that endorse the theory is a better description of “consensus.” However, Powell’s analysis is useful in showing how few peer-reviewed scientific papers explicitly reject human-caused global warming.
39		-In any case, there’s really no question that humans are the driving force causing global warming. The experts are almost universally convinced because the scientific evidence is overwhelming. Denying the consensus by misrepresenting the research won’t change that reality.
40		-With all of the consensus authors teaming up to show the 90–100 expert consensus on human-caused global warming, and most finding 97 consensus among publishing climate scientists, this paper should be the final word on the subject.
41		-Global warming definitively causes extinction
42		-Sharp and Kennedy 14 – (Associate Professor Robert (Bob) A. Sharp is the UAE National Defense College Associate Dean for Academic Programs and College Quality Assurance Advisor. He previously served as Assistant Professor of Strategic Security Studies at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA) in the U.S. National Defense University (NDU), Washington D.C. and then as Associate Professor at the Near East South Asia (NESA) Center for Strategic Studies, collocated with NDU. Most recently at NESA, he focused on security sector reform in Yemen and Lebanon, and also supported regional security engagement events into Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine and Qatar; Edward Kennedy is a renewable energy and climate change specialist who has worked for the World Bank and the Spanish Electric Utility ENDESA on carbon policy and markets; 8/22/14, “Climate Change and Implications for National Security,” International Policy Digest, http://intpolicydigest.org/2014/08/22/climate-change-implications-national-security/, Accessed 7/11/16, HWilson)
43		-Our planet is 4.5 billion years old. If that whole time was to be reflected on a single one-year calendar then the dinosaurs died off sometime late in the afternoon of December 27th and modern humans emerged 200,000 years ago, or at around lunchtime on December 28th. Therefore, human life on earth is very recent. Sometime on December 28th humans made the first fires – wood fires – neutral in the carbon balance.
44		-Now reflect on those most recent 200,000 years again on a single one-year calendar and you might be surprised to learn that the industrial revolution began only a few hours ago during the middle of the afternoon on December 31st, 250 years ago, coinciding with the discovery of underground carbon fuels.
45		-Over the 250 years carbon fuels have enabled tremendous technological advances including a population growth from about 800 million then to 7.5 billion today and the consequent demand to extract even more carbon. This has occurred during a handful of generations, which is hardly noticeable on our imaginary one-year calendar. The release of this carbon – however – is changing our climate at such a rapid rate that it threatens our survival and presence on earth. It defies imagination that so much damage has been done in such a relatively short time. The implications of climate change is the single most significant threat to life on earth and, put simply, we are not doing enough to rectify the damage.
46		-This relatively very recent ability to change our climate is an inconvenient truth; the science is sound. We know of the complex set of interrelated national and global security risks that are a result of global warming and the velocity at which climate change is occurring. We worry it may already be too late.
47		-Climate change writ large has informed few, interested some, confused many, and polarized politics. It has already led to an increase in natural disasters including but not limited to droughts, storms, floods, fires etc. The year 2012 was among the 10 warmest years on record according to an American Meteorological Society (AMS) report. Research suggests that climate change is already affecting human displacement; reportedly 36 million people were displaced in 2008 alone because of sudden natural disasters. Figures for 2010 and 2011 paint a grimmer picture of people displaced because of rising sea levels, heat and storms.
48		-Climate change affects all natural systems. It impacts temperature and consequently it affects water and weather patterns. It contributes to desertification, deforestation and acidification of the oceans. Changes in weather patterns may mean droughts in one area and floods in another. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, sea levels rise but perennial river water supplies are reduced because glaciers are retreating.
49		-As glaciers and polar ice caps melt, there is an albedo effect, which is a double whammy of less temperature regulation because of less surface area of ice present. This means that less absorption occurs and also there is less reflection of the sun’s light. A potentially critical wild card could be runaway climate change due to the release of methane from melting tundra. Worldwide permafrost soils contain about 1,700 Giga Tons of carbon, which is about four times more than all the carbon released through human activity thus far.
50		-The planet has already adapted itself to dramatic climate change including a wide range of distinct geologic periods and multiple extinctions, and at a pace that it can be managed. It is human intervention that has accelerated the pace dramatically: An increased surface temperature, coupled with more severe weather and changes in water distribution will create uneven threats to our agricultural systems and will foster and support the spread of insect borne diseases like Malaria, Dengue and the West Nile virus. Rising sea levels will increasingly threaten our coastal population and infrastructure centers and with more than 3.5 billion people – half the planet – depending on the ocean for their primary source of food, ocean acidification may dangerously undercut critical natural food systems which would result in reduced rations.
