Tournament: All | Round: Quads | Opponent: All | Judge: All
Kaushal Balagurusamy on Facebook but I might get a senior name so just in case here's the rest
kblusterpurge@gmail.com - yes I know the email is strange as hell, third graders don't think of great email names sorry
7816864974 - call/text me

Tournament: All | Round: 1 | Opponent: All | Judge: All
Any positions other Lexington people have broken are cases that I may read

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Ishan | Judge:
Extinction lurks behind the door that is fiat for the affirmative. The process of hiding creates an endless chase that kills value to life – they cannot stop their impacts
 Razinsky 1
Razinsky, Liran. "How to Look Death in the Eyes: Freud and Bataille."SubStance 38.2 (2009): 63-88.
But this attitude the cultural-conventional one of ours towards death has a powerful effect on our lives. Life is impoverished, it loses in interest, when the highest stake in the game of living, life itself, may not be risked. It becomes as shallow and empty as, let us say, an American flirtation, in which it is understood from the first that nothing is to happen, as contrasted with a Continental love-affair in which both partners must constantly bear its serious consequences in mind. Our emotional ties, the unbearable intensity of our grief, make us disinclined to court danger for ourselves and for those who belong to us. We dare not contemplate a great many undertakings which are dangerous but in fact indispensable, such as attempts at artificial flight, expeditions to distant countries or experiments with explosive substances.We are paralyzed by the thought of who is to take the son’s place with his mother, the husband’s with his wife, the father’s with his children, if a disaster should occur. Thus the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions. Yet the motto of the Hanseatic League ran: ‘Navigare necesse est, vivere non necesse.’ (“It is necessary to sail the seas, it is not necessary to live.”) (“Thoughts” 290-91) Readers unfamiliar with Freud’s paper are probably shaking their heads in disbelief. Is it Freud who utters these words? Indeed, the oddity of this citation cannot be over-estimated. It seems not to belong to Freud’s thought. One can hardly find any other places where he speaks of such an intensification of life and fascination with death, and praises uncompromising risk-taking and the neglect of realistic considerations. In addition to being unusual, the passage itself is somewhat unclear.18 The examples—not experimenting with explosive substances—seem irrelevant and unconvincing. The meaning seems to slide. It is not quite clear if the problem is that we do not bring death into our calculations, as the beginning seems to imply, or that, rather, we actually bring it into our calculations too much, as is suggested at the end But what I wish to stress here is that the passage actually opposes what Freud says in the preceding passages, where he describes the cultural-conventional attitude and speaks of our inability to make death part of our thoughts. In both the current passage and later passages he advocates including death in life, but insists, elsewhere in the text, that embracing death is impossible. In a way, he is telling us that we cannot accept the situation where death is constantly evaded. Here again Bataille can be useful in rendering Freud’s position more intelligible. He seems to articulate better than Freud the delicate balance, concerning the place of death in psychic life, between the need to walk on the edge, and the flight into normalcy and safety. As I asserted above, where in Freud there are contradictory elements, in Bataille there is a dialectic. Bataille, as we have seen, presents the following picture: It might be that, guided by our instincts, we tend to avoid death. But we also seem to have a need to intersperse this flight with occasional peeps into the domain of death. When we invest all of our effort in surviving, something of the true nature of life evades us. It is only when the finite human being goes beyond the limitations “necessary for his preservation,” that he “asserts the nature of his being” (La Littérature 214; 68). The approaches of both Bataille and Freud are descriptive as well as normative. Bataille describes a tendency to distance ourselves from death and a tendency to get close to it. But he also describes Man’s need to approach death from a normative point of view, in order to establish his humanity: a life that is only fleeing death has less value. Freud carefully describes our tendency to evade death and, in the paragraph under discussion, calls for the contrary approach. This is stressed at the end of the article, where he encourages us to “give death the place in reality and in our thoughts which is its due” (“Thoughts” 299). Paradoxically, it might be what will make life “more tolerable for us once again” (299). But since Freud also insists not only on a tendency within us to evade death, but also on the impossibility of doing otherwise, and on how death simply cannot be the content of our thought, his sayings in favor of bringing death close are confusing and confused. Freud does not give us a reason for the need to approach death. He says that life loses in interest, but surely this cannot be the result of abstaining from carrying out “experiments with explosive substances.” In addition, his ideas on the shallowness of a life without death do not seem to evolve from anything in his approach. It is along the lines offered by Bataille’s worldview that I wish to interpret them here. Sacrifice, Bataille says,brings together life in its fullness and the annihilation of life. We are not mere spectators in the sacrificial ritual. Our participation is much more involved. Sacrificial ritual creates a temporary, exceptionally heightened state of living. “The sacred horror,” he calls the emotion experienced in sacrifice: “the richest and most agonizing experience.” It “opens itself, like a theater curtain, on to a realm beyond this world” and every limited meaning is transfigured in it (“Hegel” 338; 288). Bataille lays stress on vitality. Death is not humanizing only on the philosophical level, as it is for Hegel or Kojève. Bataille gives it an emotional twist. The presence of death, which he interprets in a more earthly manner, is stimulating, vivifying, intense.Death and other related elements (violence) bring life closer to a state where individuality melts, the mediation of the intellect between us and the world lessens, and life is felt at its fullest. Bataille calls this state, or aspect of the world, immanence or intimacy: “immanence between man and the world, between the subject and the object” (“The Festival” 307-311; 210-213). Moments of intensity are moments of excess and of fusion of beings (La Littérature 215; 70). They are a demand of life itself, even though they sometimes seem to contradict it. Death is problematic for us, but it opens up for us something in life. This line of thought seems to accord very well with the passage in Freud’s text with which we are dealing here, and to extend it. Life without death is life lacking in intensity, an impoverished, shallow and empty life. Moreover, the repression of death is generalizedand extended: “the tendency to exclude death from our calculations in life brings in its train many other renunciations and exclusions.” Freud simply does not seem to have the conceptual tools to discuss these ideas. The intuition is even stronger in the passage that follows, where Freud discusses war (note that the paper is written in 1915): When war breaks out, he says, this cowardly, conservative, risk-rejecting attitude is broken at once. War eliminates this conventional attitude to death. “Death could no longer be denied. We are forced to believe in it. People really die. . . . Life