1NC

1NC ANTHROPOCENE K
Scenario planning for climate adaptation is the literally the definition of
resilient living, the depoliticizing capitulation to power
Grove 14 [Kevin, Institute of Geography and Earth Sciences, Llandinam Building,
Aberystwyth University, "Agency, affect, and the immunological politics of disaster
resilience" Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32(2): 240256]
Resilience, agency, and assemblage Resilience

is one of a number of what Ben Anderson (2010a) calls

anticipatory logics: more or less coherent explanations about the nature of future threats
and disorder that render uncertain futures governable. Anticipatory logics such as
preemption, precaution, preparedness, and resilience arose in the face of new
experiences of insecurity derived from phenomena such as nuclear warfare, global
terrorism, and global environmental change. These threats introduced a
fundamentally new understanding of life defined in terms of socioecological
interconnection and emergence (Cooper, 2008). The problem is no longer that borders may
be transgressed, but that emergent life may spiral out of control. For example, the
interconnections spawned by the physical and cybernetic infrastructure of global capitalism
act as conduits for the international drug trade and terrorist financing, as well as supporting legal flows
of financial capital and cheaply manufactured goods (Duffield, 2010; Reid, 2007). Likewise, the environmental
transformations these flows produce have created a radically unstable global climatic system that threatens all manner of
socioecological disruption, including more intense hurricanes and tropical cyclones (Dalby, 2009). Set against these new
insecurities, techniques such as scenarios, vulnerability mapping, simulations, and

education and training exercises enable people to visualize potential futures,

develop response and risk-mitigating capacities, and ultimately change their action in the
present in order to ward off future calamities. Exactly how these techniques govern
uncertain futures is determined by their timespecific and place-specific articulation with
anticipatory logics (Anderson, 2010a). What sets resilience apart from other anticipatory logics is how it
positions the subject in relation to uncertainty. While preparedness, precaution, and preemption all
in some way seek to prevent uncertain futures from being realized, resilience seeks to enhance an
individuals or systems capacity to live with, and indeed prosper from, uncertainty
(OMalley, 2010). Resilience has a unique genealogy that lies in both psychology (OMalley, 2010) and
ecology and complex systems theory (Walker and Cooper, 2011). These divergent roots share a
common concern with creating what Lentzos and Rose (2009, page 243) call a subjective and
systematic state to enable each and all to live freely and with confidence in a world
of potential risks. For example, psychology deploys resilience to study how children
exposed to traumatic events could nonetheless develop into normal, psychologically
sound adults. This work focuses on the inherent capacities of research subjects to adapt to adverse situations and cope
with otherwise debilitating stresses. Similarly, ecology is concerned with the conditions that enable
social and ecological systems to adapt to external shocks. Key here is a systems adaptive
capacity, which is determined by the density and quality of relations among a systems component parts. Proponents
distinguish disaster resilience from other approaches such as hazard and vulnerability studies with reference to the
formers emphasis on the agency of people who suffer catastrophes (Brown and Westaway, 2011; Eakin and Leurs, 2006).
However, themes of agency are not new to disaster studies. Foundational vulnerability studies drawing on Marxist
political economy and Freirian pedagogy emphasized that local people possessed their own knowledge on hazards and
vulnerability reduction that technocentric approaches to hazard studies silenced and delegitimized (eg, Hewitt, 1983;
Wisner et al, 1977). Here, the agency of local peoples became the foundation for participatory disaster mitigation
programs that made vulnerability reduction a matter of changing uneven political economic relations that caused
vulnerability in the first place (Maskrey, 1989). This is, of course, not the kind of agency that circulates within resilience
programming (Gaillard, 2010). Resilience recognizes disaster victims as active agents with

inherent self-help capacities that can be strengthened through proper resilience

programming, rather than passive victims who require external aid to overcome structural constraints.
Proponents define agency as, the capacity of an individual to act independently and to make ones own free choices.
Ones agency is ones independent capability or ability to act on ones will (Brown and Westaway 2011, page 325). In turn,

this capability

is determined not only by the physical capacity of an individual but also by the extent to
which that is supported by relationships with others and their own perceptions of the
extent to which they can exercise agency, in other words, self-efficacy (Brown and Westaway,
2011, pages 330331). Accordingly, a growing body of research now maintains that adaptation to climate change and more
frequent hazards can be improved by a better understanding of the psychological and sociocultural aspects of adaptive
capacity (Grothmann and Patt, 2005). Adaptive capacity is no longer something limited by structural constraints such as
race, class, or gender inequalities, it now depends on individuals psychological dispositions and the wider cultural belief
systems that affect their perceptions of self-efficacy (Aitken et al, 2011; Blennow and Persson, 2009; Frank et al, 2011).
Even though resilience downplays, or often ignores, the role political economic relations play in creating vulnerability and
constraining adaptability, proponents argue that resilience does not depoliticize vulnerability analysis. Instead, they argue
that resilience is a progressive development in research and policy on hazard and vulnerability reduction that seeks to
foster self-organizing adaptive capacities in individuals and complex social and ecological systems, and thus to break
dependencies on centralized forms of mitigation and relief provision. For example, a recent review of resilience in disaster
management asserts that, a focus on the perceptual and relational is inherently political, as it is about agency (Brown
and Westaway, 2011, pages 331332). In short, resilience is inherently political and progressive because it seeks to
empower people to be agents of their own vulnerability reduction in order to make the proper choices and avoid
maladaptations in an emergent environment. My concern is with the limited vision of politics

that underpins such assertions. This work relies on an understanding of power in terms of
oppression: the action of an external will or force on another will. Empowerment is a
matter of freeing this oppressed will through participatory resilience programming,
enabling subjects to make their own adaptation decisions and then realize these goals. Politics here becomes little
more than a technical pursuit to design and implement the most effective capacitybuilding initiatives (Grove, forthcoming). However, as Foucault famously demonstrates, empowerment and
freedom from oppression constitute their own power relations and systems of subjection
(Foucault, 1990). Indeed, critical scholars have begun unpacking the biopolitical effects of
techniques of anticipatory action such as resilience. For example, Julian Reid (2012) has argued that
resilience creates depoliticized subjects that see their vulnerability and insecurity
not as the result of uneven political economic relations that can and should be
changed, but rather as unavoidable consequences of living in an emergent and
interconnected world. In Mark Duffields (2011) provocative phrasing, it is the official policy response to the
fabricated uncertainty of neoliberal development. This work gives us good reason to be sceptical of
blanket claims about the inherently empowering nature of resilience programming . While
practitioners intentions may indeed be sincere, in practice the effect of resilience is often to
depoliticize and individualize adaptation, to turn it into a way of merely surviving
the aftereffects of industrial modernization, the green revolution, and the Washington consensus (Walker
and Cooper, 2011, page 155).

Global climate catastrophe has replaced military threats as the locus of

American state securitizaton --- the affs attempt to structure global climate
policy enables the effective integration of Chinese and global behavior into
the American economic sphere of influence, which sustains the
carboniferous capitalism at the root of environmental collapse
Dalby, 2015 (Simon, CIGI Chair in the Political Economy of Climate Change and
Professor of Geography and Environmental Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ph.D.
from Simon Fraser Univerity, Climate geopolitics: Securing the global economy,
International Politics, Volume 52, Issue 4, Pgs. 426-444, Published online
3/20/2015)//JBS
Mumford (1934) thus described the industrial revolution as carboniferous capitalism.
With that came the disconnect from nature, celebrated as one of the great triumphs of
modernity, but with numerous despoliation and pollution problems, where the natural recycling of wastes was
overwhelmed by the scale of industrial production and the concentration of
human activities in new cities. Climate change is a consequence of this process now
operating globally. American power in the twentieth century was to a very substantial extent built on the basis of

a petroleum powered economy (see also Dannreuther, this issue). The key technology that boosted US economic growth was the
automobile, which used gasoline in large amounts and initiated the suburbanization of North America. The expansion of suburban
living as the preferred notion of the good life involved consumption patterns
dependent on extensive use of energy and resources increasingly sourced from all over the globe (Dauvergne, 2008).
This locked American society into a pattern of extensive fossil-fueled energy
consumption (McNeill, 2000). Industrial production systems in turn greatly extended the
scope of the appropriation of resources and the disruption of rural ecologies as
capitalism went global (Dalby, 2002). This is the broad material context within which the concept of security must be understood.
The evolution of carboniferous capitalism has generated social, economic and political
developments that impinge directly on how security is understood and pursued. The social and

political transformations accompanying the rise of modern states involved numerous struggles to extend the material benefits made possible by the new productive
technologies. Mitchell (2011) argues that some of the key struggles to expand the provisions of the welfare state and extend the rights of citizens related directly to
the fuel supplies that powered carboniferous capitalism. The alliances between coal miners and transport workers were especially important in forming the
industrial unions and working class movements that improved working conditions and extended benefits to wider segments of society in the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Their threat to paralyze the supply of coal, the substance that kept everything moving, was in part effective because of the large numbers
of workers at the coal face and the relatively local use of coal. Petroleum, on the other hand, is much more a matter of technical expertise. Its production is capitalrather than labor-intensive, it needs much more processing before use, and its ease of transport gave it flexibility on international markets that coal lacked (Yergin,
2011). The Marshall plan to rebuild Europe after the Second World War was tied into attempts to change the fuel mix from coal to oil, much of which came from
the Middle East (see also Dannreuther, this issue). The attempts by American companies, and the American government, to control key parts of those supplies
were an important part of this geopolitics, but the rivalries between companies, and the attempts to involve governments in support of their various efforts
mattered too. Notwithstanding periodic petroleum supply crises, crucially Mitchell (2011) reminds readers that companies were frequently more concerned to keep

Geopolitics, in the sense of interstate rivalry, thus

explains only part of the global petroleum system and attendant security dynamics. Frequent
supplies off the market to keep prices up than they were to bring resources on stream quickly.

arguments that the US is involved militarily in the Middle East to ensure that supplies of petroleum reach global or specifically American markets are
oversimplifications of a much more complex political economy of oil (Dalby and Paterson, 2009). Likewise, restrictions in petroleum supplies, as in the case of the
OPEC embargo in the aftermath of the 1973 war between Israel and Syria and Egypt, have frequently triggered large exploration booms and a subsequent
diversification of sources of supply. Energy security is frequently defined in terms of guaranteed supplies to run national economies, but commercial
arrangements, pricing and rivalries between competing energy companies greatly complicate the policy picture. While petroleum is important, it is also the case
that it is little used for electricity generation; coal is still a major energy source for power stations. This point was emphasized in the 1980s when in Britain,
Margaret Thatcher set out to break the power of the coal mine unions, and simultaneously oversaw the rise of natural gas in the fuel mix of the United Kingdom.
Supplies of natural gas came on stream in the 1980s partly as a result of the North Sea exploration accelerated by the 1973 OPEC embargo. Given the importance of
electricity to all modern modes of living, and not just capitalist production, keeping the lights on is now an essential function of states. Most states have some sort
of national grid system. Access to reliable supplies of electricity is seen now as the mark of an effective state; electricity is, in present terminology, an essential

Modern citizenship is now enmeshed with the notion of a consumptionbased lifestyle and states legitimacy is related to its provision or at least the convincing promise that it will soon be forthcoming (Yergin, 2011).
service.

This lifestyle, and the mode of production that enables it, is now what has to be secured, both from external threats to prosperity or disruption of the supplies that
make it possible, and internal threats to the order that makes prosperity work for at least a substantial part of the populace a point developed more fully in the

The expansion of carboniferous capitalism, and the lifestyles it has enabled, has also given rise to
climate change as a threat to this prosperity. Rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
demonstrates that natural systems cannot absorb the byproducts created by our
combustion of fossil fuels fast enough to recycle the carbon; the metabolic rift is now a global
phenomenon. It has now come back to haunt humanity in the form of
climate change in particular and global environmental change more
generally. The sequestration of carbon from the atmosphere, which is what the great forests of the
carboniferous period did, has now been reversed. Modern humanitys proclivities for turning rocks
back into air, while simultaneously changing the vegetation and ecological mix of much of the planets
terrestrial surface in search of fiber and food for urban industrial life, has generated
ecological transformations on a global scale (United Nations Environmental Program, 2012). The new material
context for humanity is one of a very rapidly changing planet entering a new geological phase (Barnosky et al, 2012). Given this ecological
transformation, the geopolitical context for discussions of international security and
international economics can no longer be taken to be a stable playing field for great power rivalries
next section.

(Hommel and Murphy, 2013). It too is being transformed by human action; the global economy is changing the geopolitical situation, both because new
technologies are changing how militaries function and economic rivalries play out (see Cerny, this issue), and because larger scale processes of environmental

the reconfiguration of the global

economy in coming decades will shape the biosphere profoundly , only most obviously by
determining how much carbon dioxide and methane is added to the atmosphere and at what rate. Despite the epochal nature of these
challenges, both political economists and security thinkers are only beginning to come to
terms with the urgency of tackling climate change, in particular, and ecological change more generally (Meyer, 2012). The
change and urbanization are literally changing the material context. In turn,

conventional assumption in security thinking that climate change will have geopolitical effects needs to be supplemented by a clear understanding that
geopolitical decisions and the modes of political economy built in the immediate future will also determine what kind of climate, and planetary circumstances,

The rapid
transformation of the biosphere is changing the context of international politics, just as
the expansion of the global economy is generating new social insecurities in many places .
future generations of humanity face (Dalby, 2014). This crucial point links security studies and international political economy directly.

