Gonzaga Debate Institute 1 Warming Core Warming Bad Gonzaga Debate Institute 2 Warming Core ***Science Debate*** Gonzaga Debate Institute 3 Warming Core Warming Real – Generic Warming real - consensus Brooks 12 - Staff writer, KQED news (Jon, staff writer, KQED news, citing Craig Miller, environmental scientist, 5/3/12, "Is Climate Change Real? For the Thousandth Time, Yes," KQED News, http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2012/05/03/is- climate-change-real-for-the-thousandth-time-yes/) BROOKS: So what are the organizations that say climate change is real? MILLER: Virtually ever major, credible scientific organization in the world. It’s not just the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Organizations like the National Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, the American Association for the Advancement of Science. And that's echoed in most countries around the world. All of the most credible, most prestigious scientific organizations accept the fundamental findings of the IPCC. The last comprehensive report from the IPCC, based on research, came out in 2007. And at that time, they said in this report, which is known as AR-4, that there is "very high confidence" that the net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming. Scientists are very careful, unusually careful, about how they put things. But then they say "very likely," or "very high confidence," they’re talking 90%. BROOKS: So it’s not 100%? MILLER: In the realm of science; there’s virtually never 100% certainty about anything. You know, as someone once pointed out, gravity is a theory. BROOKS: Gravity is testable, though... Virtually every major credible scientific organization in the world says climate change is real. MILLER: You're right. You can’t drop a couple of balls off of the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove climate change. That’s why we have to rely on mathematical models to try to figure out where this is all going. And that's difficult. But it’s not impossible, as some people like to paint it. You know, the people doing the models are not inept. Over the past nearly four years, Climate Watch has interviewed a lot of scientists, attended conferences, read academic papers. To me, as what you might call an informed observer, the vast preponderance of scientific evidence supports this notion that the Earth is warming and that human activity is a significant cause. BROOKS: Are there legitimate debunkers of this proposition? MILLER: Certainly there are legitimate scientists on the other side of the question. If you take, for example, a guy by the name of John Christy from the University of Alabama, who is very strongly identified with climate change skeptics. That doesn’t mean that his work is invalidated. He came out recently with a study that basically refuted the idea that there’s been an observable shrinkage in the snow pack of the Sierra Nevada. And we talked to other scientists who do believe in anthropogenic or human-induced global warming and do believe that the Sierra snow pack is going to be shrinking, who thought that this study was sound. But that’s one study in a sea of studies. And you have look at the preponderance of the evidence and not at any one particular study, not any particular year, not even any particular ten years, because even a 10-year trend does not necessarily constitute climate change. BROOKS: What are some of the metrics scientists have looked at to come to the conclusion that human-caused climate change is real? MILLER: They study temperature records. There have been tidal gauges in place for a long time, looking at sea-level rise, and also augmented now by satellite data that measure with greater accuracy the rate of the rise. They’ve looked at things like ice cores from Greenland and elsewhere which gives us sort of a reverse chronological story of what the climate has done. And you can actually pull one of those ice cores and see the amount of C02 that was in the atmosphere at the time. And what they've found is what looks to be a pretty convincing relationship between the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the behavior of the Earth’s climate. BROOKS: But there are some who refute that evidence? MILLER: Absolutely. We’ll get people frequently commenting on our blog who will say the sea level is not rising and that there’s been no warming for the past ten years. As I already pointed out, ten years of anything does not constitute a definitive pattern; it’s just too short a time span. It’s this idea of cherry-picking data, which both sides accuse the other of doing. You have to look at the Earth’s climate over time as a really big, complicated jigsaw puzzle. And clearly there are pieces missing. And there are pieces sitting off to the side that aren’t missing, but we don’t quite know how they fit into the puzzle yet. But still, you see enough of the picture to know what’s going on. The science has yielded at least -- as Stanford's Chris Field of the IPCC puts it -- a blurry picture of the future. And the blurry picture is enough to know the general direction we’re heading, even without knowing all of the specifics. BROOKS: Are there former critics who now acknowledge the reality of climate change? MILLER: Richard Muller would be a good example of that. He’s the physicist over at UC Berkeley who was identified with the skeptic camp for a long time. He wasn’t buying a lot of climate change theory. He launched a temperature-data audit because he wasn’t convinced that the temperature data being used by the IPCC and NOAA and others was accurate, that there were fundamental issues – they were getting bad data, garbage in, garbage out. Warming now-Laundry list Venkataramanan and smitha ‘11(Department of Economics, D.G. Vaishnav College, Chennai, India Indian Journal of Science “Causes and effects of global warming p.226-229 March 2011 http://www.indjst.org/archive/vol.4.issue.3/mar11-pages159-265.pdf KG) Increasing global temperatures are causing a broad range of changes. Sea levels are rising due to thermal expansion of the ocean, in addition to melting of land ice. Amounts and patterns of precipitation are changing. The total annual power of hurricanes has already increased markedly since 1975 because their average intensity and average duration have increased (in addition, there has been a high correlation of hurricane power with tropical sea-surface temperature). Changes in temperature and precipitation patterns increase the frequency, duration, and intensity of other extreme weather events, Gonzaga Debate Institute 4 Warming Core such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and tornadoes. Other effects of global warming include higher or lower agricultural yields, further glacial retreat, reduced summer stream flows, species extinctions. As a further effect of global warming, diseases like malaria are returning into areas where they have been extinguished earlier. Although global warming is affecting the number and magnitude of these events, it is difficult to connect specific events to global warming. Although most studies focus on the period up to 2100, warming is expected to continue past then because carbon dioxide (chemical symbol CO2) has an estimated atmospheric lifetime of 50 to 200 years. Warming extremely high and increasing—current action is key to solving Malcolm, University of Toronto, 2k (Jay Malcolm 9/2000 http://wwf.panda.org/?2143/Speed-Kills- Rates-of-Climate-Change-are-Threatening PB) Boston, US: Global warming represents a rapidly worsening threat to the world's wildlife and natural habitat. The increase of global temperatures seen in the late 20th century was unprecedented in the last 1,000 years. Professor Tom Crowley of Texas A&M University predicts that in the 21st century "the warming will reach truly extraordinary levels" surpassing anything in the last 400,000 years.¶ New research by the conservation organization WWF indicates that the speed with which global warming occurs is critically important for wildlife, and that the accelerating rates of warming we can expect in the coming decades are likely to put large numbers of species at risk.¶ Species in the higher latitudes of the northern hemisphere, where the warming will be greatest, may have to migrate. Plants may need to move 10 times faster than they did at the end of the last ice-age. Very few plant species can move at rates faster than one kilometer per year, and yet this is what will be required in many parts of the world.¶ The worst affected countries are likely to be Canada and Russia, where the computer models suggest that, on average, migration rates in excess of one kilometer per year will be required in a third or more of terrestrial habitats. High migration rates will particularly threaten rare, isolated or slow-moving species but will favour weeds and pests that can move, reproduce or adapt fast. The kudzu vine and Japanese honeysuckle are examples of nuisance plants in the US that will likely benefit from global warming.¶ Conditions today make it far harder for species to move to new habitat than it was thousands of years ago. The last time the climate warmed anywhere near as fast as it is predicted to do this century, was 13,000 years ago when sabre-toothed tigers and wooly mammoths still roamed the earth and humans had just begun to populate the Americas.¶ At that time the whole of human society probably numbered in the tens of millions and all were hunter gatherers.