has, indeed, become interesting again; it has recovered its full content” (“Thoughts” 291). Thus what is needed is more than the mere accounting of consequences, taking death into consideration as a future possibility. What is needed is exposure to death, a sanguineous imprinting of deathdirectly on our minds, through the “accumulation of deaths” of others. Life can only become vivid,fresh, and interesting when death is witnessed directly. Both authors speak of a valorization of death, and in both there is a certain snobbery around it. While the masses follow the natural human tendency to avoid death, like the American couple or those who are busy with the thought of “who is to take our place,” the individualists do not go with the herd, and by allowing themselves to approach death, achieve a fuller sense of life, neither shallow nor empty.19 Yet again, Freud’s claims hover in the air, lacking any theoretical background. Bataille supplies us with such background. He contests, as we have seen, the sole focus on survival. Survival, he tells us, has a price. It limits our life. As if there were an inherent tension between preserving life and living it. Freud poses the same tension  here. `Either we are totally absorbed by the wish to survive, to keep life intact, and therefore limit our existence to the bare minimum, or else we are willing to risk it to some extent in order to make it more interesting, more vital and valuable. Our usual world, according to Bataille, is characterized by the duration of things, by the “future” function, rather than by the present. Things are constituted as separate objects in view of future time. This is one reason for the threat of death: it ruins value where value is only assured through duration. It also exposes the intimate order of life that is continuously hidden from us in the order of things where life runs its normal course. Man “is afraid of death as soon as he enters the system of projects that is the order of things” (“The Festival” 312; 214).Sacrifice is the opposite of production and accumulation. Death is not so much a negation of life, as it is an affirmation of the intimate order of life, which is opposed to the normal order of things and is therefore rejected.
The 1AC is a case study that indicates a pressing threat ofextinction, but assures us that affirming will thankfully stop our demise. However, the action the aff prescribes will never actually be materialized because the magic wand of fiat is only an illusory game. What this means is that the end of humanity is now hurling towards us and we stand powerless to stop it. Their hypothetical method of saving the world is a plea for help in the face of an inevitable death. Fehl
Steve Fehl, September 19 2011, “Reaching the present moment means coming to terms withdeath”, Saybrook University, http://www.saybrook.edu/newexistentialists/posts/09-19-11
Here is the cold, hard reality – we all die.  Each of us are reminded of this fact on a daily basis – we lose a job, a relationship ends, a child leaves home,  a friend betrays us, a long-time pet is put to sleep, a parent dies,  we witness or experience a traumatic event, or our favorite sports team loses a game.  Nature reminds us of the limitedness of life as we move from summer through fall into winter.  At the same time many of us test our mortality, wanting to prove that we are ten feet tall and bullet proof – we drive too fast, we skydive, we use nicotine, we play an extreme sport, we dive from a high cliff into the churning waters of a lake or river below, we bungee jump from a balcony or bridge, we ride a dangerous river rapids, or run with bulls.  We try some or all of these to convince ourselves that the rush of adrenaline we experience is demonstrable proof that we are exempt from dying, substantiating that the law of finality does not apply to us. Still others, in a denial or avoidance of his or her demise, turn to religious beliefs or spiritual practices.  Some hold onto a life hereafter, or focus on a previous life in some form.  Some expend tremendous energy in creating a reputation or legacy that will in some way carry him or her beyond the throws of death and to live on in infamy.  Otherstalk about those who have died as though they have simply moved onto another state or county.  Yetothers escape the inevitability of life’s end with self-medication or delusion.  But theharsh reality remains – we all are going to die. As existential therapists, how do we confront this issue of finiteness with our clients?  Many of those who enter our therapeutic space do sofearing the end.  He or she comes into our space terrorized that her or his life is coming to end, that her or his life has no meaning or purpose any longer.  Do we diminish the fear by simply reassuring them they will be “okay” or that “things will work out”, or do we join with them to struggle with their terror of the reality that life will never be the same?  Do we engage with them in their fear of what is, or do we over-simplify the struggle as a way ofprotecting ourselves, and our client, from the painstaking task of dealing with the panic that finality brings in the midst of living? The coreof existential angst is our anxiety over death.  The late-twentieth century philosopher, Dirty Harry Callahan said, “A man’s got to know his limitations?”  (Dirty Harry wasn’t much into gender inclusiveness.)  As an individual and a therapist, how have we dealt with the reality of our limitedness?  How you or I view our finitude significantly influences how we work with our clients.  If we believe, as the song “Fame” implies, “we’re gonna’ live forever, I’m gonna’ learn how to fly,” how does that impact our connection with the client who struggles with his or her sexual orientation?  If we believe that our dying is simply moving onto the “sweet by and by”, how does that influence our relationship with the client overcome with grief from the loss of a son or daughter in war To the length and depth we have explored our own perceptions and experiences of death; our ability to assist another in her or his confrontation with mortality is severely limited.  Much of our culture, as well as parts of psychology, perceive the reflection ondeath as morbid and insignificant.  Instead, our culture and our training, tells us to focus on hope and possibility.  The problem with this thinking is that an individual cannot offer or hold hope for another, until that individual has stared into the great abyss of death and acknowledged the finitude of his or her existence. The insight and perspective we gain from sitting with our own existential angst concerning our deathenables and empowers us to sit with the anxiety of our client concerning his or her limitations in life and relationships.  Such reflecting on death does not mean creating a ‘bucket list’ of that which we wish to accomplish before our passing.  It does not mean writing our epitaph or how we will be described upon our passing.  To meditate on our perceptions and experience of death is to sit with the lack of existence. To sit with the idea that no one will remember our dying.  To sit with our finitude is to embrace the thought that maybe there will be no celebrations of our life, no memorials of our sacrifice or contributions to others.  To confront our dying is to focus on the current moment, the here and the now. To confront our finality is to focus on another, to know them and connect with them right here and right now.  It is being present with our client in this moment.  It is taking in the current situation with all of our senses, not just observing but allowing ourselves to experience the situation to the fullest extent.  The reality is that you and I are going to die . . . today, tomorrow, next week, . . . sometime.  The more we come to know the reality of our dying, the more we come to know depth of the current moment.