Whether security can be rethought to take this dynamic seriously and to recognize that a functional biosphere is more important than the existing social order of

capitalism is the key question. Security The material context sketched above is crucial for understanding the meaning of security in the modern age. As the
introduction to this special issue observes, much recent literature explains the changing scope of security as reflecting the emergence of new threats that are often

security has always been about

mitigating the contradictions of capitalism and providing the conditions
necessary for its reproduction. Much recent critical work has focused on acts of
securitization: how threats are invoked and dangers used to mobilize states to act in
particular ways (Fierke, 2007). In Buzan et als (1998) terms, securitization involves the invocation of
dangers and threats to a referent object that is frequently a particular state,
and the subsequent mobilization of resources to counter that threat . This may
require the suspension of normal politics and the invocation of emergency measures, as in wartime or in the face of a major
simultaneously identified as byproducts of and threats to globalization. Arguably, however,

disaster. This formulation, close in places to Carl Schmitts discussions of sovereignty as the ability to suspend the law and declare a state of exception, emphasizes

The difficulty with such

discursive formulations of the logic of security is that they frequently occlude the
persistent function of security in maintaining the legal, political and economic arrangements of
modern societies (Bell, 2011), and thus overstate and misapprehend its recent expansion. Security was understood in the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, just as the metabolic rift began to change human circumstances, in terms of providing the legal assurance of private
property, the essential prereq uisite for the rapid expansion of capitalism (Neocleous,
2008). This was crucial to the rise of modern capitalist states, and subsequently of globalization. Thus, while security is obviously
about mobilizing to face both immediate emergencies and long-term
threats, its more pervasive function has long been to perpetuate the social
order of capitalism. In the realm of international relations, the term security typically relates to
defending particular states in the face of competition from other states and, since the dawn of the nuclear age, to arranging matters
internationally so that global warfare does not bring civilization to an end altogether . However, this
narrow view fails to recognize the longstanding relationship between
capitalism and security. In Panitch and Gindins (2012) terms, the task of American foreign
policy has long been to make the world safe for capitalism. American national
security, with its global military reach, has long underpinned the current
geopolitical order of liberal-capitalist states (Latham, 1997), even while ostensibly
providing a defense against a supposedly expansionist Soviet Union during the Cold War. Thereafter, in
the Clinton administrations foreign policy, this became about the enlargement of democracy and the
related spread of economic freedom. Despite differences in emphasis, the subsequent Bush administration maintained
that imperial impulse to extend the remit of American-led globalization (Smith, 2005). In the
Bush doctrine after 9/11, economic freedom had to be spread, by force if necessary,
to do nothing less than eliminate tyranny on earth, as the official White House documents put it (Dalby, 2009a).
As security was extended widely in the logics of the global war on terror, its logic has been extended
into numerous realms of society, and has become an explicit mode of governance in many places
(Bell, 2011). Security studies in its Cold War manifestation the focus on nuclear weapons and strategies, and the overarching superpower rivalry
frequently failed to consider in much detail the larger social functions of security in domestic terms
beyond the concern with subversion, and the internal communist menace to capitalist social arrangements . Maintaining the Americanboth the performance of security by political actors and the ability to impose extreme measures (Williams, 2003).

led social order was simply taken for granted in much of the literature, something that required permanent military readiness and a willingness to use force in
many places around the world (Bacevich, 2010). However, the contradictions of nuclear weapons and Mutually Assured Destruction suggested very clearly that

threats of massive violence rendered everyone insecure, generating

numerous attempts to redefine security. Much of these were summarized in the very influential United Nations
Development Report of 1994, which introduced the notion of human security, covering numerous things including environment, economy,
politics and community. This formulation recognized that many threats to human security are
generated unintentionally by the actions of millions of people undertaking routine
activities, not by the malicious designs or aggressive intentions of one states rulers toward other states, which had been the traditional Cold War focus of
national security (Kaldor, 2007). As security expanded beyond military threats , so too the
agencies responsible for providing security to themselves and others were
also extended; security became ubiquitous as a statement of desire and a mode of ruling numerous things, agencies
and peoples (Rothschild, 1995). Indeed, given the proliferation of security discourse in the last couple of decades
it has become a prime mode of governance. Linked to the logics of neoliberalism
and the presumed efficacy of the market, security has extended its scope to
ensure social relations consistent with the further expansion of capitalism
such

into such things as carbon markets, and the production of resilient subjects able to deal with
numerous new threats in a way that will not undermine social order (Chandler, 2013). Thus

security is increasingly understood though still only implicitly as being challenged by the contradictions of capitalist development, which require
multidimensional mitigation. The difficulty with claiming that this formulation of security is new is that many states have long provided at least basic welfare under
the rubric of social security. Pension schemes, some health services, unemployment insurance and public education have been part of welfare state provisions for
generations in the worlds metropolitan economies. These initiatives were in part necessary to provide for the survival of people in new urban settings without the
social safety net of traditional communities, and partly won by working class struggles, with coal miners, key workers in carboniferous capitalism, central to many
of these (Mitchell, 2011). This helped legitimate modern states and justify their taxation systems. In this sense, states have long provided for key aspects of human
security, at least within their borders, by mitigating some of the social, economic and political disruptions and inequities caused by the rapid expansion of
capitalism. The historical extension of such measures to many states is part of the argument underpinning the principle of responsibility to protect, which insists
that their provision is part of the necessary functions of states (ICISS, 2001). Ironically, this has occurred just as financial globalization has reduced the abilities of
many smaller states in particular to raise taxes and deal with related policy issues, and made states more vulnerable to the vagaries of the global economy,
emphasizing that the vulnerabilities against which states supposedly provide security are increasingly manmade (Stiglitz and Kaldor, 2013). Similar dynamics are

Paradoxically, extending human

security currently involves ecological transformation to provide ever-greater supplies of
commodities and energy to support human life and the commodity systems that make it possible, thereby
exacerbating insecurity stemming from environmental degradation.
in play in terms of environmental matters, as the emerging discussion of climate security illustrates.

The impact is mass death, global violence, and root cause of their aff
resilient adaptability is the essence of capitalism
Parr 13 [Adrian, Assoc. Prof. of Philosophy and Environmental Studies @ U. of
Cincinnati, THE WRATH OF CAPITAL: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, pp.
145-147]
A quick snapshot of the twenty-first century so far: an

economic meltdown; a frantic sell-off of public

land to the energy business as President George W Bush exited the White House; a prolonged, costly,
and unjustified war in Iraq; the Greek economy in ruins; an escalation of global food prices;
bee colonies in global extinction; 925 million hungry reported in 2010; as of 2005, the world's
five hundred richest individuals with a combined income greater than that of the poorest
416 million people, the richest 10 percent accounting for 54 percent of global income; a planet on the verge
of boiling point; melting ice caps; increases in extreme weather conditions; and the list
goes on and on and on.2 Sounds like a ticking time bomb, doesn't it? Well it is.
It is shameful to think that massive die-outs of future generations will put to pale comparison the 6
million murdered during the Holocaust; the millions killed in two world wars; the
genocides in the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Darfur; the 1 million left homeless and
the 316,000 killed by the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The time has come to wake up to the warning
signs.3
The real issue climate change poses is that we

do not enjoy the luxury of incremental change

anymore. We are in the last decade where we can do something about the situation. Paul
Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace International and a core faculty member of Cambridge University's Programme
for Sustainability, explains that "two degrees of warming is an inadequate goal and a plan for
failure;' adding that "returning to below one degree of warming . . . is the solution to the problem:'4 Once we move
higher than 2C of warming, which is what is projected to occur by 2050, positive feedback
mechanisms will begin to kick in, and then we will be at the point of no return. We
therefore need to start thinking very differently right now.
We do not see the crisis for what it is; we only see it as an isolated symptom that we
need to make a few minor changes to deal with. This was the message that Venezuela's president Hugo
Chavez delivered at the COP15 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen on December 16, 2009, when he declared:
"Let's talk about the cause. We should not avoid responsibilities, we should not avoid the depth of this problem. And I'll
bring it up again, the cause of this disastrous panorama is the metabolic, destructive

system of the capital and its model: capitalism.5

The structural conditions in which we operate are advanced capitalism. Given this fact, a

few adjustments here

and there to that system are not enough to solve the problems that climate change and
environmental degradation pose.6 Adaptability, modifications, and displacement,
as I have consistently shown throughout this book, constitute the very essence of capitalism .
Capitalism adapts without doing away with the threat. Under capitalism, one deals with threat

not by challenging it, but by buying favors from it, as in voluntary carbon-offset schemes. In the
process, one gives up on one's autonomy and reverts to being a child. Voluntarily
offsetting a bit of carbon here and there, eating vegan, or recycling our waste, although well intended,
are not solutions to the problem, but a symptom of the free market's ineffectiveness. By
casting a scathing look at the neoliberal options on display, I have tried to show how all these options are
ineffective. We are not buying indulgences because we have a choice; choices abound,
and yet they all lead us down one path and through the golden gates of capitalist
heaven.
For these reasons, I have underscored everyone's implication in this structure myself included. If anything, the book has
been an act of outrage outrage at the deceit and the double bind that the "choices" under

capitalism present, for there is no choice when everything is expendable. There is

nothing substantial about the future when all you can do is survive by facing the absence
of your own future and by sharing strength, stamina, and courage with the people around you.
All the rest is false hope.
We must craft an affirmative conception of subjectivity in response to the
Sixth Extinction Event. What is obscured by scientific and economic
responses to climate change is that the metaphysical question of the human
subject is a necessary prerequisite to imagining sustainable futures.
Evans and Reid 14. Brad Evans, professor of international relations at the University
of Lapland, Finland and Julian Reid, senior lecturer in international relations at the
University of Bristol, Resilient Life, 2014, pg. 152
The concept of extinction as it is currently employed in claims concerning the
already occurring process of the Sixth Extinction within the discourse of global ecological
catastrophe is also non-equivocal. Of course, extinction can be a risk and
possibility that one might successfully avoid. But this is not the truth we are
told of our times, which in the end will result in extinction. We are told that
we are already in the Sixth Extinction; a moment in our life-world cycle that is
already happening. Regardless of how much time we may buy ourselves now by
recognizing the truth of finitude, recovery of biodiversity will not occur in any
timeframe meaningful to people: evolution of new species typically takes at least
hundreds of thousands of years and recovery from mass extinction episodes
probably occurs on timescales encompassing millions of years.18 So, despite our
best efforts at adaption, we are merely enduring and living through the conditions
of the event of the Sixth Extinction, not overcoming or preventing its occurrence.
This to us seems to be a highly questionable deal once broached either politically or
philosophically. We seem to be in good company. For this problem was already raised by
Nietzsche, who once again proves his remarkable capacity to think in the most untimely
ways to challenge that which initially seems insurmountable and the source for lament:
Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into
numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts
invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of
world history, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few
breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. One
might invent such a fable, and yet he [they] still would not have adequately
illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and transient, how aimless and
arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There were eternities during
which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human intellect,
nothing will have happened.19
This infamous passage from On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense has often been read

to further the charges of nihilism. Nothing will have happened, so what is the point to it
all? Nothing, however, could be further from the truth. A central question Nietzsche put
in this article was What does man actually know about himself? Which also may
be put in a more affirmative way to read How can man live differently once he [they]
accepts the errors of his [their] ways?. For Nietzsche, part of the genius of
construc- tion lies in our abilities to bring error into reason. We live, he
maintained, by the error of our ways. And long may it continue. We also live in a
magnificent fabricating universe where the power of fabulation produces
different senses of perception that are no less true to the subjects existence. More
than necessary for revealing the suffocating modes of being which are continually
authenticated in modern times, it was essential to its over-coming. It is a mistake,
therefore, to read Nietzsches original provocation on the end of times as the
triumph of resentment and negation. On the contrary, he provides an acute
warning as to the dangers of living unto the end as if nothing will have happened.
Or to put it another way, to continue to live beneath the suffocating clouds of
despair is sure testimony to the fact that there is nothing to live of meaning:
The most extreme form of nihilism would be the view that every belief, every
holding-something-true is necessarily false because there is no true world.20
For Nietzsche, the counter to this will-to-nothingness could not be achieved by
turning towards some conservative approximation of truth that reveals some immutable
essence. It demands a veritable courage to truth that weathers the storm in
order to emerge transformed: When a real storm cloud thunders above him [them], he
[they] wraps himself [themselves] in his [their] cloak[s], and with slow steps he [they]
walks from beneath it21.
This raises a number of significant questions for us: If we accept the truth and reality of
the global ecological catastrophe, then how else might we respond to it? If we accept,
especially, our responsibility as a species for the creation of this catastrophe, how does
such an acceptance affect our response? Ought we not to question the injunction
to respond by merely seeking to adapt in order to survive longer? Given that it
is the very ethics of species survival and development that accounts, at base, for the
existence of human responsibility for the global ecological catastrophe, ought we not to
be seeking alternative answers to the question of how we want to live out this
self-fulfilling endgame of human existence? If there is such a thing indeed as a
global ecological catastrophe, surely the question becomes one that seeks to stake
out a more affirmative choice? How do we desire to live out these end times of
human existence so that our end might no longer be conditioned by the fear of
that end? If it is an end, and if it is true that there is no turning back from this tipping
point of extinction time, why are we choosing to live out that end by adapting to the
conditions of our own demise, rather than with experimenting with other ways of living
less attached to preserving our life as such, and more attuned to the inevitability of death
and extinction as realities that can contribute to the intensity of our experience of
worldly living for the finite time that we are left with as a species already fated to
extinction in the end?
These questions are profoundly philosophical. And rightly so! The assault we are
witnessing on the political today is so intellectually catastrophic that the only
solutions presented to us as viable propose changes so that everything ultimately
remains the same. For what are we really conserving when we offer vulnerability to
counter vulnerability and insecurity to counter insecurity? This is the real
mastery of neoliberalism. For it has led us into a catastrophic quagmire that is
fully in keeping with its need to reproduce conditions that are insecure by

design; and yet it is managing to repackage itself as the most enlightened way
to navigate the uncertain waters, albeit with a captainless crew, which ultimately
accepts that the promised land will never be shored. So surely without the
ability to step back from the catastrophic injunction with more consideration,
and bring into question the framing of the debates which offer various
technocratic solutions to the effects brought about by ecological change, however
devastating, to begin questioning the philosophical and political stakes , how is
it at all possible to even think about setting a new course of direction with a
confidence in our abilities to live through these uncertain times, and view the
troubled waters in a new, more exhilarating and aesthetically enriching light
of day?
Experimental, playful geoengineering renders problematic the geopolitical
boundaries imagined to be inevitable by resilient subjectivity the
alternative reconfigures political agendas by positing radical
geoengineering proposals as a negotiation between the human and the
cosmic forces unleashed by the Anthropocene that exceed our grasp
Clark 13 [Nigel, Professor, Lancaster Environment Centre, Geoengineering and
geologic politics, 2013, Environment and Planning 45(12) 2825 2832]
Territory and strata We

have seen that concerns over security threats in a globalising world have
engendered new strategies for protecting territorial collectivities against undesirable
incursions of lively beingsboth human and nonhuman. Geographers, it might be claimed, are beginning to
bring some depth to discussions about territorial processes, by drawing attention to the vertical and volumetric
dimensions of territory in the political landscapes of modernity (see Braun, 2000; Elden, 2013). But it is early days.

The
geoengineering debate, together with the more encompassing problematic of climate change I would argue, goes
further, raising fundamental questions about the very forces that generate, subtend, and sometimes destabilise
territorialised political formations. As we have seen, geoengineering discourse foregrounds the
potentiality of earth systems to pass over critical transition points to whole new
systemic conditions or states. It is such moments of passage through thresholds (popularised as `tipping points
in the lexicon of climate change) that geoscientists use to distinguish different periods or epochs in the earths history. And

it is major shifts between states or regimes of earth systems that define the multiple
strata that can be distinguished in the structure of the planets crust. In attending to
questions of whether or not, by what means, to what degree, and with whose consent
purposive intervention in climatic systems might be initiated, geoenginering
deliberations pivot around such critical points in earth systems. Geoengineering is not alone in

this regard. Other issues associated with climate change, such as environmental migration, threats to coastal settlements
and infrastructure, and the recent rush for access to productive land in distant regions also have much to do with the risk
of crossing boundaries in earth systems, as indeed does the more encompassing discussion about the coming of a new
human-induced geologic epochtermed the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). The concern with securing
social life against incursive biological threats is also already partially oriented towards emergent eventswhich is to say,
threshold points in ecological systems. But arguably, it is the geoengineering field that is most directly

and practically geared towards the prospect of transgressing thresholds in earth systems.
Geotechnics and related engagements with dynamical earth processes, as we have seen, are oriented toward
changes of state or regime shifts in complex physical systems. In this way, the boundaries or
thresholds of earth systems are being rendered politically problematic, analogous to the
ways that more conventional political issues come into sharp relief at the borders of nation-states or other territorial
units. To put it another way, we might say that an emergent political concern with stratathe dynamic
compositional layerings of the earthis

beginning to supplement the more familiar political

agendas defined by territory. The possibility raised by geoengineering debatesand by
the Anthropocene thesis more generallyis that the critical thresholds or boundaries that
define strata may turn out to be at least as important as those which delineate territories.
Of course, it is not simply a question of replacing the politics of territory with a politics of strata, but a matter of exploring

the multiple ways in which the dynamical properties of strata overlap, cut across, or collide with territorial processes. If
not in these precise terms, such issues already feature in geoengineering deliberations. Discussants have

pondered the question of the differential impact of various planet-scaled engineering