51		-Climate change also carries significant inertia. Even if emissions were completely halted today, temperature increases would continue for some time. Thus the impact is not only to the environment, water, coastal homes, agriculture and fisheries as mentioned, but also would lead to conflict and thus impact national security. Resource wars are inevitable as countries respond, adapt and compete for the shrinking set of those available resources. These wars have arguably already started and will continue in the future because climate change will force countries to act for national survival; the so-called Climate Wars.
52		-As early as 2003 Greenpeace alluded to a report which it claimed was commissioned by the Pentagon titled: An Abrupt Climate Change Scenario and Its Implications for U.S. National Security. It painted a picture of a world in turmoil because global warming had accelerated. The scenario outlined was both abrupt and alarming. The report offered recommendations but backed away from declaring climate change an immediate problem, concluding that it would actually be more incremental and measured; as such it would be an irritant, not a shock for national security systems.
53		-In 2006 the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) – Institute of Public Research – convened a board of 11 senior retired generals and admirals to assess National Security and the Threat to Climate Change. Their initial report was published in April 2007 and made no mention of the potential acceleration of climate change. The team found that climate change was a serious threat to national security and that it was: “most likely to happen in regions of the world that are already fertile ground for extremism.” The team made recommendations from their analysis of regional impacts which suggested the following. Europe would experience some fracturing because of border migration. Africa would need more stability and humanitarian operations provided by the United States. The Middle East would experience a “loss of food and water security (which) will increase pressure to emigrate across borders.” Asia would suffer from “threats to water and the spread of infectious disease. ” In 2009 the CIA opened a Center on Climate Change and National Security to coordinate across the intelligence community and to focus policy.
54		-In May 2014, CNA again convened a Military Advisory Board but this time to assess National Security and the Accelerating Risk of Climate Change. The report concludes that climate change is no longer a future threat but occurring right now and the authors appeal to the security community, the entire government and the American people to not only build resilience against projected climate change impacts but to form agreements to stabilize climate change and also to integrate climate change across all strategy and planning. The calm of the 2007 report is replaced by a tone of anxiety concerning the future coupled with calls for public discourse and debate because “time and tide wait for no man.”
55		-The report notes a key distinction between resilience (mitigating the impact of climate change) and agreements (ways to stabilize climate change) and states that:
56		-Actions by the United States and the international community have been insufficient to adapt to the challenges associated with projected climate change. Strengthening resilience to climate impacts already locked into the system is critical, but this will reduce long-term risk only if improvements in resilience are accompanied by actionable agreements on ways to stabilize climate change.
57		-The 9/11 Report framed the terrorist attacks as less of a failure of intelligence than a failure of imagination. Greenpeace’s 2003 account of the Pentagon’s alleged report describes a coming climate Armageddon which to readers was unimaginable and hence the report was not really taken seriously. It described:
58		-A world thrown into turmoil by drought, floods, typhoons. Whole countries rendered uninhabitable. The capital of the Netherlands submerged. The borders of the U.S. and Australia patrolled by armies firing into waves of starving boat people desperate to find a new home. Fishing boats armed with cannon to drive off competitors. Demands for access to water and farmland backed up with nuclear weapons.
59		-The CNA and Greenpeace/Pentagon reports are both mirrored by similar analysis by the World Bank which highlighted not only the physical manifestations of climate change, but also the significant human impacts that threaten to unravel decades of economic development, which will ultimately foster conflict.
60		-Climate change is the quintessential “Tragedy of the Commons,” where the cumulative impact of many individual actions (carbon emission in this case) is not seen as linked to the marginal gains available to each individual action and not seen as cause and effect. It is simultaneously huge, yet amorphous and nearly invisible from day to day. It is occurring very fast in geologic time terms, but in human time it is (was) slow and incremental. Among environmental problems, it is uniquely global. With our planet and culture figuratively and literally honeycombed with a reliance on fossil fuels, we face systemic challenges in changing the reliance across multiple layers of consumption, investment patterns, and political decisions; it will be hard to fix!

EntryDate

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1		-2016-09-10 16:30:36.0

Judge

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1		-Adam Bistagne

Opponent

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1		-Harvard Westlake EE

ParentRound

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1		-1

Round

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1		-1

Team

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1		-La Canada Zhao Neg

Title

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1		-SEPOCT - Warming DA

Tournament

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1		-Loyola