The alternative is to reject the aff’s illusion of solvency and to endorse the sacrifice of humanity as a thought experiment. Instead of deferring the inevitable, you should recognize that death is close and embrace this fact, submitting to vapid luxury in order to reclaim value. If the affirmative is a negation of death, the negative is an affirmation of life

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge:
They rely on a naïve understanding of separation, technology, tools, humans are fundamentally all one of the same, nuclear energy – their alarmism only serves to separate us from embracing radiation as natural and part of nature’s many rhizomes, turns otherization
Lovelock 88—Worked for NASA. Ph.D. degree in medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Fellow of the Royal Society. Served as the president of the Marine Biological Association, and has been a Honorary Visiting Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford (James,  The ages of Gaia, http://www.alamut.com/proj/98/nuclearGarden/bookTexts/Lovelock_Radiation.html, AMiles)

It is easy to ignore the fact that we are the anomalous ones. The natural energy of the Universe, the power that lights the starts in the sky, is nuclear. Chemical energy, wind, and water wheels: such sources of energy are, from the viewpoint of a manager of the Universe, almost as rare as a coal-burning star. If this is so, and if God's Universe is nuclear-powered, why then are so many of us prepared to march in protest against its use to provide us with electricity? Fear feeds on ignorance, and a great niche was opened for fear when science became incomprehensible to those who were not its practitioners. When X rays and nuclear phenomena were discovered at the end of the last century, they were seen as great benefits to medicine--the near-magic sight of the living skeleton and the first means to palliate, even sometimes cure, cancer. Röntgen, Becquerel, and the Curies are remembered with affection for the good their discoveries did. Sure enough, there was a dark side also, and too much radiation is a slow and nasty poison. But even water can kill if too much is taken. It is usually assumed that the change in attitude towards radiation came from our revulsion at that first misuse of nuclear energy at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it is not that simple. I well remember how the first nuclear power stations were a source of national pride as they quietly delivered their benefice of energy without the vast pollution of the coal burners they replaced. There was a long spell of innocence between the end of the Second Worlds War and the start of the protest movements of the 1960s. So what went wrong? Nothing really went wrong, it just happens that nuclear radiation, pesticides, and ozone depleters share in common the property that they are easily measured and monitored. The attachment of a number to anything or anyone bestows a significance that previously was missing. Sometimes, as with a telephone number, it is real and valuable. But some observations--for example, that the atmospheric abundance of perfluoromethyl cyclohexame is 5.6 x 10-15, or that as you read this line of text at least one hundred thousand of the atoms within you will have disintegrated--while scientifically interesting, neither confer benefit nor have significance for your health. They are of no concern to the public. But once numbers are attached to an environmental property the means will soon be found to justify their recording, and before long a data bank of information about the distribution of substance X or radiation Y will exist. It is a small step to compare the contents of different data banks and, in the nature of statistical distributions, there will be a correlation between the distribution of substance X and the incidence of the disease Z. It is no exaggeration to observe that once some curious investigator pries open such a niche, it will be filled by the opportunistic growth of hungry professionals and their predators. A new subset of society will be occupied in the business of monitoring substance X and disease Z, to say nothing of those who make the instruments to do it. Then there will be the lawyers who make the legislation for the bureaucrats to administer, and so on. Consider the size and intricacy of the radiation-monitoring agencies, of the industry that builds monitoring and protective devices, and of the academic community that has radiation biology as its subject. If the strong public fear of radiation were dispelled, it would not be helpful to their continued employment. We see that there is a very biological, Gaian, feedback in our community relationship with the environment. It is not a conspiracy or a selfishly motivated activity. Nothing like that is neeed to maintain the ceaseless curiosity of explorers and investigators, and there are always opportunists waiting to feed on their discoveries. If this alone were not enough, there are the media, ready to entertain us. They have in the nuclear industry a permanent soap opera that costs them nothing. Why, we can even experience the excitement of a real disaster, like Chernobyl, but in which, as in fiction, only a few heroes died. It is true that calculations have been made of the cancer deaths across Europe that might come from Chernobyl, but if we were consistent, we might wonder also about the cancer deaths from breathing the coal smoke smogs of London and look on a piece of coal with the same fear now reserved for uranium. How different is the fear of death from nuclear accidents from the commonplace and boring death toll of the roads, of cigarette smoking, or of mining--which when taken together are equivalent to thousands of Chernobyls a day. It was Rachel Carson, with her timely and seminal book Silent Spring, who started the Green Movement and made us aware of the damage we can so easily do to the world around us. But I do not think that she could have made her case against pesticide poisoning without the prior discovery that agricultural pesticides were distributed ubiquitously throughout the whole biosphere. Number could even be attached to the wholly insignificant quantities of pesticide in the milk of nursing mothers or in the fat of penguins in the Antarctic. In Rachel Carson's time, pesticides were a real threat, and the blind exponential increase of their use put all our futures in hazard. But we have responded in a fashion, and that one experience ought not be extrapolated to all environmental hazards real or imagined. The foregoing paragraphs are not intended as support for the nuclear industry, not to imply that I am