options on the inhabitants of different nation-states or regions . They have confronted the
possibility that single nations might embark upon climate modification programmes without the
consent of the global community, as well as considering how the multiplex world of political states might
convene to govern geoengineering research and development. And they have begun to contemplate the
mammoth task of drawing the entire global populace into some kind of participation
in decisions over geoengineering options (see Corner and Pidgeon, 2010; Robock, 2008) What I am
suggesting then, is that geoengineering debates are already in the process of reconfiguring
political agendas around the shifting composition of the earths strata, and around the
tension between the deep temporal dynamics of strata and the more superficial territorial divisions of the earths surface.
But a politics of strata is not simply an addition or amendment to the prevailing politics of

territory. Thinking and working through strata, I would insist, have very different implications
for politics than engaging with territory, and it is these differences or specificities that I turn to in my
concluding remarks. Geologic politics for a stratified planet Earlier, I suggested that earth processes have proven resistant
to prevailing modes of political ontology on account of the difficulty in imagining them as being composed or enacted
differently. Now, it may seem as though the possibility of geoengineering overcomes any conceived limit to the scope of
ontological politics by showing that even the elemental composition of our planet is now open to remaking, and is in this
wayat least in theory amenable to the decisions of the polity. But such a reading, I would argue, is too simplistic. If
there is one thing we need to take from an encounter with geoengineering debates, it is that the earth in its

entirety cannot be straightforwardly rendered into an object of political

contention. While it may well be that the territories over which different human groupings struggle are themselves
socially constructedand thus in a real sense always already politicisedthe same cannot be said of strata. Strata are
characterised by subtending relationships, in the sense that earlier or older strata are the condition of
possibility of later strata. It takes an already-composed planetary body to support the
emergence of biological life, just as a well-established stratum of living things is the condition of existence of our
own species. As philosophers Jacques Deleuze and Flix Guattari explain, it is possible for strata to
enfold each other or otherwise complicate any strict order of succession (1987, pages 335336).
Nonetheless, the subtending relationship between earlier and later strata imposes profound limits
on their capacity for recomposition by human action or any other form of agency. So while
human agents can tap into buried stratathe exhuming of fossilised hydrocarbons being a decisive case
there is an important sense in which strata composed in the past are not simply ours
to recompose. That is, we cannot
expect the conditions out of which humans emerged to fully submit to our reconstruction
or reordering, no matter how careful and how collective decision-making processes have
been (Clark, 2011, pages 5054). With regard to geoengineering, it is important for social thinkers to
keep firmly in mind that even advocates of the most audacious proposals to intervene in the
earths climate are aware that they are only tweaking a vast, massively complex system.
They know full well that any nudging of global climate into or away from a threshold is only
possible because the alternative regime is one of the possible or virtual states that inhere
in the extant earth system. In whatever form it might be imagined or applied, then, geoengineering is
not a total remaking of the earth, not the final seal on the end of nature. It can only
ever be a negotiation between the forces that humans can conceivably impact upon and
those that remainprovisionally or permanentlybeyond their practical reach. I have been arguing that
geoengineering is at the forefront of issues that are extending the scope of the political into new geological or stratal
domains. But in the very process, I want to insist, politics confronts its own limits . It comes up
against what philosopher Claire Colebrook refers to as the

monstrously impolitic (2011, page 11) or what fellow

cosmic and
terrestrial forces that surpass all measure of the human. In this sense, the incitement of
geotechnicsand of geologic politics more generallyis to bring into relief the demanding and
fraught nature of the juncture between that which is potentially political and that which
exceeds the grasp of politics, between the narrow province of the polity and the vast dominions of the
philosopher Elizabeth Grosz describes as cosmological imponderables (2008, page 23) elemental

inhuman. This means that, in

order to make a positive contribution to geoengineering and other

science may need to reconsider their investment in
ontopolitical thinking. If the desire for political domains that map onto existence or
reality with no remainder has been responsible for the occlusion of the geologic and
cosmologic dimensions of being, the same imaginaries are unlikely to open the
way to the geologic politics that the current planetary predicament calls for. It is of course
geopolitical issues, key strands of social

necessary for social science to interrogate the production of natural scientific knowledge. But the issues raised in the
geoengineering debate thus far suggest that there is also an urgent need for the social sciences to offer their commitment
and support to those geophysical truth claims that (provisionally) pass the test. Moreover, if social sciences are to move
beyond defensive and reactive responses to geoengineering, they will need to move their contributions upstream to the
framing of scientific and technoscientific inquiry. This means that social scientists must learn to think

creatively and speculatively around interventions in earth systemsas well as engaging critically.
They must be willing to reengage, in new ways, with a long human history of active, hands-on
intervention in valued physical systems (Clark, 2014). For human geographers especially, I would argue,

geoengineering offers an incitement to return to the deep temporalities and elemental

forcefulness of the earth. It is one of number of contemporary issues that prompt us to imagine a new kind of
geologic politics in which identity, citizenship, and governance are construed not just in terms of the territorial
subdivisions of our planets surface, but in the relation to a dynamic and stratified earth.

1NC CASE DEFENSE

Cant solve warming no political will in America this also straight turns
their heuristics page
Loki 9/15 [Raynard, How Republicans Made Climate Change America's Most Divisive
Political Issue, AlterNet, 9/15/15, http://www.alternet.org/environment/climatechange-more-divisive-abortion-blame-republicans]
Writing in the Altantic in May of last year, Thomas Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, laid the blame of
the nations current political dysfunction squarely in the GOPs camp:
Republicans have become a radical insurgency ideologically extreme,

contemptuous of the inherited policy regime, scornful of compromise, unpersuaded by

conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science ; and dismissive of the
legitimacy of their political opposition. The evidence of this asymmetry is overwhelming.
The Power of Denial
Even more alarming is the fact that the

climate denial sown by the GOP machine is, to a certain extent,

working. According to a recent study led by University of Bristol cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky, the
ceaseless public debate over whether climate change is actually happening is making
some climate scientists understate their own findings, which unintentionally
supports the climate deniers position that it is too soon to take aggressive climate
action.
In response to constant , and sometimes toxic, public challenges, scientists have overemphasized scientific uncertainty, and have inadvertently allowed contrarian claims to affect how
they themselves speak, and perhaps even think, about their own research, writes Lewandowsky in the journal Global
Environmental Change. One of the psychological mechanisms behind this, he argues, is pluralistic ignorance, a social
phenomenon that occurs when a minority opinion is given disproportionate

prominence in public debate, resulting in the majority of people incorrectly

assuming their opinion is marginalized. So, while climate deniers may be in the minority, the regular
coverage of climate denial by Fox News and other conservative media, and perhaps even the lack of climate change
coverage by mainstream media, are contributing factors to scientists muted approach.
A public discourse that asserts that the IPCC has exaggerated the threat of climate

change, Lewandoswky points out, may cause scientists who disagree to think their views are in the minority, and they
may therefore feelinhibited from speaking out in public. Furthermore, the researchers said when offering rebuttals to
their critics, scientists often do so within a linguistic landscape created by denial and often in a manner that reinforces
the contrarian claim.
This assessment supports the UCS analysis of cable news coverage of climate change; specifically of how CNN, an
ostensibly centrist network (at least in comparison to Fox), readily offers a soapbox for the climate denial wing. Most of
CNNs misleading coverage stemmed from debates between guests who accepted established climate science and other
guests who disputed it, write the UCS reports authors. This format suggests that established climate science is still
widely debated among scientists, which it is not, and also allows opponents of climate policy to convey inaccurate
statements about climate science.

With the media freely giving airtime to climate deniers, GOP presidential candidates feel
no inhibition about sharing their particular strain of climate denial with the world. They
are joined by growing ranks of Republican politicians of varying levels of anti-science
denial, but who agree in their opposition of any policy to combat climate change. You dont
have to be an outright science denier to try to prevent action on climate change, said Brulle. Youve got gradation its
not real; its real but we are not sure how much humans are contributing to it; I am not a scientist phrase as a way to
avoid the issue while avoiding being labeled an outright denier. There are all sorts of strategies.
But how long will the Tea Party wield influence on the climate debate? Tea Partiers tend to be older than other
Republicans (25 percent are 65 or older, compared with 19 percent of other GOP supporters). And since young people
overwhelmingly believe that climate change is happening (only 3 percent dont), perhaps the Tea Partys ability to shape
the climate debate will diminish over time. But by then, it may be too late to do anything about it.
GOP-Led Rift
While environmentalists have targeted climate change as a wedge issue that might influence the independent vote, the
climate divide is just one part of a larger trend in the United States. An expansive 2014 Pew political polarizaton survey of
10,000 adults nationwide concluded that Republicans and Democrats are more divided along

ideological lines and partisan antipathy is deeper and more extensive than at any point in the last two decades.

This deep animosity is extremely worrisome. Since 1994, the percentage of party-affiliated Americans
who have a highly negative view of the opposing party has doubled, with the majority of these fiercely partisan voters
viewing the opposing partys policies as so misguided that they threaten the nations well-being.

Though both parties are fomenting an increasing hatred for each other, its the
Republicans who must bear the brunt of the blame even as theirs is the party that
more often plays the blame game and harbors more distrust. According to Pew, more
conservatives (72 percent) have a very unfavorable opinion of Democrats, compared to 53 percent
of liberals who share the same view of Republicans. In addition, conservatives are more likely to say that Democratic party
policies are a threat to the nations well-being.

The GOP has done an excellent job at sowing enough doubt to create a political rift that
threatens any U.S.-led action on climate change . Even GOP governors have lined
up to defy Obamas new emissions rules. Jim Manzi, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and Peter
Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, offered an explanation of the GOPs stance and its
predicament in a recent National Affairs essay:
The Republican positioneither avowed ignorance or conspiracy theorizing is ultimately
unsustainable, but

some still cling to it because they believe that accepting the premise that
some climate change is occurring as a result of human action means accepting the
conclusions of the most rabid left-wing climate activists. They fear, at least implicitly, that the
politics of climate change is just a twisted road with a known destination: supporting new

carbon taxes, a cap-and-trade system, or other statist means of energy rationing, and in the process ceding yet another key
economic sector to government control. Conservatives seem to be on the horns of a dilemma: They will have to either
continue to ignore real scientific findings or accept higher taxes, energy rationing, and increased regulation.

The aff retains all the trappings of absolute power including absolute
military, technological and economic superiority and if the world seems to
be getting better it is only because we in the West have insulated ourselves
from the violence of colonialism
Douzinas 7 /Costas, Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, visiting fellow at Princeton University
and at the Cardozo School of Law, Human Rights and Empire The political philosophy of
cosmopolitanism New York: Routledge-Cavendish. pg. 288-290/
The withdrawal is precipitated and advertised by our recent wars, the war on
terrorism and the postmodern just wars. In modernity, the setting of ends,
including the ends of law, was the prerogative of the sovereign. War is the ultimate
expression of the sovereign end. The return of war indicates that sovereignty is not
retreating but losing its ability to make sense. The decision to go to war is the sovereign
decision par excellence and beyond its immediate aims, wars end is to accomplish the
sovereigns essence. The nature of the enemy in the war on terror may help us
understand this changing essence. The enemy is both banalised as a mere
criminal and absolutised as radical evil-doer and our wars take the form of
police action, of a war of law. As a criminal, the terrorist testifies to the emergence
of a common law and, as evil-doer of a universal lingua franca of ethics and semiotics
governing the entire world. The terrorist as criminal violates the one legal order and as
evildoer repudiates our common ethics. The creation of this symbolic space is
infinitely more important than toppling Saddam Hussein or catching a few Al
Qaeda members. This is the symbolic space of a global community organised according
to the effectiveness of planetary technology, world capitalism and a legal system given to
the endless circulation of causes and effects without end. But as we saw, no common law
or ethics, no world constitution or supranational right has or can emerge. War is called
police action and economic competition, violence has taken a lawful ,
humane, civilised form, nesting everywhere and nowhere, linked to any
number of ends but not to a supreme end. Community without commonality, law

without justice, terrifying sovereign action that has made the exception permanent; these
are the normative contours of the new world order. Finally, laws action veers between a
sovereignty that has given up on determining its end and a humanity that cannot
determine ends. In this sense, war may be the return to sovereignty, but of a
bastard sovereignty without community, which acts without end, except the
end of endless aggrandisement. One can argue, therefore, that the withdrawal of
sovereignty, its alleged subjection to legal and moral rules, and its replacement by
humanity refers to the withdrawal of bare sovereignty, the sovereignty of autonomous
selfconstitution. Theological sovereignty on the other hand, withdraws from
the weak states and gets condensed in its quasi-imperial centre. It is a
sovereignty of absent value, a nihilistic theology that retains all the
trappings of absolute power including absolute military, technological and
economic superiority, which has as its end the endless circulation of
exchange value. As bare sovereignty is the logical and historical presupposition of all
community including a world one, what withdraws is the space that came between bare
and theological sovereignty or between citizen and subject, in other words politics. If
sovereignty infused with value was predominantly that of blood and soil, the sovereignty
of the absence of value is the postmodern sovereignty of globalisation and empire. The
deconstruction of sovereignty, the destruction of the sense of the world leaves us
with a super-sovereignty for which violence has replaced value. The
metaphysics of humanity, of the human added to legal rights in the form of human rights
cannot provide a postmodern principle of justice because humanity like rights carries
no intrinsic value. Absent justice, the mythological principle of modernity, becomes
infinitely relativised, it abandons the remembrance or promise of absent value for
absence simple. Its justice is what we find when law and justice are collapsed into each
other, justice becomes bare and nihilistic, the productivity or efficiency of law regulating
external, material, relative relations. At this point, the symbolic space of a new world
order opens. Cosmopolitan sovereignty, the only type of global sovereignty on offer,
claims the garments of value (freedom, dignity, emancipation) but is realised in the
ubiquitous violence of economic competition, war as police action and empty but
ever-present legality. Law as validity without significance is the main form of the
social bond. There can be no community at the global level. The jurisdiction of
the global hegemon, rather than expressing of autonomy and self-constitution of
community marks its heteronomy and decline. Because nihilism and value, solely as
exchange value, cannot finish community and subjectivity, the simulacra of value
(atrocious nationalism, nihilistic terrorism, religious fundamentalism)
appear, no longer as the opposite and supplement of nihilism but as its mirror and
bastard progeny. Humanity cannot act as the a priori nihilistic or mythological source of
legal and moral rules. Let me repeat: humanitys function lies not in a philosophical
essence but in its non-essence, in the endless process of redefinition and the necessary
but impossible attempt to escape external determination. Humanity has no
foundation and no ends, it is the definition of groundlessness. But if humanity
has no ends, it can never become a sovereign value and war fought in its name will
always be fake. If rights express the endless trajectory of a nihilistic and insatiable desire,
humanitys only sacred aspect is its ability to endless sacrifice in order to resacralise the
principle of sovereignty as terrible and awe-inspiring or as its slightly ridiculous
simulacrum. At this point, the new sovereign will have achieved its end and could even
gradually wither away as humanity will have come to its final definition. But this would
also be the withering away of humanity. The principle of just war will have finally won, in
the proclamation of a perpetual peace drowned in endless violence.

The aff ignores complex dynamics within the policy climate that precludes
solvencybest case the plan gets rolled back, if not they make warming
worse
Milne, 15Adaptation Specialist with Nova Scotia Environment (Kyla, Can sensemaking tools inform adaptation policy? A practitioners perspective, Ecology and
Society 20(1): 66, dml)
Adaptation to climate change is highly complex, involving multiple players across
temporal and spatial scales, facing different stressors, at different times, with unique
vulnerabilities and capacities to adapt (Berkes et al. 2003, Adger et al. 2009, Smithers and Smit 2009).
What enables some groups to thrive and others to decline is often not the result of a single factor but of multiple
interacting factors (Folke et al. 2002, Diamond 2005). It is difficult to capture these dynamics a priori,

let alone affect them through policy (Adger et al. 2007).