enamoured of nuclear power. My concern is that the hype about it, both for and against, diverts us from the real and serious problem of living in harmony with ourselves and the rest of the biota. I am far from being an uncritical supporter of nuclear power. I often have a nightmare vision of the invention a simple, light weight nuclear fusion power source. It would be a small box, about the size of a telephone directory, with four ordinary electricity outlets embedded in its surface. The box would breath in air and extract, from its content of moisture, hydrogen that would fuel a miniature nuclear fusion power source rated to supply a maximum of 100 kilowatts. It would be cheap, reliable, manufactured in Japan, and available everywhere. It would be the perfect, clean, safe power source; no nuclear waste nor radiation would escape from it, and it could never fail dangerously. Life could be transformed. Free power for domestice use; no one need ever again be cold in winter or overheated in the summer. SImple, elegant pollution-free private transport would be available to everyone. We could colonize the planets and maybe even move on to explore the star systems of our Galaxy. That is how it might be sold, but the reality almost certainly is ominously expressed by Lord Acton's famous dictum "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He was thinking of political power, but it could be just as true of electricity. Already we are displacing the habitats of our partners in Gaia with agricultural monocultures powered by cheap fossil fuel. We do it faster than we can think about the consequences. Just imagine what could happen with unlimited free power. If we cannot disinvent nuclear power, I hope that it stays as it is. The power sources are vast and slow to be built, and the low cost of the power itself is offset by the size of the capital investment required. Public fears, unreasoning though they sometimes are, act as an effective negative feedback on unbridled growth. No one, thank God, can invent a chain saw driven by a nuclear fission power source that could but a forest as fast and heedlessly as now we cut down a tree. To my ecologist friends, many of whom have been at the sharp end of protest against nuclear power, these views must seeem like a betrayal. In fact, I have never regarded nuclear radiation or nuclear power as anything other than a normal and inevitable part of the environment. Our prokatyotic forebears evolved on a planet-sized lump of fallout from a star-sized nuclear explosion, a supernova that synthesized the elements that go to make our planet and ourselves. That we are not the first species to experiment with nuclear reactors has been touched on earlier in this book. I am indebted to Dr. Thomas of Oak Ridge Associated Universities, who gave me a new insight on the nature of the biological consequences of nuclear radiation. As I listened to his words, spoken in the quiet privacy of his room, I felt an emotion like that described by Keats in his verses about fist reading Chapman's Homer. What Dr. Thomas said may have been no more than hypothetical, but to me it was exciting stuff. Let's look at his proposition: "Suppose that the biological effects of exposure to nuclear radiation are no different from those of breathing oxygen." We have long known that the agents within the living cell that do damage after the passage of an X-ray photon, or a fast-moving atomic fragment, are an assortment of broken chemicals; things called free radicals that are reactive and destructive chemicals. As an X-ray photon passes through the cell, the radiation severs chemical bonds just as a bullet might sever blood vessels and nerves. By far the greater part of this destruction is of molecules of water, for they are the most abundant in living matter. The broken pieces of a water molecule form, in the presence of oxygen, a suite of destructive products including the hydrogen and hydroxyl radicals, the superoxide ion, and hydrogen peroxide. These are all capable of damaging, irreversibly, the genetic polymers that are the instructions of the cell. This is now conventional scientific wisdom; the novel insight from Dr. Thomas was to remind us that these same destructive chemicals are being made all the time, in the absence of radiation, by small inefficiencies in the normal process of oxidative metabolism. In other words, so far as our cells are concerned, damage by nuclear radiation and damage by breathing oxygen are almost indistinguishable. The special value of this hypothesis is that it suggests a rule of thumb for comparing these two damaging properties of the environment. If Dr. Thomas were right, then the damage done by breathing is equivalent to a whole body radiation dose of approximately 100 roentgens per year. I used to wonder about the risk-benefit ratio of a medical X-ray examination. A typical hospital X-ray of the chest or abdomen could deliver 0.1 roentgen of radiation, enough to blacken the film of a personal radiation monitor and to have caused terror to the inhabitants of Three Mile Island. Now, thanks to Dr. Thomas, I look upon it as no more than one-thousandth of the effect of breathing for a year. Or to put it another way, breathing is fifty times more dangerous than the sum total of radiation we normally receive from all sources. The early battles at the end of the Archean against the planet-wide pollution by oxygen are still apparently with us. Living systems have invented ingenious countermeasures: antioxidants such as vitamin E to remove the hydroxyl radiacals, superoxide dismutase to destroy the superoxide ion, catalase to inactivate hydrogen peroxide, and numerous other means to lessen the destructive effects of breathing. Nevertheless, it seems likely that the life span of most animals is set by a fixed upper limit of the quantity of oxygen that their cells can use before suffering irreversible damage. Small animals such as mice have a specific rate of metabolism much greater than we do; that is why they live only a year or so even if protected from predation and disease. Oxygen kills just as nuclear radiation does, by destroying the instructions within our cells about reproduction and repair. Oxygen is thus a mutagen and a carcinogen, and breathing it sets the limit of our life span. But oxygen also opened to life a vast range of opportunities that were denied to the lowly anoxic world. To mention just one of these: free molecular oxygen is needed for the biosynthesis of those special structure-building amino-acids, hydroxylysine and hydroxyproline. From these are made the structural components that made possible the trees and animals. 

The alternative is to embrace technological progress as inevitable and necessary to survival as evolution. Nevertheless, it is your job to purpose it correctly, ceding the political only allows current systems to become technocratic
- sequencing goes neg on this issue of environmentalism, they’ve conceptualized a failed politicial approach that doesn’t know how to appeal to the system and use it to benefit the environment
Mendenhall 9 Beth Mendenhall (2011 CEDA champ, graduated from Kansas state, studied philosophy and political science). “The Environmental Crises: Why We Need Anthropocentrism.” Stance, Volume 2, April 2009. http://www.bsu.edu/libraries/virtualpress/stance/2009_spring/5menderhall.pdf
The weakly anthropocentric view avoids the difficulties of justifying an environmental ethic from either end of the spectrum. On one hand, it avoids controversy over the existence of intrinsic value in non-human organisms, objects, and ecological systems. This is one important characteristic of a nonanthropocentric ethic like Deep Ecology– finding intrinsic value in all living things.3 By intrinsic value, I mean value that exists independent of any observer to give it value. For example, a nonanthropocentric ethicist would see value in an animal that no human could ever benefit from or even know about, simply because of what it is. While possibly justifiable, an ethic that treats all living things and possibly even ecological systems as intrinsically valuable may seem very radical to a large portion of the public. It seems that even the philosophical community remains divided on the issue. On the other hand, our ethic avoids making felt human desire the loci of all value by showing how considered human values can explain the value in our environment. In other words, what humans value, either directly or indirectly, generates value in the environment. In this way, we avoid unchecked felt preferences that would not be able to explain why excessive human consumption is wrong. Avoiding these controversial stances will contribute substantially to the first advantage of a weakly anthropocentric environmental ethic: public appeal. The importance of public appeal to an environmental ethic cannot be overstated. We are running out of time to slow or reverse the effects of past environmental degradation, and we will need the support of society to combat them effectively. Hence, the most important advantage of a weakly anthropocentric ethic over a nonanthropocentric one is public appeal because many people feel that nonanthropocentrism is just too radical and contrary to common sense. For many, all value does come from humans, since they believe we are the only species capable of rational thought. Opinions about the environment are certainly changing, but anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that most reasons given for increasing environmental protection all reduce to anthropocentrism. For example, the 2004 book The Meat You Eat, by Ken Midkiff, explains why factory farming should be rejected, with a focus on its detrimental effects to human health. The vegan and vegetarian movements have increasingly focused on this angle of the factory farming debate, perhaps because of the broader appeal of human-focused motivations. As Midkiff says, “It is simply impossible to raise animals in concentrated operations and to slaughter these animals by the thousands… without severe health consequences among humans. By treating these animals as units of production, the industrial methods, ultimately and inevitably, produce meats that are unfit to eat.”4 Even if this justification for ending factory farming is not one defended by deep ecologists, isn’t actual change more important? Common justifications for species protection include parents wanting their children to know what an elephant, or a leopard, or a panda look like, how the beauty of animals increases human satisfaction in much the same way that an art gallery would, or the genetic information they can provide which might cure human diseases. In fact, almost every justification printed or aired in major news media reflects a anthropocentric bias. For example, an April 2008 article from the BBC, entitled “Species Loss Bad for Our Health”, surveys “a wide range of threatened species whose biology could hold secrets to possible treatments for a growing variety of ailments.”5 President-elect Barack Obama has consistently spoken about global warming in terms of its impact on future human generations. In a 2007 speech at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, he stressed the urgency of the issue by saying that “the polar ice caps are now melting faster than science had ever predicted… this is not the future I want for my daughters.”6  As for the last premise, most people agree that human consciousness is intrinsically valuable. That is the reason why this value needs little explanation. Even if this justification isn’t perfect, I believe that the ecological ends justify the philosophical means.
Turns case and their rep cause policy failure- Their strategy is too radical empirically fails to reclaim the political and solve anthropocentric climate change which is the root cause of their impacts

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 4 | Opponent: Ishan | Judge:
The aff’s rhetoric plays into a racist tradition of scapegoating—the impact is endless war
- the aff has an islamaphobic sentiment that is essentially agaisnt the central concept of islam.
- the aff has used the threat to interfere in other areas, after 9/11-- bush declared the war on the wrong states assuming they assisted terrorists which never happened.
- Police act against their enemy eeyrwhere and the man with the turban is assigned as the archetypal enemy.
Denike, 15—Dalhousie University (Margaret, “Scapegoat racism and the sacrificial politics of “security””, Journal of International Political Theory 2015, Vol. 11(1) 111–127, dml)
A sacrificial logic has been repeatedly expressed to the point of being rather commonplace in the hype of the so-called “war on terror” and its endless reverberations in the security-focused policies of the past decade, and in the rising tides of Islamophobic sentiment that have swept through communities and launched organizations such as Jihad Watch,3 mandated to expose and eradicate the imposition of “jihad theology and ideology” in “Western societies.” In the United States, it has inspired initiatives such as the “Save our State” legislation passed with overwhelmingly popular vote by the Oklahoma State legislature in 2010, prohibiting courts from considering Islamic Shari’a law when deciding a case (Ballou, 2012).4 Being against Islam, as such, or refusing any legislative or institutional recognition is the only condition of membership in such catastrophizing communities, physically, virtually, and otherwise. Such environments feature scapegoating as a daily affair, expressed in what Girard might consider to be its “ancient” sense: operating at the imposed borders and margins of the community, quite literally as a “casting out” (Razack, 2008) of those who are deemed “non-citizens” for whatever reason. Expelled, if not consigned to “the camp” (Razack, 2008: 7), the mythic figure carries with it the fears and anxieties of communities caught up in cycles of vengeance and in the desire to define itself against those others on the right side of a vindictive justice. As Sherene Razack (2008) observes, when critical political theorists speak of significance of “the camp” in an endless war on terror, “it is in order to note the sheer numbers of people exiled from political community, their status as non-persons, and the fact that their eviction from political community is a legally authorized one” (p. 12).¶ Since 9/11 in particular, domestic and international imperialist politics have firmly fastened onto fear as an apparatus of social and public control, using the specter of terrorism as a proxy for public danger and social insecurity. The threat of terrorism— imagined or otherwise—has been ascribed stereotypical cultural, political and religious attributes, which for this generation, at least, is that of the presumptively Middle Eastern “Islamic fundamentalist,” the popular making of which has furnished a (re)newed archetype and related symbol to carry the fears and anxieties of countless communities within security states such as Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. Such figures make regular appearances in the contexts of media, public education, marketing initiatives, and political campaigns, invariably to their own benefit and to that of burgeoning “security industries” and private military contactors, worldwide. Through these apparatuses, the scapegoating mechanism is fully imbricated in the productive racial formations that have constituted the “Muslim-looking” subject as an identity in its own right (Cashin, 2010; Volpp, 2002), part of which includes its status as an “archetypal enemy” (Razack, 2008: 12), readily resorting to terror, and publicly justifiably profiled, preventatively detained or deported. Although this refocused racism has notably different expressions than those used to justify the slavery of African detainees two centuries ago, it nonetheless shares with these earlier formations its related incentives: they are both lucratively yoked to the global economies of modern imperialism, and they remain a condition of empire’s international corporate/militaristic flourishing.¶ Sherene Razack (2008) discusses at length how the new juridical formation of what Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt call today’s Empire5 formulates the haunting figure of the terrorist as the “new enemy” (p. 12). Fueled by the passions of “just wars” and enabled by the “exceptionalism” that unilaterally extends executive and police powers, as they do security measures around border control, the “logic of the exception” sustains a racial order through legislated practices of exclusion, disposal, and consignment to “the camp” (Agamben, 2005: 2; Razack, 2008: 12–13). As Razack suggests, in line with Hardt and Negri (2000: 13–16), this logic gives content to racial difference, marking those who are expendable, deportable, and justifiably detainable as a function of a neoliberal ordering that, at a “banal” level, empowers police to act against enemy everywhere, while at another empowers the nation against “an archetypal enemy who poses an absolute threat,” justifying permanent states of emergency and endless war.