There are also many tools in the policy toolbox, such as regulations, market-based incentives, and
behavior-change campaigns that can be used to steer behavior (Halpern et al. 2004). Identical policy
instruments may have positive and negative applications and unintended as well as
intended outcomes in different policy contexts (Fiorino 2006). Policy makers cannot, therefore,
rely on off-the-shelf solutions or naively assume that by adopting so-called best practices they will
evoke the positive responses experienced elsewhere. Achieving desired policy outcomes is
particularly complex because of this context sensitivity. The factors that lead to success
cannot always be predicted.
Adaptation policy is daunting too because of the diversity of views about adaptation held by
different groups. These preferences often influence what policies get supported and later
adopted. However, frequently what people think and say may not always align with how
they act or behave, particularly if factors change or policies shift (Kahneman 2011). Policy
makers cannot assume, for instance, that public support for proposed initiatives will
continue once they are implemented or that stated preferences would dictate actual
behavior on the ground. This exacerbates political uncertainty about how people will
respond to different policy regimes and renders decision making difficult .
In this sense, climate adaptation fits many of the characteristic traits of what Rittel (1972) called
wicked problems. The causes and the solutions to the problem are difficult if not
impossible to define. There is no one actor responsible for the problem or the solution.
Actors hold different views about what should be done, and unpredictable social
behaviors determine to a great extent policy success (Rittel 1972, Conklin 2006, Australian Public
Service Commission 2007, Head and Alford 2013). These and other characteristics of wicked problems help analysts to
distinguish them from more benign challenges where the problem definition and solution is clear and where there are
already best practices in place to guide decision making.
Standard rational policy planning is not designed to solve wicked problems (Rittel
1972). It

is designed to solve simple or complicated problems where the causes and

effects are known, linear, and empirically grounded (Kurtz and Snowden 2003). Managing
wicked problems requires a different strategy, and this poses a great challenge to
policy makers who tend to default into traditional policy thinking, even when it comes to
complex issues (Conklin 2006, Australian Public Service Commission 2007, Head and Alford 2013). As Einstein
once said, We cant solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them (Mielach 2012).
However, changing how policy makers approach wicked problems is tough because it requires reconciling two very
opposing modes of thinking (http://www.homerdixon.com/2010/05/05/complexity-science-and-public-policy).
The archetypal traditional policy maker is trained to distill from complex problems logical

rational solutions, using evidence to support political decision making (Rittel 1972, Howlett and
Ramesh 2009). These analysts rely on experts and independent advisers for objectivity and
tend to place great faith in the scientific method (Rittel 1972, Kurtz and Snowden 2003, Howlett and Ramesh 2009, Head
and Alford 2013). They are geared toward providing tangible, efficient, and one-time policy

solutions.
The complexity analyst archetype, by contrast, captures and tackles problems in their
inherent complexity. These analysts rely on the multiple perspectives of nonexperts for

insights on how to navigate, not necessarily solve, wicked problems (Rittel 1972, Conklin 2006).
People on the ground are thought to be more knowledgeable because they interact in the problem environment every day,
as opposed to experts who may be removed from the environment and only able to understand it through abstraction.
Through creative conversation and engagement with peers, complexity policy makers believe that people come to

identify and negotiate ways of interacting that eventually lead to solutions that are more
effective than ones that are imposed.
We use this dichotomy between traditional and complexity policy makers to help illustrate the tension between these two
opposing approaches to policy making and how it influences policy-makers impressions of SenseMaker and the value of
this kind of work. In reality, policy makers are neither one of these extremes and may exhibit any range of perspectives
and behaviors along the continuum. Like people, they are not constrained to a single, consistent position. Their views can
change as the policy context, goals, and problems shift. That said, policy makers, like anyone else, are still

vulnerable to habitual modes of thinking, bias, and preference that can color the way
they approach policy issues.
Both traditional and complexity approaches have merit provided they suit the problem at hand. If the policy
problem is tangible and simple, then a traditional approach is the most efficient and
effective (Rittel 1972). It is when traditional approaches get wrongly applied to complex
problems that troubles arise (Snowden and Boone 2007). The criticisms of risk assessments in
climate adaptation planning are a case in point. Risk assessments involve identifying
impacts, ranking risks, and finding costeffective measures to reduce those risks (Willows and
Connell 2003, Carter et al. 2007, Burton et al. 2009, Smith and Petley 2009, Kennedy et al. 2010). Risk analysts
believe that there are known knowns, or at least known unknowns, in the way that climate
change will impact society and that these factors can be drawn out with the help of expert
modeling or analysis (Snowden and Boone 2007, Smith and Petley 2009). Adaptation is treated as a simple or
complicated domain issue, not a complex or wicked one (Snowden and Boone 2007). In reality, climate
adaptation is often more complex. As argued previously, it requires addressing cause-andeffect relationships that are sometimes only retrospectively knowable, which makes
identifying the problem and the solution difficult if not impossible. Applying linear
rational policy approaches may not work in this case because there is no clear policy
problem or solution to work toward. If we force a problem diagnosis where it is not clear,
simply to adhere to the steps of our approach, we risk oversimplifying and
misdiagnosing the problem (Rittel 1972, Eakin et al. 2009, Kennedy et al. 2010).\
Otherwise alt causes like human rights would overwhelm
Schell 9/21 - Director, Center on US-China Relations, Asia Society
Orville, "How to Improve U.S.-China Relations," www.cfr.org/china/improve-us-chinarelations/p37044?cid=rss-fullfeed-how_to_improve_u.s._china_rela-092115
As U.S. and Chinese heads of state gather for another summit, the vexing question of human rights
looms larger than ever. The issue plagues the overall health of the bilateral
relationship like a low-grade infection. U.S. displeasure with Chinas rights record is only
matched by Beijings displeasure with Washingtons judgmental attitude. This standoff has
created an increasing sourness in relations that have made it difficult leaders from both countries to feel at ease with one
another. The result is that the two countries have struggled to establish the lan and comfort level required for solving
problems where real common interest is shared. Disagreement over human rights grows out of a more

divisive problem that sits unacknowledged like the proverbial elephant in the room.
Because nobody quite knows what to do, we are hardly inclined to recognize, much less discuss it: the United States
and China have fundamentally irreconcilable political systems and antagonistic
value systems. If we want to get anything done, we must pretend that the elephant isnt
there.
Disease coop inevitable, despite tensions
Jones 9/24 - vice president and director of the Foreign Policy program at Brookings
Bruce, "Xi on the global stage: The costs of leadership," Sept 24,

www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2015/09/24-xi-jinping-costs-ofleadership-jones?rssid=LatestFromBrookings
Chinas actions in the South China Sea have been more subtle than these, but no less invidious or
injurious to the notion of a stable international order . If China wants others to believe that it still
intends for its rise to be peaceful, it needs urgently to shift strategy in the South China Seaand it would be in a strong
position, then, to call on the other great powers to recommit themselves to the principle of the non-use of force and
respect for sovereignty. Im reasonably optimistic about the first idea. China was among the most neuralgic

of countries when it came to the global response to SARS a decade ago; its learned its lesson
and was far more forward leaning on Ebola. It chipped in, albeit not to scale, on the eurocrisis. Its made
financial contributions to the counter-ISIS campaign. And its made commitments that, if kept, will make
a vital difference on the climate. These efforts represent a serious start, and if President Xi expands Chinas
role in this kind of leadership it could position him well on global issuesespecially during his G-20 presidency.

Affs a useless distraction that facilitates widespread denial any reform

outside of binding international emissions reductions will fail to make a
dent in warming radical transformation key
Parr 13 [Adrian, PHD in philosophy from Monash University, professor in the
Department of Sociology and the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the
University of Cincinnati, 2013, The wrath of capital: neoliberalism and climate change
policies, Columbia University Press: New York, NY, p. 2-4]
Fredric Jameson neatly summarizes the narrative condition of modernity as the dialectic
between the modality of rupture that inaugurates a new period and the definition of that
new period in turn by continuity.4 The ironical outcome, as I describe it in the pages that follow, is that
despite the narrative category driving change in the modern world, everything continues
to stay the same-perhaps because what this narrative produces is a virulent strain of amnesia. Every change or
historical rupture contains within it the dialectical narrative structure of modernity such that the New and the period it
launches into existence are mere ritual. What persists is the condition of violence embedded in

neoliberal capitalism as it robs each and every one of us (other species and ecosystems included) of
a future. The narrative of modernity and the optimistic feeling of newness it generates are merely a distraction.
Distractions such as decarbonizing the free-market economy, buying carbon offsets,
handing out contraceptives to poor women in developing countries, drinking tap water in
place of bottled water, changing personal eating habits, installing green roofs on city hall,
and expressing moral outrage at British Petroleum (BP) for the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, although well
meaning, are merely symptomatic of the uselessness of free-market "solutions" to
environmental change. Indeed, such widespread distraction leads to denial. With
the proclamation of the twenty- first century to be the era of climate change, the Trojan horse of neoliberal
restructuring entered the political arena of climate change talks and policy , and a more
virulent strain of capital accumulation began . For this reason, delegates from the African nations, with the support of the
Group of 77 (developing countries), walked out of the 2009 United Nations (UN) climate talks in Copenhagen, accusing
rich countries of dragging their heels on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and destroying the mechanism
through which this reduction can be achieved-the Kyoto Protocol. In the absence of an

internationally binding agreement on emissions reductions, all individual

actions taken to reduce emissions-a flat global carbon tax, recycling, hybrid cars,
carbon offsets, a few solar panels here and there, and so on-are mere theatrics. In this book, I argue
that underpinning the massive environmental changes happening around the world, of
which climate change is an important factor, is an unchanging socioeconomic condition
(neoliberal capitalism), and the magnitude of this situation is that of a political crisis. So, at the risk
of extending my literary license too far, it is fair to say that the human race is currently in the middle of
an earth-shattering historical moment. Glaciers in the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps are
receding. The social impact of environmental change is now acute, with the International Organization for Migration
predicting there will be approximately two hundred million environmental refugees by 2050, with estimates expecting as

many as up to one billion.5 We

are poised between needing to radically transform how we

live and becoming extinct. Modern (postindustrial) society inaugurated what geologists
refer to as the ''Anthropocene age;' when human activities began to drive environmental change, replacing the
Holocene, which for the previous ten thousand years was the era when the earth regulated the environment. 6 Since then
people have been pumping GHGs into the atmosphere at a faster rate than the earth can reabsorb them. If we remain

on our current course of global GHG emissions, the earth's average climate will rise 3C
by the end of the twenty-first century (with a 2 to 4.5 probable range of uncertainty) . The warmer the
world gets, the less effectively the earth's biological systems can absorb carbon. The more the earth's climate heats up, the
more carbon dioxide (C02) plants and soils will release; this feedback loop will further increase climate heating. When

carbon feedback is factored into the climate equation, climate models predict that the
rise in average climate temperature will be 6C by 2100 (with a 4 to 8C probable range of
uncertainty) .7 For this reason, even if emissions were reduced from now on by approximately 3
percent annually, there is only a fifty-fifty chance that we can stay within the 2C benchmark set by the
UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007. However, given that in 2010 the world's annual growth
rate of atmospheric carbon was the largest in a decade, bringing the world's C02 concentrations to 389.6 parts per million
(ppm) and pushing concentrations to 39 percent higher than what they were in 1750 at the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution (approximately 278 ppm), and that there is no sign of growth slowing, then even the fiftyfifty window of
opportunity not to exceed 2C warming is quickly closing. If we continue at the current rate of GHG

emissions growth, we will be on course for a devastating scenario.8 We need to change

course now.9

2NC CASE

2NC WARMING INEV

Permafrost release is inevitable proves warming is locked in
Algar 2015 Jim, "Scientists Warn Of Climate Change 'Time Bomb' Locked In World's
Permafrost," www.techtimes.com/articles/59214/20150610/scientists-warn-of-climagetime-bomb-locked-for-now-in-worlds-permafrost.htm
With United Nations climate talks underway in Germany, scientists are warning of dire results if action is not taken to
defuse a "time bomb" of greenhouse gas lurking in Arctic permafrost. Permafrost, which is thawing with the warming
climate, holds

about 1,500 billion tons of heat-trapping carbon gases, they say. If released from the
could unleash
a vicious cycle in the planet's global-warming threat, according to Susan Natali of the Woods Hole
perennially frozen ground making up around a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere's exposed land, it

Research Center in Massachusetts. "Emissions from permafrost could lead to out-of-control global warming," scientists
said in a presentation at the 11-day climate talks being held in Bonn. The amount of carbon entrapped in

permafrost is around twice that currently found in Earth's atmosphere, explained Natali, who
co-authored a paper on the climate threat of thawing permafrost published in the journal Nature in April. "By 2100, we
expect 130 to 160 gigatons of carbon [to be] released into the atmosphere," she said in Bonn.
The Nature study came too late to be included in the most recent warming projections issued by the U.N.'s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Negotiators from many nations are at the Bonn talks intended to create a
draft for a global climate pact to be considered at a full United Nations climate summit in Paris this December. However,

little progress has been made toward that draft, with national delegates reporting the
talks are becoming bogged down in procedural and technical side issues . Carbon release from
thawing permafrost will only add to the problem of soaring emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, Natali and other
researchers warn. The thaw and release are interlocked, they explain, as the thawing is being accelerated by climate
warming already occurring as a result greenhouse gas emissions from human activities. In the Nature study, the
researchers estimated that the world could see a global loss of permafrost between 30 and 70

percent by 2100, tied to the rate of emissions. The lower figure is based on successful attainment of the U.N.'s stated
goal of limiting global warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-Industrial levels; the higher figure
would be the result of unrestrained emission. "The actions that we take now in terms of our fossil fuel emissions are going
to have a significant impact on how much permafrost is lost and in turn how much carbon is released from permafrost,"
Natali said. "While there is some uncertainty, we know that permafrost carbon losses will be

substantial, [and] they will be irreversible."

Warming is irreversible recent study
Jayalakshmi 2014
K, "Climate Change: It's Too Late to Avoid 1.5C Temperature Rise, Says World Bank,"
Nov 24, www.ibtimes.co.uk/climate-change-its-too-late-avoid-1-5-degree-ctemperature-rise-says-world-bank-1476233
A World Bank report notes that the world is already locked into an unavoidable rise in
temperature of almost 1.5 degree C thanks to past and predicted emissions. This can rise up to 2 degrees by
mid-century and 4 degrees by end of century if there are no concerted actions to curb emissions, says the report titled
'Turn down the heat'. "Today's report confirms what scientists have been saying past emissions have set an

unavoidable course of warming over the next two decades, which will affect the world's poorest and
most vulnerable people the most," World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said on Sunday. Even a 1.5 degree rise will
mean more severe droughts and sea level rise, more storms and more crop losses. It will drive more warming by releasing
methane from frozen permafrost. The oceans will continue to acidify and warm, damaging coral

ecosystems and sending fish migrating to cooler waters. The result could be a loss of up to 50% of
current catch volume. While melting glaciers will mean waters brought down to farms much
earlier in the season, threatening crops, the floods will turn to droughts as the glaciers
that supply water downstream disappear by end of the century.
Impossible to solve
Pearce, 13 environmental consultant for New Scientist magazine with over 20 years

of experience reporting on the environment, winner of 2002 CGIAR agricultural

research science journalism award [9/25, Fred, The New Scientist,
www.newscientist.com/article/dn24261-world-wont-cool-without-geoengineeringwarns-report.html#.VENB0VevdqO]
Global warming is irreversible without massive geoengineering of the atmosphere's chemistry. This stark
warning comes from the draft summary of the latest climate assessment by the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Delegates from national governments are discussing the draft this
week, prior to its release on Friday morning. According to one of its lead authors, and the latest draft seen by New Scientist, the report

will say: "CO2-induced warming is projected to remain approximately constant for many
centuries following a complete cessation of emission . A large fraction of climate change is
thus irreversible on a human timescale, except if net anthropogenic CO2 emissions were strongly negative
over a sustained period." In other words, even if all the world ran on carbon-free energy and
deforestation ceased, the only way of lowering temperatures would be to devise a
scheme for sucking hundreds of billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.
Much of this week's report, the fifth assessment of the IPCC working group on the physical science of climate change, will reaffirm the
findings of the previous four assessments, published regularly since 1990. It will point out that to

limit global warming to 2

C will require cumulative CO2 emissions from all human sources since the start of the
industrial revolution to be kept below about a trillion tonnes of carbon. So far, we have emitted
about half this. Current emissions are around 10.5 billion tonnes of carbon annually, and rising. Since the last assessment, published in
2007Speaker, the IPCC has almost doubled its estimate of the maximum sea-level rise likely in the coming century to about 1 metre. They
also conclude

that it is now "virtually certain" that sea levels will continue to rise for many
centuries, even if warming ceases, due to the delayed effects of thermal
expansion of warming oceans and melting ice sheets.