Their fixation on national interests and apocalyptic scenarios justifies endless violence, totalitarianism, and nuclear war—the alternative is to vote neg as an intellectual criticism of their securitizing representations
Ahmed 12 Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is Executive Director of the Institute for Policy Research and Development (IPRD), an independent think tank focused on the study of violent conflict, he has taught at the Department of International Relations, University of Sussex "The international relations of crisis and the crisis of international relations: from the securitisation of scarcity to the militarisation of society" Global Change, Peace and Security Volume 23, Issue 3, 2011 Taylor Francis

While recommendations to shift our frame of orientation away from conventional state-centrism toward a 'human security' approach are valid, this cannot be achieved without confronting the deeper theoretical assumptions underlying conventional approaches to 'non-traditional' security issues.106 By occluding the structural origin and systemic dynamic of global ecological, energy and economic crises, orthodox approaches are incapable of transforming them. Coupled with their excessive state-centrism, this means they operate largely at the level of 'surface' impacts of global crises in terms of how they will affect quite traditional security issues relative to sustaining state integrity, such as international terrorism, violent conflict and population movements. Global crises end up fuelling the projection of risk onto social networks, groups and countries that cross the geopolitical fault-lines of these 'surface' impacts - which happen to intersect largely with Muslim communities. Hence, regions particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts, containing large repositories of hydrocarbon energy resources, or subject to demographic transformations in the context of rising population pressures, have become the focus of state security planning in the context of counter-terrorism operations abroad.
The intensifying problematisation and externalisation of Muslim-majority regions and populations by Western security agencies - as a discourse - is therefore not only interwoven with growing state perceptions of global crisis acceleration, but driven ultimately by an epistemological failure to interrogate the systemic causes of this acceleration in collective state policies (which themselves occur in the context of particular social, political and economic structures). This expansion of militarisation is thus coeval with the subliminal normative presumption that the social relations of the perpetrators, in this case Western states, must be protected and perpetuated at any cost - precisely because the efficacy of the prevailing geopolitical and economic order is ideologically beyond question.
As much as this analysis highlights a direct link between global systemic crises, social polarisation and state militarisation, it fundamentally undermines the idea of a symbiotic link between natural resources and conflict per se. Neither 'resource shortages' nor 'resource abundance' (in ecological, energy, food and monetary terms) necessitate conflict by themselves.
There are two key operative factors that determine whether either condition could lead to conflict. The first is the extent to which either condition can generate socio-political crises that challenge or undermine the prevailing order. The second is the way in which stakeholder actors choose to actually respond to the latter crises. To understand these factors accurately requires close attention to the political, economic and ideological strictures of resource exploitation, consumption and distribution between different social groups and classes. Overlooking the systematic causes of social crisis leads to a heightened tendency to problematise its symptoms, in the forms of challenges from particular social groups. This can lead to externalisation of those groups, and the legitimisation of violence towards them.
Ultimately, this systems approach to global crises strongly suggests that conventional policy 'reform' is woefully inadequate. Global warming and energy depletion are manifestations of a civilisation which is in overshoot. The current scale and organisation of human activities is breaching the limits of the wider environmental and natural resource systems in which industrial civilisation is embedded. This breach is now increasingly visible in the form of two interlinked crises in global food production and the global financial system. In short, industrial civilisation in its current form is unsustainable. This calls for a process of wholesale civilisational transition to adapt to the inevitable arrival of the post-carbon era through social, political and economic transformation.
Yet conventional theoretical and policy approaches fail to (1) fully engage with the gravity of research in the natural sciences and (2) translate the social science implications of this research in terms of the embeddedness of human social systems in natural systems. Hence, lacking capacity for epistemological self-reflection and inhibiting the transformative responses urgently required, they reify and normalise mass violence against diverse 'Others', newly constructed as traditional security threats enormously amplified by global crises - a process that guarantees the intensification and globalisation of insecurity on the road to ecological, energy and economic catastrophe. Such an outcome, of course, is not inevitable, but extensive new transdisciplinary research in IR and the wider social sciences - drawing on and integrating human and critical security studies, political ecology, historical sociology and historical materialism, while engaging directly with developments in the natural sciences - is urgently required to develop coherent conceptual frameworks which could inform more sober, effective, and joined-up policy-making on these issues.’

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge:
Text: Countries should only use existing shipbuilding sites to produce 100 1GWe MSRs per year per shipyard for all nuclear power and convert existing reactors
Tech exists now and avoids every conventional reactor issue – build rate is fast enough to solve warming
ThorCon 16 "Thorcon Power | The Do-Able Molten Salt Reactor". Thorconpower.com. N. p., 2016. Web. 30 Aug. 2016.
ThorCon is a simple molten salt reactor. Unlike all current reactors, the fuel is in liquid form. If the reactor overheats for whatever reason, ThorCon will automatically shut itself down, drain the fuel from the primary loop, and passively handle the decay heat. There is no need for any operator intervention. In fact there is nothing the operators can do to prevent the drain and cooling. ThorCon is walkaway safe. The ThorCon reactor is 30 m underground. ThorCon has three gas tight barriers between the fuelsalt and the atmosphere. Two of these barriers are more than 25 m underground. Unlike nearly all current reactors, ThorCon operates at near-ambient pressure. In the event of a primary loop rupture, there is no dispersal energy and no phase change. The spilled fuel merely flows to a drain tank where it is cooled. The most troublesome fission products, including strontium-90 and cesium-137, are chemically bound to the salt. They will end up in the drain tank as well. No New Technology ThorCon is all about NOW. ThorCon requires no new technology. ThorCon is a straightforward scale-up of the successful Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE). The MSRE is ThorCon’s pilot plant. There is no technical reason why a full-scale 250 MWe prototype cannot be operating within four years. The intention is to subject this prototype to all the failures and problems that the designers claim the plant can handle. This is the commercial aircraft model, not the Nuclear Regulatory Commission model. As soon as the prototype passes these tests, full-scale production can begin. Rapidly Deployable The entire ThorCon plant including the building is manufactured in blocks on a shipyard-like assembly line. These 150 to 500 ton, fully outfitted, pre-tested blocks are barged to the site. A 1 GWe ThorCon will require less than 200 blocks. Site work is limited to excavation and erecting the blocks. This produces order of magnitude improvements in productivity, quality control, and build time. ThorCon is much more than a power plant; it is a system for building power plants. A single large reactor yard can turn out one hundred 1 GWe ThorCons per year. Fixable No complex repairs are attempted on site. Everything in the nuclear island except the building itself is replaceable with little or no interruption in power output. Rather than attempt to build components that last 40 or more years in an extremely harsh environment with nil maintenance, ThorCon is designed to have all key parts regularly replaced. Every four years the entire primary loop is changed out, returned to a centralized recycling facility, decontaminated, disassembled, inspected, and refurbished. Incipient problems are caught before they can turn into casualties. Major upgrades can be introduced without significantly disrupting power generation. Such renewable plants can operate indefinitely; but, if a ThorCon is decommissioned, the process is little more than pulling out but not replacing all the replacable parts. Cheaper than Coal ThorCon requires less resources than a coal plant. Assuming efficient, evidence based regulation, ThorCon can produce reliable, carbon free, electricity at between 3 and 5 cents per kWh depending on scale.

Mutually exclusive, they ban reactors
Produces 50000 times less waste
ThorCon 16 "Thorcon Power | The Do-Able Molten Salt Reactor". Thorconpower.com. N. p., 2016. Web. 30 Aug. 2016.
A 1 GWe ThorCon requires an initial fuel charge of 3,156 kg of 20 Low Enriched Uranium. We also need to add 11 kilograms of this fuel per day. Every 8 years the fuel must be changed out. The uranium is easily recoverable, but we do not give ourselves any credit for this. Assuming a yellowcake cost of $66 per kg, a conversion to UF6 cost of $7.50, and 90 dollars per SWU, ThorCon’s levelized fuel cost is 0.53 cents per kilowatt-hour. See the Executive Summary for details. Every 8 years the plant will end up sending about 160 tons of spent fuel back to the recycling facility. This material will be about 75 thorium, with 95 of the remainder valuable uranium. Even if we don’t attempt any separation, other than boiling off the salt, the total fuel waste stream averages about 2 m3 per year. ThorCon has more than a 4:1 advantage over coal in fuel costs, and at least a 50,000:1 advantage in solid waste volume. If the easily separated uranium is re-enriched, then ThorCon’s fuel cost will drop further, and uranium requirements will be nearly halved.

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge:
Resolved- The USFG will install underwater anti-neutrino detectors with adaptive telescoping neutrino detection.
Allows us to prematurely shutdown reactors
Neutrino telescopes utilize new techniques to deliver preemptive signals for CME’s.
EVP 12
EMIL VENERE-PURDUE. "Decay Detector Gives Solar Flare Alert - Futurity." Futurity. N.p., 14 Aug. 2012. Web. 24 Mar. 2015. http://www.futurity.org/decay-detector-gives-solar-flare-alert/.
PURDUE (US) — A new method predicts solar flares more than a day before they occur—protecting satellites, power grids, and astronauts from potentially dangerous radiation. The system works by measuring differences in gamma radiation emitted when atoms in radioactive elements “decay,” or lose energy. This rate of decay is widely believed to be constant, but recent findings challenge that long-accepted rule. The new detection technique is based on a hypothesis that radioactive decay rates are influenced by solar activity, possibly streams of subatomic particles called solar neutrinos. This influence can wax and wane due to seasonal changes in the Earth’s distance from the sun and also during solar flares, according to the hypothesis, which is supported with data published in a dozen research papers since it was proposed in 2006, says Ephraim Fischbach, a Purdue University professor of physics. Fischbach and Jere Jenkins, a nuclear engineer and director of radiation laboratories in the School of Nuclear Engineering, are leading research to study the phenomenon and possibly develop a new warning system. Jenkins, monitoring a detector in his lab in 2006, discovered that the decay rate of a radioactive sample changed slightly beginning 39 hours before a large solar flare. The new observations support previous work by Jenkins and Fischbach to develop a method for predicting solar flares. Advance warning could allow satellite and power grid operators to take steps to minimize impact and astronauts to shield themselves from potentially lethal radiation emitted during solar storms. The findings agree with data previously collected at the Brookhaven National Laboratory regarding the decay rate of chlorine 36. There, changes in the decay rate were found to match changes in the Earth-sun distance and Earth’s exposure to different parts of the sun itself, Fischbach says. Large solar flares may produce a “coronal mass ejection” of highly energetic particles, which can interact with the Earth’s magnetosphere, triggering geomagnetic storms that sometimes knock out power

Tournament: Greenhill | Round: 2 | Opponent: Katy Taylor | Judge:
Nuclear energy essential to decreasing warming- studies prove
- warming real confirmed by IPCC
- WHO study of nuclear power being clean
WNA 16 More Than, "World Energy Needs and Nuclear Power," No Publication, http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and-future-generation/world-energy-needs-and-nuclear-power.aspx World Nuclear Association KB