Models prove
Borenstein 6 (Seth,- writer for the AP http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2002906901_warming03.html)
But he and other scientists say it's too late to stop people from feeling the heat. Nearly two dozen computer
models now agree that by 2100, the average yearly global temperature will be 3 to 6 degrees
Fahrenheit higher than now, said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).
Warmings irreversible
Solomon et al 10 Susan Solomon et. Al, Chemical Sciences Division, Earth System Research Laboratory,
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ph.D. in Climotology University of California, Berkeley, Nobel Peace
Prize Winner, Chairman of the IPCC, Gian-Kasper Plattner, Deputy Head, Director of Science, Technical Support Unit
Working Group I, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Affiliated Scientist, Climate and Environmental Physics,
Physics Institute, University of Bern, Switzerland, John S. Daniel, research scientist at the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Ph.D. in physics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Todd J. Sanford,
Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Science, University of Colorado Daniel M. Murphy, Chemical
Sciences Division, Earth System Research Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Boulder GianKasper Plattner, Deputy Head, Director of Science, Technical Support Unit Working Group I, Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change, Affiliated Scientist, Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute, University of Bern,
Switzerland Reto Knutti, Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, Eidgenssiche Technische Hochschule Zurich
and Pierre Friedlingstein, Chair, Mathematical Modelling of Climate Systems, member of the Science Steering Committee
of the Analysis Integration and Modeling of the Earth System (AIMES) programme of IGBP and of the Global Carbon
Project (GCP) of the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) (Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of
the United States of America, "Persistence of climate changes due to a range of greenhouse gases", October 26, 2010 Vol
107.43: 18354-18359)
Carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and other greenhouse gases increased over the course of the 20th century due to human activities.
The human-caused increases in these gases are the primary forcing that accounts for much of the global warming of the past fifty years, with
carbon dioxide being the most important single radiative forcing agent (1). Recent studies have shown that the human-

caused warming linked to carbon dioxide is nearly irreversible for more than 1,000 y, even
if emissions of the gas were to cease entirely (25). The importance of the ocean in taking up heat and slowing the
response of the climate system to radiative forcing changes has been noted in many studies (e.g., refs. 6 and 7). The key role of the oceans
thermal lag has also been highlighted by recent approaches to proposed metrics for comparing the warming of different greenhouse gases
(8, 9). Among the observations attesting to the importance of these effects are those showing that climate changes caused by transient
volcanic aerosol loading persist for more than 5 y (7, 10), and a portion can be expected to last more than a century in the ocean (1113);

clearly these signals persist far longer than the radiative forcing decay timescale of about 1218 mo for the volcanic aerosol (14, 15). Thus
the observed climate response to volcanic events suggests that some persistence of climate change should be expected even for quite shortlived radiative forcing perturbations. It follows that the climate

changes induced by short-lived anthropogenic

greenhouse gases such as methane or hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) may not decrease in concert with
decreases in concentration if the anthropogenic emissions of those gases were to be eliminated. In this

paper, our primary goal is to show how different processes and timescales contribute to determining how long the climate changes due to
various greenhouse gases could be expected to remain if anthropogenic emissions were to cease. Advances in modeling have led to
improved AtmosphereOcean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) as well as to Earth Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs).
Although a detailed representation of the climate system changes on regional scales can only be provided by AOGCMs, the simpler EMICs
have been shown to be useful, particularly to examine phenomena on a global average basis. In this work, we use the Bern 2.5CC EMIC (see
Materials and Methods and SI Text), which has been extensively intercompared to other EMICs and to complex AOGCMs (3, 4). It should
be noted that, although the Bern 2.5CC EMIC includes a representation of the surface and deep ocean, it does not include processes such as
ice sheet losses or changes in the Earths albedo linked to evolution of vegetation. However, it is noteworthy that this EMIC, although
parameterized and simplified, includes 14 levels in the ocean; further, its global ocean heat uptake and climate sensitivity are near the mean
of available complex models, and its computed timescales for uptake of tracers into the ocean have been shown to compare well to
observations (16). A recent study (17) explored the response of one AOGCM to a sudden stop of all forcing, and the Bern 2.5CC EMIC shows
broad similarities in computed warming to that study (see Fig. S1), although there are also differences in detail. The climate sensitivity
(which characterizes the long-term absolute warming response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations) is 3 C for the
model used here. Our results should be considered illustrative and exploratory rather than fully quantitative given the limitations of the
EMIC and the uncertainties in climate sensitivity. Results One Illustrative Scenario to 2050. In the absence of mitigation policy,
concentrations of the three major greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide can be expected to increase in this century.
If emissions were to cease, anthropogenic CO2 would be removed from the atmosphere by a series of processes operating at different
timescales (18). Over timescales of decades, both the land and upper ocean are important sinks. Over centuries to millennia, deep oceanic
processes become dominant and are controlled by relatively well-understood physics and chemistry that provide broad consistency across

20% of the
emitted anthropogenic carbon remains in the atmosphere for many thousands of years
(with a range across models including the Bern 2.5CC model being about 19 4% at year 1000 after a pulse emission; see ref. 19), until
much slower weathering processes affect the carbonate balance in the ocean (e.g., ref. 18). Models with stronger
models (see, for example, Fig. S2 showing how the removal of a pulse of carbon compares across a range of models). About

carbon/climate feedbacks than the one considered here could display larger and more persistent warmings due to both CO2 and non-CO2
greenhouse gases, through reduced land and ocean uptake of carbon in a warmer world. Here our focus is not on the strength of
carbon/climate feedbacks that can lead to differences in the carbon concentration decay, but rather on the factors that control the climate
response to a given decay. The removal processes of other anthropogenic gases including methane and nitrous oxide are much more simply
described by exponential decay constants of about 10 and 114 y, respectively (1), due mainly to known chemical reactions in the atmosphere.
In this illustrative study, we do not include the feedback of changes in methane upon its own lifetime (20). We also do not account for
potential interactions between CO2 and other gases, such as the production of carbon dioxide from methane oxidation (21), or changes to
the carbon cycle through, e.g., methane/ozone chemistry (22). Fig. 1 shows the computed future global warming contributions for carbon
dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide for a midrange scenario (23) of projected future anthropogenic emissions of these gases to 2050.
Radiative forcings for all three of these gases, and their spectral overlaps, are represented in this work using the expressions assessed in ref.
24. In 2050, the anthropogenic emissions are stopped entirely for illustration purposes. The figure shows nearly irreversible warming for at

All published studies to date , which

largely irreversible warming due to future carbon dioxide

least 1,000 y due to the imposed carbon dioxide increases, as in previous work.
use multiple EMICs and one AOGCM, show

increases (to within about 0.5 C) on a timescale of at least 1,000 y (35, 25, 26). Fig. 1 shows that the calculated future warmings due
to anthropogenic CH4 and N2O also persist notably longer than the lifetimes of these gases. The figure illustrates that emissions of key nonCO2 greenhouse gases such as CH4 or N2O could lead to warming that both temporarily exceeds a given stabilization target (e.g., 2 C as
proposed by the G8 group of nations and in the Copenhagen goals) and remains present longer than the gas lifetimes even if emissions were
to cease. A number of recent studies have underscored the important point that reductions of non-CO2 greenhouse gas emissions are an
approach that can indeed reverse some past climate changes (e.g., ref. 27). Understanding how quickly such reversal could happen and why
is an important policy and science question. Fig. 1 implies that the use of policy

measures to reduce emissions of short-

lived gases will be less effective as a rapid climate mitigation strategy than would be thought if based only upon the gas lifetime.
Fig. 2 illustrates the factors influencing the warming contributions of each gas for the test case in Fig. 1 in more detail, by showing
normalized values (relative to one at their peaks) of the warming along with the radiative forcings and concentrations of CO2 , N2O, and
CH4 . For example, about two-thirds of the calculated warming due to N2O is still present 114 y (one atmospheric lifetime) after emissions
are halted, despite the fact that its excess concentration and associated radiative forcing at that time has dropped to about one-third of the
peak value.

Amazon matters more

Nordhaus 8 [Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, Founders-Break Through
Institute, Break Through, p. 64]
None of this is to deny the ecological reality. The

burning of forests, the loss of their role as net

absorbers and storage banks of carbon, and the reality of global warming make the increasingly
rapid destruction of the Amazon even more alarming than it was back in the mid-1980s, when the
Amazon first became appreciated for its biodiversity. Even if we reduced greenhouse gases by 70
percent worldwide overnight, the continued destruction of the Amazon would still
leave the global climate system in jeopardy.

Land-use changes overwhelm

Pielke et al. 2002Roger A. Pielke Sr1, Gregg Marland2, Richard A. Betts3, Thomas
N. Chase4, Joseph L. Eastman1, John O. Niles5, Dev dutta S. Niyogi6 and Steven W.
Running7, 1 Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, 2
Environmental Sciences Division, Oak Ridge National Laboratory,3 Met Office, Hadley
Centre for Climate Prediction and Research, 4 Cooperative Institute for Research in
Environmental Sciences and Department of Geography, CB 216, University of Colorado,
5 Energy and Resources Group, 310 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley, 6
Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State
University, 7 Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, University of Montana (online
25 June 2002, The influence of land-use change and landscape dynamics on the climate
system: relevance to climate-change policy beyond the radiative effect of greenhouse
gases, http://www.agci.org/dB/PDFs/Publications/01S1_RoyalSociety_Article02.pdf,
RBatra)
Policy-related quantification

of human influences on climate has focused largely on changes in

atmospheric composition. However, a large body of work has demonstrated that land-cover
change provides an additional major forcing of climate, through changes in the physical
properties of the land surface. The global radiative forcing by surface albedo change may
be comparable with that due to anthropogenic aerosols, solar variation and several of the greenhouse gases.
Moreover, in regions of intensive human-caused land-use change such as North America, Europe and
southeast Asia, the local radiative-forcing change caused by surface albedo may actually be
greater than that due to all the well-mixed anthropogenic greenhouse gases
together (IPCC 2001). Surface albedo change can be compared with greenhouse-gas emissions through the concept of
radiative forcing (Betts 2000), but changes in vegetation cover can also modify the surface heat fluxes
directly. This cannot be quantified in terms of radiative forcing, so a full quantification of land-use impacts on climate requires a new
approach. Furthermore, as well as influencing local long-term weather conditions, regional-scale land-cover change
can impact on the global climate system through teleconnections (Avissar 1995; Pielke 2001a; Claussen
2002). Remote changes in different locations may be of opposing sign, so spatial averaging may under represent the true global significance
of the land-use effects. These aspects of human influence on climate are not currently accounted for under the Kyoto Protocol. One reason
for this may be the difficulty in objectively comparing the effects of different local land-surface changes with each other and with the effects
of changing atmospheric composition. However, the

neglect of land-use effects will lead to inaccurate

quantification of contributions to climate change , with the danger that some actions may give unintended and

counterproductive results. It is therefore important that possible metrics for land-use effects are explored. Here we discuss some
approaches to this problem. 2. Historical land-use change. A documentation of global patterns of land-use change from 1700 to 2000 is
presented in Klein Goldewijk (2001). Klein Goldewijk reports on worldwide changes of land to crops of 136, 412 and 658 Mha in the periods
1700-1799, 1800-1899 and 1900-1990, respectively. Conversion to pasture was 418, 1013 and 1496 Mha in these three time periods. Figure 1
illustrates these changes, including an acceleration of tropical deforestation during the 20th century. O'Brien (2000) also documents landuse change for recent years (table 1). Apart from their role as reservoirs, sinks, and sources of carbon, tropical forests provide numerous
additional 'ecosystem services'. Many of these ecosystem services directly or indirectly influence climate. The climate-related ecosystem
services that tropical forests provide include the maintenance of elevated soil moisture and surface air humidity, reduced sunlight
penetration, weaker near-surface winds and the inhibition of anaerobic soil conditions. Such an environment maintains the productivity of
tropical ecosystems (Betts 1999) and has helped sustain the rich biodiversity of tropical forests. 3. Impacts of land-cover change on climate
The significant role of the land within the climate system should not be surprising. As discussed by Wu & Newell (1998) for El Nino events,

warming of a relatively small area in the tropical eastern and central Pacific Ocean has global climate
consequences. This occurs because tropical cumulonimbus clouds occur in this region during an El
Nifnoevent, and not during average ocean conditions. These deep cumulus clouds permit the
export of heat, moisture and kinetic energy to higher latitudes that do not normally
receive such tropical export. Wu & Newell concluded that the long persistence, the spatial coherence
of the ocean warming and its large magnitude are the reasons for this major role of El
Nifio events within the Earth's climate system. Tropical land-use change has been shown in Chase et al. (1996,
2000), and summarized in Claussen (2002), to have an effect on the climate system similar to that from an El Nifio event. Since
thunderstorms preferentially form over land (Lyons 1999), the role of the tropical land surface should be expected to have a greater effect
on global climate than implied by its per cent areal coverage of the Earth's surface alone. General circulation model ( GCM)

simulations by Chase et al. (2000) indicated that regional landscape change can result in
alterations to surface fluxes elsewhere in the world through nonlinear feedbacks within
the atmosphere's global circulation (figure 2). The alteration of tropical landscapes, primarily the

conversion of forests to agriculture or pasture, changes the partitioning of solar insolation into its sensible and
latent turbulent heat forms. Less transpiration associated with the agricultural and pasture regions results in less thunderstorm activity
over this landscape. Lawton et al. (2001), for example, illustrates, for Costa Rica, the significant regional effects that tropical deforestation
has on the ecological environment of adjacent mountains. The longitudinal distribution of thunderstorms in the tropics is also changed.
Unlike an El Nifio, however, where the system changes back to 'average' and La Nifia conditions (over time, we have learned to identify the
global impacts of the different situations), land-use

change is often permanent, so its global effects are

not as obvious. Further, the atmospheric feedback due to similar land-use changes are variable, depending on the geographical

domain or the existing land use (Niyogi 2000; Niyogi et al. 2002a). Deliberate land-use change (afforestation or reforestation) has been
accepted as a mechanism to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and sequester carbon in trees and soils. However, as discussed by Betts
(2000) and Pielke (2001b), this activity may have other effects in terms of the radiative forcing in the atmosphere. For example, in regions
subject to significant snow cover, afforestation would result in a lower surface albedo and hence a positive radiative forcing, resulting in a
net warming effect despite the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere (figure 3). Similarly, increases in the surface fluxes of water vapour
could result in positive radiative forcing. The biogeochemical effect of enhanced CO2 and trace-gas concentration, and of aerosol deposition
(such as nitrogen), on landscape dynamics has also not been adequately considered. For example, Jenkinson

et al. (1991)
demonstrated a significant positive feedback where soils released carbon to the
atmosphere under warming conditions. More recently, Lenton (2000), using a simple box model, and Cox et al.
(2000), using GCM-sensitivity experiments, showed that biogeochemical feedbacks in
conjunction with an increased CO2 radiative warming produced an amplified regional
and global-warming response. Eastman et al. (2001a, b) used a regional climate model in a sensitivity study and suggested

a cooler daytime and warmer nighttime in the central Great Plains in response to greater plant growth in a doubled-CO2 atmosphere.
Niyogi et al. (2002b) used a coupled process-based model to show that the carbonassimilation potential for each of the GCM land-use
categories (comprising both C3 and C4 photosynthesis pathways) is sensitive to the soil-moisture availability. The presence of drought and
hydrological feedbacks associated with land-use change locally or through teleconnections, therefore, has a direct impact on the source/sink
capabilities of the terrestrial ecosystem. These studies illustrate the significant role that biogeochemistry has within the climate system. This
feedback, along with other climate forcings and feedbacks (Pielke 2001b), makes climate prediction on time-scales of years and longer a
particularly difficult problem.

2NC MODELS
Their evidence is overhyped and based on unverifiable feedbacks
Miyazaki, PhD mathematics University of Texas, 11
(K. An Analytic Study of Climate Sensitivity, UT Mathematical Physics database,
https://www.math.utexas.edu/mp_arc/c/11/11-16.pdf)
Based on the Stefan-Boltzmann law, the IPCC derives the climate sensitivity of _T = 1 _C
in the absence of feedbacks. Is this naive picture reasonable? In the present work we
examine the radiative forcing in a refined theoretical framework based on an analytic
model of radiative transfer. We have found that the naive picture of IPCC is
incorrect. The precise climate sensitivity is _T = 1:4 _C. The observed temperature
anomaly can be reproduced even in the absence of feedbacks. The result is quite sug-
gestive. Although the IPCC derives the overall climate sensitivity of _T = 3 _C, the value
might be too high as pointed out in Ref. [18]. So as to assess the overestimates by IPCC,
we examine the climate sensitivity using a pure analytic expression of water vapor
feedback, which is however expected to produce the results overestimated. The obtained
value _T = 2:32 _C is similar to the overall climate sensitivity predicted in Ref. [32]. The
water vapor feedback factor 1.65 is however lower than 2 predicted by IPCC. It is
therefore seen that the IPCC overestimates the water vapor feedback. In addition, as an
experiment, we continue the calculation using the water vapor feedback reduced
articially by half. The result can reproduce the observed temperature anomaly fairly
well. The resultant feedback factor 1.25 agrees with the cloud feedback factor in Ref.
[33] but is much weaker than the IPCC prediction. This indicates that our model
effectively includes the cloud feedback and that the IPCC also overestimates
the positive feedbacks other than water vapor. Moreover, the overestimates of
positive feedbacks also indicate that the IPCC overestimates the negative forcing by
aerosols. Consequently, we can say that the IPCC exaggerates the anthropogenic
effects on climate.
Their models overestimate CO2 forcingconfluence of data proves its very
small
Lindzen, professor Program in Atmospheres, Oceans, and Climate @ MIT, and Choi,
Department of Environmental Science and Engineering Ewha Womans University, 11
(Richard and Yong-Sang, On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity
and Its Implications, Asia-Pacific J. Atmos. Sci., 47(4), p. 377-390)
Our study also suggests that, in current coupled atmosphere ocean models, the
atmosphere and ocean are too weakly coupled since thermal coupling is inversely
proportional to sensitivity (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998). It has been noted by Newman
et al. (2009) that coupling is crucial to the simulation of phenomena like El Nio.
Thus, corrections of the sensitivity of current climate models might well improve the
behavior of coupled models, and should be encouraged. It should be noted that there
have been independent tests that also suggest sensitivities less than predicted
by current models. These tests are based on the response to sequences of volcanic
eruptions (Lindzen and Giannitsis, 1998), on the vertical structure of observed versus
modeled temperature increase (Douglass, 2007; Lindzen, 2007), on ocean heating
(Schwartz, 2007; Schwartz, 2008), and on satellite observations (Spencer and Braswell,
2010). Most claims of greater sensitivity are based on the models that we have

just shown can be highly misleading on this matter. There have also been attempts
to infer sensitivity from paleoclimate data (Hansen et al., 1993), but these are not really
tests since the forcing is essentially unknown given major uncertainties in clouds, dust
loading and other factors. Finally, we have shown that the attempts to obtain feedbacks
from simple regressions of satellite measured outgoing radiation on SST are
inappropriate.
One final point needs to be made. Low sensitivity of global mean temperature anomaly
to global scale forcing does not imply that major climate change cannot occur. The earth
has, of course, experienced major cool periods such as those associated with ice ages
and warm periods such as the Eocene (Crowley and North, 1991). As noted, however, in
Lindzen (1993), these episodes were primarily associated with changes in the equatorto-
pole temperature difference and spatially heterogeneous forcing. Changes in global
mean temperature were simply the residue of such changes and not the
cause.

2NC FEEDBACKS
Water vapor washout mitigates ALL positive feedbacksmost realistic
model
McShane 8Owen, chairman of the policy panel of the New Zealand Climate Science
Coalition and director of the Centre for Resource Management Studies, April 4, 2008
(Cites Roy Spencer, principal research scientist for U of Alabama in Huntsville and
recipient of NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement, Climate change
confirmed but global warming is cancelled, The National Business Review (New
Zealand), Lexis)
Atmospheric scientists generally agree that as carbon dioxide levels increase there is a
law of "diminishing returns" - or more properly "diminishing effects" - and that ongoing increases in CO2
concentration do not generate proportional increases in temperature. The common analogy is
painting over window glass. The first layers of paint cut out lots of light but subsequent
layers have diminishing impact. So, you might be asking, why the panic? Why does Al Gore talk about temperatures
spiraling out of control, causing mass extinctions and catastrophic rises in sea-level, and all his other disastrous outcomes when there is no
evidence to support it? The alarmists argue that increased CO2 leads to more water vapour - the main greenhouse gas - and this provides
positive feedback and hence makes the overall climate highly sensitive to small increases in the concentration of CO2. Consequently, the
IPCC argues that while carbon dioxide may well "run out of puff" the consequent evaporation of water vapour provides the positive feedback
loop that will make anthropogenic global warming reach dangerous levels. This

assumption that water vapour provides positive

behind the famous "tipping point," which nourishes Al Gore's dreams of destruction, and indeed all
those calls for action now - "before it is too late!" But no climate models predict such a tipping point.
feedback lies

However, while the absence of hot spots has refuted one important aspect of the IPCC models we lack a mechanism that fully explains these
supposed outcomes. Hence the IPCC, and its supporters, have been able to ignore this "refutation." So by the end of last year, we were in a
similar situation to the 19th century astronomers, who had figured out that the sun could not be "burning" its fuel - or it would have turned
to ashes long ago - but could not explain where the energy was coming from. Then along came Einstein and E=mc2. Hard to explain
Similarly, the climate sceptics have had to explain why the hotspots are not where they should be - not just challenge the theory with their
observations. This is why I felt so lucky to be in the right place at the right time when I heard Roy Spencer speak at the New York conference
on climate change in March. At first I thought this was just another paper setting out observations against the forecasts, further confirming
Evans' earlier work. But as the argument unfolded I realised Spencer was drawing on observations and measurements from the new Aqua
satellites to explain the mechanism behind this anomaly between model forecasts and observation. You may have heard that the IPCC
models cannot predict clouds and rain with any accuracy. Their

models assume water vapour goes up to the

troposphere and hangs around to cook us all in a greenhouse future. However, there is a
mechanism at work that "washes out" the water vapour and returns it to the oceans along with the
extra CO2 and thus turns the added water vapour into a NEGATIVE feedback mechanism.
The newly discovered mechanism is a combination of clouds and rain (Spencer's mechanism adds
to the mechanism earlier identified by Professor Richard Lindzen called the Iris effect). The IPCC models assumed water vapour formed
clouds at high altitudes that lead to further warming. The Aqua satellite observations and Spencer's analysis show water vapour actually
forms clouds at low altitudes that lead to cooling. Furthermore, Spencer shows the extra

rain that falls from these

clouds cools the underlying oceans, providing a second negative feedback to negate the CO2 warming.
Alarmists' quandary This has struck the alarmists like a thunderbolt, especially as the lead author of the IPCC chapter on feedback has
written to Spencer agreeing that he is right! There

goes the alarmist neighbourhood! The climate is not

highly sensitive to CO2 warming because water vapour is a damper against the warming effect of
CO2. That is why history is full of Ice Ages - where other effects, such as increased reflection from the ice cover, do
provide positive feedback - while we do not hear about Heat Ages . The Medieval Warm Period, for example,
is known for being benignly warm - not dangerously hot. We live on a benign planet - except when it occasionally gets damned cold. While I
have done my best to simplify these developments they remain highly technical and many people distrust their own ability to assess
competing scientific claims. However, in this case the tipping point theories are based on models that do not include the effects of rain and
clouds. The new Nasa Aqua satellite is the first to measure the effects of clouds and rainfall. Spencer's
interpretation of the new data means all previous models and forecasts are obsolete. Would anyone trust long-term forecasts of farm
production that were hopeless at forecasting rainfall? The implications of these breakthroughs in measurement and understanding are
dramatic to say the least. The responses will be fun to watch.

2NC WARMING NOT XTN

Framing issueeven if warming itself is scientific, their impact is not
Hsu 10 (Jeremy, Live Science Staff, July 19, pg.
http://www.livescience.com/culture/can-humans-survive-extinction-doomsday100719.html)
His views deviate sharply from those of most

experts, who don't view climate change as the end for

humans. Even the worst-case scenarios discussed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
don't foresee human extinction. "The scenarios that the mainstream climate
community are advancing are not end-of-humanity, catastrophic scenarios," said
Roger Pielke Jr., a climate policy analyst at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Humans have the
technological tools to begin tackling climate change, if not quite enough yet to solve the problem, Pielke said. He added
that doom-mongering did little to encourage people to take action. "My view of politics is that the long-term, high-risk
scenarios are really difficult to use to motivate short-term, incremental action," Pielke explained. "The rhetoric of fear and
alarm that some people tend toward is counterproductive." Searching for solutions One technological solution to climate
change already exists through carbon capture and storage, according to Wallace Broecker, a geochemist and

renowned climate scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New

York City. But Broecker remained skeptical that governments or industry would commit the resources needed to
slow the rise of carbon dioxide (CO2) levels, and predicted that more drastic geoengineering might become necessary to
stabilize the planet. "The rise in CO2 isn't going to kill many people, and it's not

going to kill humanity," Broecker said. "But it's going to change the entire wild ecology of the planet, melt a
lot of ice, acidify the ocean, change the availability of water and change crop yields, so we're essentially doing an
experiment whose result remains uncertain."

No extinction from warming

Barrett 7, professor of natural resource economics Columbia University (Scott, Why
Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods, introduction)
climate change does not threaten the survival of the human species.5 If unchecked, it will
cause other species to become extinction (though biodiversity is being depleted now due to other reasons ). It will
alter critical ecosystems (though this is also happening now, and for reasons unrelated to
climate change). It will reduce land area as the seas rise, and in the process displace human populations. Catastrophic climate
change is possible, but not certain. Moreover, and unlike an asteroid collision, large changes (such as sea level rise of,
say, ten meters) will likely take centuries to unfold, giving societies time to adjust.
Abrupt climate change is also possible, and will occur more rapidly, perhaps over a decade or two. However, abrupt climate change
(such as a weakening in the North Atlantic circulation), though potentially very serious, is unlikely to be ruinous. Human-induced
climate change is an experiment of planetary proportions, and we cannot be sur of its consequences. Even in a worse case
scenario, however, global climate change is not the equivalent of the Earth being hit by megaasteroid. Indeed, if it were as damaging as this, and if we were sure that it would be this
harmful, then our incentive to address this threat would be overwhelming . The challenge would still be
First,

more difficult than asteroid defense, but we would have done much more about it by now.

Feedbacks are negative

Happer, Ph.D. in Physics, 11Chairman of the Board of Directors (GMI); Cyrus
Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Princeton University, Ph.D. in Physics from
Princeton (William, 23 May 2011, The Truth About Greenhouse Gases,
http://www.marshall.org/article.php?id=953, RBatra)
warnings that alarmists offer about the effects of doubling CO2 are based on computer
models that assume that the direct warming effect of CO2 is multiplied by a large feedback
factor from CO2-induced changes in water vapor and clouds, which supposedly contribute much more to the greenhouse warming of the earth than CO2. But there is
observational evidence that the feedback factor is small and may even be negative. The
The frightening

models are not in good agreement with observationseven if they appear to fit the
temperature rise over the last 150 years very well.
Try or die assumes an implausible hodgepodge of worst-case scenarios
Dennis 12, PhD physics UC Santa Barbara, senior fellow Center for Industrial
Progress, 3/16/12
(Eric, What the Skeptics of Climate Catastrophe are Skeptical Of: Nordhaus
Reconsidered, http://www.masterresource.org/2012/03/what-the-skeptics-areskeptical-of/)
To say that modeling the climate for long-term predictions is difficult given the current state of
climate science is like saying that it would be difficult for your five-year-old son to build a 400
horsepower car from re-purposed Toys R Us purchases. Imagine that he comes to you with pages and
pages of plans hes sketched out in crayon. The car will cost $22,827.35 worth of toys.
Why wouldnt you reach for your credit card? Is that because youre against teaching kids
engineering? Is it because his sworn enemy, your daughter, is paying you off? Or perhaps its because this project is
obviously beyond the capability of a five-year-old, and that his crayon schematics dont offer convincing
evidence that he is in fact the kind of once-in-a-generation prodigy who could somehow pull it off.

If one understands how monumental an undertaking it would be to produce a sound climate model, one can see that todays

climate modelers are making assertions no less implausible than our five-year olds
fantasy.

In physics it is generally possible to exactly predict the behavior of systems involving two
independent bodies, whether planets interacting through gravity or elementary particles through the electromagnetic field.
More bodies means no exact solution to the dynamical equations and a zoo of different
approximations, usually requiring computational simulation, which takes more and more
time as the number of bodies being simulated increases. Indeed the computation time generally grows exponentially
with the number of bodies.

The global climate system comprises

an astronomical number (at least billions) of

effectively independent bodies, which is to say of isolatable, relatively uniform chunks of air, ocean,
and earth. Their interactions span the complexity spectrum, from the mechanical push-and-pull of an

ocean current to the lesser-known dynamics of cloud formation to intricate, biological mechanisms like plant growth and respiration that
have evolved over billions of years.

Solving this kind of complex system is outside the realm of controlled

approximations and reasonable estimates. Its in the realm of random stabs,
on any objective assessment of our current scientific powers. Since attempts to model this system are the basis of claims for catastrophic
global warming, the evidence we need to consider pertains to whether or not such models are capturing enough of the detailed mess of
forces that actually drives the climate.