On a global scale nuclear power currently reduces carbon dioxide emissions by some 2.5 billion tonnes per year (relative to the main alternative of coal-fired generation, about 2 billion tonnes relative to the present fuel mix). Carbon dioxide accounts for half of the human-contributed portion of the global warming effect of the atmosphere. The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has comprehensively reviewed global warming and has reached a consensus that the phenomenon is real and does pose a significant environmental threat during the next century if fossil fuel use continues even at present global levels. See also Climate Change – science paper. The 2007 IPCC report on mitigation of climate change says that the most cost-effective option for restricting the temperature rise to under 3°C will require an increase in non-carbon electricity generation from 34 (nuclear plus hydro) then to 48-53 by 2030, along with other measures. With a doubling of overall electricity demand by then, and a carbon emission cost of US$ 50 per tonne of CO2, nuclear's share of electricity generation was projected by IPCC to grow from 16 now to 18 of the increased demand (ie 2650 TWh to some 6000 TWh/yr), representing more than a doubling of the current nuclear output by 2030. The report projected other non-carbon sources apart from hydro contributing some 12-17 of global electricity generation by 2030. This is considerably more than subsequent World Energy Outlook projections for 2030 reported above. Nuclear power has a key role to play in reducing greenhouse gases. Every 22 tonnes of uranium (26 t U3O8) used saves one million tonnes of carbon dioxide relative to coal. Of more immediate relevance is clean air, and the health benefits of low pollution levels. A World Health Organisation (WHO) study published in 2011 showed that some 1.34 million people each year die prematurely due to PM10 particles – those less than 10 microns (μm) – in outdoor air. Outdoor, PM10 particles mostly originate in coal-fired power stations and motor vehicles, and indoors, residential wood and coal burning for space heating is an important contributor, especially in rural areas during colder months. WHO studied publicly-available air quality data from 1081 cities across 91 countries, including capital cities and those with populations of more than 100,000 people. The data used are based on measurements taken from 2003 to 2010, with most being reported for the period 2008-09. The WHO air quality guideline for PM10 is 20 micrograms per cubic metre (μg/m3) as an annual average. However, eleven cities exceeded 200 μg/m3 average, eg UlaanBaatar at 279 μg/m3, whereas most of the 490 cities below the guideline level were in North America. In August 2015 the Global Nexus Initiative (GNI) was set up by the US Nuclear Energy Institute (NEI) and the Partnership for Global Security. It aims to explore the links between climate change, nuclear energy and global security challenges through a working group of 17 multidisciplinary policy experts from the non-governmental, academic and private sectors in Denmark, France, Japan, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates and the USA. The group will convene for a series of meetings and workshops, through which it aims to produce policy memoranda identifying the challenges and offering recommendations. These will feed into a cumulative report at the end of the two-year project. GNI points out that climate change, energy security and global security are all issues that cut across national borders, have significant economic and social impacts, and require input from the full spectrum of stakeholders. This means policies must be coordinated at national, regional and global levels.
Prefer:
A. They study 1081 studies across 91 countries to observe air pollution and ghg’s at various instances over a 7 year period. Sample size first- it filters out cherrypicking and data bias
B. This is a non-governmental organization so they don’t have any incentive to change their data- they also draw on data from experts in multiple organizations. Prefer experts- they know individual factors in their field
Nuclear trades off with coal plants
Magill 15 Bobby;  Senior Science Writer for Climate Central; Scientific American; 1/30/2015; “Nuclear Power Needs to Double to Curb Global Warming”; http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-needs-to-double-to-curb-global-warming/;
The International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency suggest in a report released Thursday that nuclear will have such a significant role to play in climate strategy that nuclear power generation capacity will have to double by 2050 in order for the world to meet the international 2°C (3.6°F) warming goal.¶ With fossil fuels growing as sources of electricity across the globe, the IEA sees nuclear power as a stable source of low-carbon power helping to take polluting coal-fired plants offline.¶ To accomplish the needed CO2 emissions cuts to keep warming no greater than 2°C, the IEA says global nuclear power generation capacity needs to increase to 930 gigawatts from 396 gigawatts by 2050. With nearly 100 nuclear reactors, the U.S. has more nuclear power plants than any other country, representing 105 gigawatts of production. France, Japan, Russia and China round out the top five countries using nuclear power.¶ Globally, nuclear energy is already making a comeback with 72 nuclear reactors now under construction worldwide, mainly in Asia.¶ “This marked the greatest number of reactors being built in 25 years,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement. “Nuclear energy also remains the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity worldwide. And, indeed, if we are to meet our collective climate goals, nuclear energy is critical.”¶ All forms of low-carbon energy must be employed to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, she said.¶ That conclusion is consistent with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s findings last year that global carbon dioxide emissions need to be capped at 450 parts per million in order to prevent warming greater than 2°C, Robert N. Stavins, director of the Project on Climate Agreements at Harvard University and a drafting author of the IPCC’s Working Group III Report, said.¶ “It is virtually inconceivable that the 2 degree or 450 parts per million target as a cap can be achieved in this century without a variety of factors, among which are substantially greater reliance on nuclear power than current trajectories would suggest,” Stavins, who is unaffiliated with the IEA’s report, said.¶ Charles Kolstad, professor of economic policy research at Stanford University, suggested the IEA’s conclusions may be too strident.¶ “Nuclear is not necessary to meet any target except the most stringent,” he said. “The IPCC relies heavily on CCS (carbon capture and storage). Nuclear would certainly help, though.”¶ That’s because global power demand is growing and nuclear is a good alternative to coal, the main source of power in parts of the world where cheap natural gas is unavailable to replace coal, he said.¶ The IEA said nuclear reactor safety issues raised by Fukushima can be addressed by strong regulations, independent regulators, a culture of safety surrounding nuclear plants and the development of new safety technology, the report says.¶
Global warming definitively causes extinction
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/)
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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.” The report notes a key distinction between resilience (mitigating the impact of climate change) and agreements (ways to stabilize climate change) and states that: 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. 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: 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. 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. 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!