Many different climate processes affect the energy balance between the earth and outer-space and thus
affect temperatures on the Earth. One such process is the greenhouse effect , by which CO2 and other gases trap
some extra solar energy in the atmosphere and convert it into heat. It is widely acknowledged that the CO2-linked greenhouse effect itself
can produce only a modest warming going forward because the incremental warming produced by each extra liter of CO2 gets smaller and
smaller as more CO2 is added.
The catastrophist

projections are based on the idea that this modest warming will trigger
an entirely separate set of feedback mechanisms that will multiply the warming many times.
For instance warming is projected to increase ambient levels of water vapor, itself a greenhouse gas; melting ice will
expose more earth or open water, which tend to absorb more solar energy as heat; temperature-linked changes in cloud patterns
affect how much solar energy gets reflected back to space or back to the Earth.

There are also negative feedbacks, meaning processes that come into play due to warming, or to CO2 increases,
that wind up counteracting that warming. Examples include enhanced re-radiation of energy back into space at
higher temperatures, increased absorption of CO2 into the oceans, and increased
quantities of organic matter capturing CO2. Indeed some supposedly positive feedbacks, like certain cloud effects,
may turn out actually to be negative ones.

Moreover, nature does not simply provide us with a list of all the relevant feedbacks, or climate processes
in general. There is no systematic procedure by which the set of processes included in current climate models are picked out from the
catalogue of all possible such processes. The procedure

is simply for modelers to engage their own

imaginations, given our current knowledge, to conceive possible effects and gather evidence to confirm or falsify them.

How many known ones have been intentionally discarded due to a lack of knowledge and evidence about how to incorporate them?

How

many have just not been thought of to date?

In a certain sense, this is the nature of any scientific theory. But this is why such theories have to produce specific,
detailed predictions, confirmed by observation, to show that they have captured the
relevant causal factors. Apart from this, there is a lot of room here for the ultimate outcome of the
models to be controlled by ideological predispositionslike that, of all the underlying drivers, the decisive one just happens
to be CO2, the one with a clear link to the functioning of modern, industrial capitalism.
What would be a rational response when your five-year-old car enthusiast presents you with his crayon plans, protesting that hes also
proven his case by putting together a scale model in Legos? First you might point out that while his plans are impressive for a boy his age,
its rarely the case that reality works out just like a priori plans and models suggest.
Rather than setting him loose at toysrus.com with your credit card, you might suggest he start off with a scaled-down project, like an RC kit.
Then, if thats a success, maybe an introduction to simple wood and then metal work. As he gets older and proves himself at each stage, he
could move on to machine shop projects, welding, and an apprenticeship with a real car mechanic.
This kind of demonstrated, step-by-step progress is how legitimate inventions, and inventors, are made. At the end of the process, they no
longer agitate for sizable investments on the basis of their original crayon plans.
And such demonstrated, step-by-step progress

is exactly what a reasonable person ought

to demand from the global warming catastrophists. Not mere simulations,
generated by model code that they control and have played with for years. Since the odds are
so small, a priori, that they have actually cracked the excruciatingly complicated problem of global climate
prediction, we need dramatic positive evidence. Lesser evidence is powerless to
overcome the overwhelming odds against being able to delicately sort out the
mess of climate drivers and feedbacks.
The catastrophists need to demonstrate their methodology by applying it to smaller problems whose outcomes we dont have to wait a

century for. They need to derive unambiguous, detailed predictions for these outcomes and see them borne
out. By detailed I mean predictions of not just a single number, like a cumulative warming trend, that could just be accidentally correct
and theyre not even getting predictions on these simpler metrics right. I mean predictions of a more intricate, unaccidental nature.
For instance, climate models predict a detailed pattern of warming that occurs at different rates in different parts of the globe and,
importantly, at different altitudes in the atmosphere. But when we look in actual climate data for the specific, altitude-dependent warming
signature produced by these models, we find something entirely different.
And thats only half the problem. Before

we can test models, we need this historical climate data to be

accurate in order for the comparison to mean anything. Even for the one central climate variable, global average temperature, the
reconstructed data is fraught with uncertainties and scientific misconduct.
What has always to be kept in mind on these issues, is (i) the massive complexity of the problem
the catastrophist modelers are claiming to have solved relative to the current state of climate science, and (ii) what this implies
about the onus of proof. Their claim is to have accomplished a scientific miracle with tools that by any reasonable analysis
are far from capable of the task.

Absent shocking evidence of success on their part, the conclusion to draw is not:
catastrophic global warming has just moderate odds of occurring. The conclusion is
that these models bear as much relationship to reality as your sons crayon
plans bear to a real car. And suggestions about how to transform the entire world economy
based on these models should be treated accordingly.

1NR KRITIK

1NR DOUZ
Stop it.
Douzinas 7 /Costas, Professor of Law and Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London, visiting fellow at Princeton University
and at the Cardozo School of Law, Human Rights and Empire The political philosophy of
cosmopolitanism New York: Routledge-Cavendish. pg. 193-197/
For a brief moment around 1990, globalisation and the collapse of communism seduced
people into believing that conflict had become pointless and obsolete. In that climate of
euphoria, economic rules, free markets and capitalist institutions started being gradually
supplemented by moral and civic regulations and directives. The combination of the two
would prepare the individual of the new order, a world citizen, highly moralised, highly
regulated but also highly differentiated materially, despite the common human rights
that everyone enjoys, from Helsinki to Hanoi and from London to Lahore. We can find
parallels with the emergence of early capitalism. The legal system first developed the
rules necessary for the regulation of capitalist production, including rules for the
protection of property and contract and the development of legal and corporate
personality. Only later did civic rules emerge, mainly with the creation of civil and
political rights, which led to the creation of the modern subject and citizen. These rules
gave the man of the classical declarations the legal tools and public recognition necessary
to cut his traditional ties, abandon any residual ideas of virtue and duty and organise his
activities and life-plan according to a calculation of interest borne by the institution of
rights. Similarly today, the globalisation of the sui generis morality of human rights
follows the gradual unification of world markets. As economic practices, legal rules and
governance are standardised, a unified ethics, semiotics and law becomes the
international lingua franca. This common language promises perpetual peace but forgets
its own founding violence. According to the 2000 UN Development report 30,000
children die every day of malnutrition and the life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa is
thirty-six years. The extreme injustice of global distribution is invisible to cosmopolitan
law and is reduced to the sphere of the private; natural inevitable and humanitarian
intervention will not confront the regime of intellectual property that condemns millions
of people to death by disease. Poverty, disease, lack of food and clean water, violence
against minorities and women, HIV/Aids are the main causes of misery and death in the
world. But they are not seen as worthy of humanitarian intervention. They are demoted
to the private and domestic, they become an invisible and normalised part of the
contingencies of life for which not much can be done. They are left to the magnanimity of
philanthropists and the goodwill of pop stars. Despite the rhetoric of universal
international law only a tiny part of the world comes under its purview and only a few
problems of interest to the West are defined as crises.49 The universalism of rights was
invented by the West, but will be used now by the South and East to make claims on the
distribution of the world product. The recent converts to universal values are led to
believe that improvement of domestic human rights will strengthen their claim against
world resources. Milosevic was extradited to the Hague for a few hundred million dollars
in aid to Serbia, while the Afghan regime is given aid if it polices successfully the borders
of empire. Aid agreements routinely impose privatisation, market economics and human
rights as the new gospel of liberation. Neo-liberal economic policies and human rights
appear to promise an inexorable process of equalisation between East, South and West.
Poor states are treated like the Western workers of old, as dangerous and valueless
partners at worst (rogue states) or, as suffering and deserving recipients who must get
the chances and philanthropy proletarians were offered in earlier times. Aid and human

rights are the contemporary version of alms and Sunday school, of poor law and skills
training. As we know from Western histories, formal liberties cannot be contained in
their formalism for too long. Soon, the workers with the vote and freedom of speech will
demand the income and resources needed to make their new-found freedoms real: they
will ask for the material preconditions of equality. Lecturers in China and farmers in
India will demand to earn as much as those in Helsinki or southern France, something
that can only be done through a substantial reduction in the Western standard of living.
The (implicit) promise that market-led home-based economic growth will inexorably
lead the South to Western economic standards is fraudulent. The Western ability to turn
the protection of formal rights into a limited guarantee of material, economic and social
rights was based on huge transfers from the colonies to the metropolis. While universal
morality and rights now militate in favour of reverse flows, Western policies on
development, aid, trade and Third World debt, and American policies on oil pricing, gas
emissions and defence spending, indicate that this is not politically feasible. Indeed,
unsustainable living standards at the core depend on flows of wealth from the periphery.
As Immanuel Wallerstein put it, if all humans have equal rights, and all the peoples have
equal rights, then we cannot maintain the kind of inegalitarian system that the capitalist
world-economy has always been and always will be.50 When the unbridgeability of the
gap between the missionary statements on equality and dignity and the bleak reality of
obscene inequality becomes apparent, human rights rather than eliminating war will
lead to new and uncontrollable types of tension and conflict. While human rights appear
to be universal and uninterested in the particularities of each situation, their triumph
means that they have now become prime weapons in political conflict, something that
undermines their claim to universality. The reference to their common values will not
stop their polemical use, by those who have been at the receiving end of our
humanitarian wars. Spanish soldiers taken prisoners met the advancing Napoleonic
armies who were spreading modernity and liberty, with banners inscribed Down with
freedom! It is not difficult to imagine people meeting the peacekeepers and
humanitarians of the new times with cries of Down with human rights! The devastating
bombings against the Baghdad Red Cross headquarters and United Nations compound
in 2003 were the beginning of a counter-attack by the Iraqi insurgency. When the
insignia of universal morality are embossed on the flags of occupiers, the local insurgents
interpret them like the cross on the crusaders banners: they become symbols of
oppression and humiliation and the most particular expressions of self-interest.51
Universalist morality claims to muster agreement about the content of its prescriptions.
But universal human rights cannot work in the abstract. As they become the lingua
franca of the new times but are unable to eliminate conflict, the formal struggle over
human rights will revolve predominantly around their interpretation and application.
They can only operate as an instrument of the leading powers of the new times or by the
citizens claiming not just formal but material equality. As always, the universal is placed
at the service of the particular: it is the prerogative of a particular to announce the
universal. The enunciating particular can place itself towards the universal in two
positions: either it can attach an opt-out clause and exclude itself from the applicability
of the universal or it can arrogate itself the exclusive power and right to offer the correct
interpretation of the universal. France was the enunciator of the universal in early
modernity, the United States in the new times, and they have adopted both practices.
The imperial opt-out clause is most apparent when the Americans adopt what can be
called their universalist exceptionalism and denounce the jurisdiction of the new
International Criminal Court declaring that under no circumstances will they allow
American personnel to be tried by it. But they also claim the power of the sole
authoritative interpreter of the law. During the Afghan campaign, President Bush

declared that, despite the unanimous view of international lawyers to the contrary, his
interpretation of the Geneva Conventions was the only valid one and accordingly, the
prisoners held in the Guantnamo Bay camp would be designated not as prisoners of
war, but would instead fall into the novel category of unlawful combatants.52 Similarly,
the interpretation of the meaning of torture by American legal officers, practised in Abu
Ghraib, Guantnamo Bay and the various destinations of the process of exceptional
rendition, wildly diverges from the accepted legal position. It is a little ironic that, while
the insurgents approach the universal as the most aggressive version of the particular
and colonial, the same approach in reverse can be observed in the other major objective
of American foreign and military policy, the spread of democracy. Susan Marks in an
extraordinary review of the cosmopolitan claim that a democratic norm has developed
in international law, under which the law requires and imposes democratic forms of
government, concludes that the democratic norm thesis works to stabilise existing
power relations by identifying democracy with low intensity democracy and global
democracy with pan-national democracy.53 But even the low intensity democracy of
elections and basic rights was unacceptable to the White House when the election results
in the Palestinian territories, Iran, Venezuela and Bolivia did not go the way the
Americans wanted despite the large aid given to the opposition. In the case of Palestine,
relations were broken with the freely elected government of Hamas, while the
democratically elected presidents of Venezuela, Iran and Bolivia have been repeatedly
denounced. On the other hand, the Pakistani dictatorship and the absolute monarchies
of Saudi Arabia and the various Emirates are beyond reproach if they align themselves to
American foreign policy. The principles of human rights and democracy are universal,
only if they promote the interests of the most particular. Social and political systems
become hegemonic by turning their ideological priorities into universal principles and
values. The rulers must adjust their ideas to those of the ruled to have them accepted and
adopted; in reverse, the ruled accept the (adjusted) ideology of the rulers as their own. In
the new world order, human rights are the perfect candidate for this role. Their core
principles, interpreted negatively and economically, promote neo-liberal capitalist
penetration. Under a different construction, their abstract provisions could subject the
inequalities and indignities of late capitalism to withering attack. But this cannot happen
as long as they are used by the dominant powers to spread the values of a nihilistic
ideology. This is why Jacques Derrida denounced the discourse on human rights and
democracy [which] remains little more than an obscene alibi so long as it tolerates the
terrible plight of so many millions of human beings suffering from malnutrition, disease,
and humiliation, grossly deprived not only of bread and water but of equality or
freedom.54 The critique of injustice cannot be formulated in the terms of a discourse
that supports the arrangements producing injustice. The short-circuit between human
rights as ideology and human rights as critique is complete. In a historical first, the end
of human rights coincides with their rise.

1NR PARR
Faith in global governance and policy interventions to fix climate change is
misplacedits a capitalist distraction tactic that staves off resolution of the
real problem
Bond 13professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal
(Patrick, Climate Crisis, Carbon Market Failure, and Market Booster Failure: A Reply to Robin Hahnel's Desperately
Seeking Left Unity on International Climate Policy, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 24:1, 54-61, dml)

The policy interventions Hahnel says are needed for his argument to succeedespecially effective
regulation of current carbon markets, plus profound repression of Wall Street more generallyappear
politically impossible at this stage. Even within the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) framing, it should be obvious from all recent UNFCCC Conferences of the Parties (COPs)
that three major practical problems for the emissions trading strategy persist (there are other conceptual problems I
mention below): the negotiators emissionscut ambitions are extremely low in part because, as
Larry Lohmann (personal email correspondence Nov. 10, 2012) notes, the

Kyoto Protocol and successors

cannot have strict caps because that would defeat the logic of these markets, which is to
bribe corporates; market mechanisms are still relied upon notwithstanding their repeated failures; and systematic
cheating is widespread, with no prospect of sufficiently strict controls given the revolving
door between the regulated and regulators. The UN, for example, disqualified one of its own adjudicators
of emissions trades in 2009, but problems of fraud persisted; the E.U. scheme has been rife with corruption and theft,
resulting in a two-week market shutdown in early 2011; and the now-defunct Chicago Climate Exchanges founder,
Richard Sandor, has been sued for fraud by his hand-picked investors.

The futility of contemporary global-scale reform is illustrated by the fact that not since
the 1987 Montreal Protocolwhich addressed the widening ozone hole by banning (not
trading) CFCshave any initiatives to reverse world crises been adopted with
commitment by elite managers from national states. The reason is simple: since the late 1980s,
the prevailing balance of forces, heavily influenced by multinational corporations, have
favored, in ideological terms, either neoliberalism, neoconservatism, or Barack Obamas fusion
of the two. Moreover, Lohmann (personal email correspondence Nov. 10, 2012) points out, The climate crisis is
intertwined with structural connections between industrial capitalism and fossil
fuelswhich was not the case for CFCs. This leaves the world without effective, top-down fixes
to economic (trading and financial), environmental, geopolitical and social crises. Notwithstanding
Millennium Development Goal rhetoric, there is apparently no hope for reviving genuinely
expansive projects, such as the prior generations Brundtland Commission advocating sustainable development,
earlier New International Economic Order appeals from the Third World, or the Brandt Commissions global social
democracy.
Yet in spite of this global-governance cul de sac, for Hahnel (2012a, 18), what must be done

to avert climate change in the here and now is to fix the Kyoto Protocol. That strategy died
in Copenhagen in December 2009, as nearly everyone involved in multilateral
negotiations (or anyone who read WikiLeaks U.S. State Department cables from 20092010) would admit.
Washington not only refused to join, it revealed as a fib former Vice President Al Gores 1997 claim that the U.S.
would endorse Kyoto if carbon trading was included, the lie underscored in 1998 by a 95-0 Senate vote against the Kyoto
Protocol. Obama and the U.S. State Department then actively sabotaged Kyotos resurrection in 2009 by

cajoling Brazil, South Africa, India, and China to replace it with the Copenhagen Accord, a nonbinding
promise that would leave the earth warming by at least 4 degrees Celsius . Then, as reported in
The New York Times in early 2012 (J. Broder, Signs of New Life as UN Searches for a Climate Accord, Jan. 24) U.S.
climate negotiations expert and former advisor to Todd Stern, Trevor Hauser, referring to COP17, bragged:
The Durban platform was promising because of what it did not say. There is no mention of historic

responsibility or per capita emissions. There is no mention of economic

development as the priority for developing countries. There is no mention of a
difference between developed and developing country action .
Hahnel may well reply that there is still a conceptually simple fix: more political will, as

if that alone could fix the broken economic tools

. After U.S. climate denialism was recently rolled back1 with further consciousness raising by Hurricane Sandy and after
Obamas successful reelection campaignalbeit a campaign remarkably silent about climate there is renewed

hope in the U.S., at least for Washington reformers intent on compelling Obama to use his (non-legislative)
political-regulatory power to address clean energy, emissions standards, and a few other minor areas of
importance. But by all accounts, there is no chance in coming years for a renewed cap-andtrade bill, given that Republicans control the House of Representatives. While California has a new
marketjustly accused of environmental racism for prolonging polluting industries in communities of colorother
regional markets are stagnant or dying.

no reregulation can reverse the power dynamics in

which the only real winners in emissions markets are speculators, financiers,
consultants (including some in the NGO scene), and energy sector hucksters. As the air itself
became privatized and commodified, poor communities across the world suffered from
the on-the-ground impact of CDMs,2 while resources and energy were diverted away
from real solutions. To reply that more regulation can fix the system is to ignore what may
be termed the captive regulatory regime that has emerged even at the top of the
UNFCCC, whose secretary, Christiana Figueres, is a former carbon trader and whose head of the UN panel mandated
In any case,

to fix the CDM, Valli Moosa, is the former chair of the South African energy giant, Eskom. Moosa was deeply implicated in
what a South African government investigator termed improper conduct when he chaired Eskom and channeled a vast
coal-fired power plant contract to a company linked to his political party at the same time that he served on the partys
finance committee (Bond 2012).

Independently, their focus on technical solutions to climate change causes

extinctionits a Band-Aid for consumptive practices and ignores other
manifestations of the environmental crisis that are a comparatively larger
problem
Crist 7Associate Professor of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech
University
(Eileen, Beyond the Climate Crisis: A Critique of Climate Change Discourse, Telos 141 (Winter 2007): 2955, dml)

While the dangers of climate change are real, I argue that there are even greater dangers in
representing it as the most urgent problem we face. Framing climate change in such a
manner deserves to be challenged for two reasons: it encourages the restriction of proposed
solutions to the technical realm, by powerfully insinuating that the needed approaches are
those that directly address the problem; and it detracts attention from the planets
ecological predicament as a whole, by virtue of claiming the limelight

for the one issue that trumps all others.

Identifying climate change as the biggest threat to civilization, and ushering it into center
stage as the highest priority problem, has bolstered the proliferation of technical
proposals that address the specific challenge. The race is on for figuring out what technologies, or
portfolio thereof, will solve the problem. Whether the call is for reviving nuclear power, boosting the
installation of wind turbines, using a variety of renewable energy sources, increasing the efficiency of fossil-fuel use,
developing carbon-sequestering technologies, or placing mirrors in space to deflect the suns rays, the narrow

character of such proposals is evident: confront the problem of greenhouse gas

emissions by technologically phasing them out, superseding them, capturing them, or

mitigating their heating effects. In his The Revenge of Gaia, for example, Lovelock briefly mentions the
need to face climate change by changing our whole style of living.?6 But the thrust of this work, what
readers and policy-makers come away with, is his repeated and strident call for investing in
nuclear energy as, in his words, the one lifeline we can use immediately.?7 In the policy realm, the first
step toward the technological fix for global warming is often identified with
implementing the Kyoto protocol. Biologist Tim Flannery agitates for the treaty, comparing
the need for its successful endorsement to that of the Montreal protocol that phased out the
ozone-depleting CFCs. The Montreal protocol, he submits, marks a signal moment in human societal development,
representing the first ever victory by humanity over a global pollution problem.?8 He hopes for a similar victory for the
global climate-change problem. Yet the deepening realization of the threat of climate change ,

virtually in the wake of stratospheric ozone depletion, also suggests that dealing with
global problems treaty-by-treaty is no solution to the planets predicament. Just as the
risks of unanticipated ozone depletion have been followed by the dangers of a long
underappreciated climate crisis, so it would be nave not to anticipate another (perhaps even
entirely unforeseeable) catastrophe arising after the (hoped-for) resolution of the above two.
Furthermore, if greenhouse gases were restricted successfully by means of technological
shifts and innovations, the root cause of the ecological crisis as a whole would
remain unaddressed. The destructive patterns of production, trade, extraction,
land-use, waste proliferation, and consumption, coupled with population growth,

would go unchallenged, continuing to run down the integrity, beauty, and biological richness of
the Earth. Industrial-consumer

civilization has entrenched a form of life that admits

virtually no limits to its expansiveness within, and perceived entitlement to, the entire
planet.?9 But questioning this civilization is by and large sidestepped in climate-change
discourse, with its single-minded quest for a global-warming techno-fix.20 Instead of
confronting the forms of social organization that are causing the climate
crisisamong numerous other catastrophesclimate-change literature often focuses on
how global warming is endangering the culprit, and agonizes over what technological
means can save it from impending tipping points.2? The dominant frame of climate change
funnels cognitive and pragmatic work toward specifically addressing global warming, while
muting a host of equally monumental issues. Climate change looms so huge on the environmental
and political agenda today that it has contributed to downplaying other facets of the ecological
crisis: mass extinction of species, the devastation of the oceans by industrial fishing,
continued old-growth deforestation, topsoil lossesand desertification, endocrine
disruption, incessant development, and so on, are made to appear secondary and more
forgiving by comparison with dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate
system.
In what follows, I will focus specifically on how climate-change discourse encourages the continued
marginalization of the biodiversity crisisa crisis that has been soberly described as a
holocaust,22 and which despite decades of scientific and environmentalist pleas remains a virtual non-topic in society,
the mass media, and humanistic and other academic literatures. Several works on climate change (though by
no means all) extensively examine the consequences of global warming for biodiversity , 23 but
rarely is it mentioned that biodepletion predates dangerous greenhouse-gas buildup by
decades, centuries, or longer, and will not be stopped by a technological resolution of
global warming. Climate change is poised to exacerbate species and ecosystem losses
indeed, is doing so already. But while technologically preempting the worst of climate change
may temporarily avert some of those losses, such a resolution of the climate quandary
will not put an end towill barely addressthe ongoing destruction of life on Earth.

1NR ALTERNATIVE
We should exhaust their sorry representations of suffering the creation of
an alternative theater of the human in a violent becoming-otherwise is the
only way to make life meaningful. Their suffering based justifications for life
are not neutral but political claims that reify liberal regimes of dominance
through pity and moralizing that mask a regime of truth that striates life.
You should prefer our politics of exhaustion with liberalism as an embrace
of death and the only way to make life meaningful.
---AT: Pinker
Evans and Reid 14. Brad Evans, professor of international relations at the University
of Lapland, Finland and Julian Reid, senior lecturer in international relations at the
University of Bristol, Resilient Life, 2014, pg. 176
If the era we have just left exhausted its remaining possibilities and attained the stage of
culmination, the processes of thinking, of action, of will, have by no means reached their
term . . . on the contrary, the drama of anthropology has only just begun. So claims
Sloterdijk in another of his phenomenal works, Neither Sun Nor Death.9 Sloterdijks
underlining of the drama of anthropology is an important gesture. The human is not
simply a constructed category or outcome of representation, but a drama. Every
account of humanity presupposes its theatre. We continue to remain heirs to the
Greeks in this regard. The human is a staging, a performance, which comes into
existence not just in the act of its representation, but arises in and through a
performance. We may think of it indeed as a performative unfolding that not only
assigns certain significations or modes of subjectivization to authenticate the meaning
of lives, but a more profound awakening that opens onto the future in ways which
cannot be anticipated in advance. But what genre of performance are we now to
practise? What drama does the theatre of our humanity today presuppose? Who, indeed,
does this body of humanity condemned to be a spectator on this fated earth think it is?
What truths does it guide us to see? And what truths does it tell such that we may repeat
them without questioning otherwise?
We do not accept the idea so widely propounded by others that the most
urgent question of our time is how better to relieve human suffering, or that
of any other form of life defined by tales of survival. We are, it appears, or ought
to be at least, exhausted by the discourse and aesthetic practice of suffering. Nothing
seems to us more tiring than the representation of the human as that form of life which
suffers, makes suffer, and consequently has to be concerned with relieving its
suffering from a merciless world. Not only are publics immune to the spectacles of
victims. Suffering often translates into pity. Pity in turn all too often shifts into
piousness. The pious then give unto them moral supremacy to the righteous
indignation of others. Such moralizing often becomes the vehicle upon which
interventions proceed to enter into the souls of the living. These interventions
sanction a removal of political agency on account of the fact that the need for
something to be done to alleviate the suffering is premised in part upon the victims
complicity in the regressive conditioning. This results in the politicization of
suffering such that the victim becomes a problem to be solved without ever
questioning whether they perceived their plight to be different from the standpoint of
vulnerable subjects who require external assistance, instead of focusing on
confronting the conditions which deny their abilities to express their own
political desires and agencies. //////////////

Our theatre, which we inhabit now, is a compassionately narcissistic one. Its chorus
is deafening. Our question the question we would like a theatre of the human to
respond to is that of what is it to exhaust or be exhausted by suffering?. What
drama does the human perform when it has exhausted all of those tragic idioms of
lament it has been forced to repeat in the theatres of liberal modernity? The exhausted is
the exhaustive, the dried up, the extenuated, and the dissipated.10 To be exhausted is
absolutely not to be tired. Tired people continue to perform that which they are already
doing in a laborious way. They suffer that which they are and have to do. And tired
people are tiresome in their suffering. We suffer their presence while all the while
wishing to be exhausted of them as well as wishing that they might exhaust themselves,
dry up and disappear. To be exhausted, in contrast, is to have done with what one
has been. It is to be incapable of continuing to perform that which one has
done so as to become capable of being otherwise. Thus to be exhausted is
absolutely not to be passive. It is only in being exhausted that one can become
active for nothing.11 And to be active for nothing is not to be caught doing
nothing. It demands a lot of its subject. Samuel Becketts plays are populated by
characters who are fully exhausted by their suffering, while they remain positively active
for nothing. Characters that in seeing the end do not fear it, who live out their end in
full knowledge of that end while renouncing any call to organization with a view to trying
to survive the end. Their goals are not to do this or that in preparation for their end, but
instead to refuse all plans as to how to survive the end. There is no dignity for them in
the servi- tude of self-preservation. Such refusal requires an activity, vigilance,
awareness and a learning to die. This is a theatre that, in actuality, is not miserable
at all, but which celebrates the end of the possible as a condition for the
beginning of the new. Beyond the possible, it posits the question of absolute
freedom. One must exhaust the possible, and be prepared to be exhausted by
it, in order to reach such freedom. And in effect the possible is accomplished by
the exhausted characters who exhaust it.12

Geoengineering inevitable but how we frame geoengineering determines if

its corporate-controlled, or if we can sensitize the dynamics of earth
systems thresholds and even intentional human geoclimatic agency
Anshelm and Hansson 14 [Jonas Anshelm, professor in the Unit of Technology and
Social Change at Linkping University, Sweden, and Anders Hansson, senior lecturer in
the Unit of Technology and Social Change at Linkping University, Sweden, The Last
Chance to Save the Planet? An Analysis of the Geoengineering Advocacy Discourse in the
Public Debate, Environmental Humanities, vol. 5, 2014, pp. 101-123]
The point of departure for the storyline of the scientists double fear is the claim that
climate researchers, who until very recently had rejected geoengineering as bizarre or
foolish, considering the various alternatives taboo, anathema, or a distraction
from dealing with climate mitigation, now have re-evaluated the situation and that most
of them have started to advocate immediate research into various geoengineering
options.26 This shift is claimed to exist because the severity of climate change now
justifies the assessment and investigation of all means that might be able to counteract it. Climate scientists have
become desperate and reached their social tipping point.27 Climate change is depicted as catastrophic
in this storyline: the end of the world as we know it is approaching , and scientists are shocked by
new scientific findings and observations. The alternatives, as they are presented, are either to inactively

wait for the catastrophe or to explore the final option: geoengineering.28 To further emphasize
the gravity of the situation, the time constraints, and the pressing need for geoengineering, it is claimed that it might
already be too late. The catastrophe is upon us and its negative effects are accumulating in the

Earths ecosystems. Even though it is too late to prevent all the negative effects, because of the delayed impact of
already released greenhouse gases, geoengineering offers the possibility of removing CO2 from the atmosphere and
helping create a new balance.29 Fear of the consequences of climate change is therefore an asset

in the geoengineering discourse. The more alarmingly global warming is presented, the
greater the need for geoengineering and, consequently, the less noteworthy criticism of it
becomes. The fear that the geoengineers, popular science journalists, and editors writing and talking in this discourse
evoke is their main resource. In some cases, this fear is expanded to include the deployment of geoengineering. The
president of the Royal Societys panel of experts, John Shepherd, declared that he did not favour geoengineering but
feared that it would likely be needed as a complementary method.30 At the prospect of failure of COP15 in Copenhagen,
he declared that it would be scary if humanity were obliged to resort to geoengineering solutions.31 His coauthor Ken
Caldeira stated that, in his personal capacity, he disliked geoengineering because of the substantial environmental risks,
but that as a scientist he would prefer sulphur particles in the atmosphere to the drastic melting of Greenlands ice
sheet.32 Another co-author, Jason Blackstock, labelled geoengineering terrifying, but added that the scientists did not
develop these ideas because of hubris, but because of fear.33 The double fear expressed in interviews by

these and other researchers is reiterated by journalists and constitutes a powerful

rhetorical resource. If the researchers responsible for developing geoengineering admit fear of their creations
consequences for the environment but, in view of approaching climate catastrophe, also advocate the necessity of
geoengineering, how can citizens question their willingness to expose the environment to risks? In line with Clarks claim,
the scientists have already admitted the risks and taken the lead among those warning of

the consequences of both geoengineering and climate change. This technocratic

emergency framing or politics of emergency, as Clark puts itexerts a
depoliticizing influence.34 Hamilton extends the argument and even claims that
geoengineering advocates seem to approve a world of technocratic control: they
apparently believe that a separation can be sustained between pure science and technology, on one hand, and the politics
threatening to mar it, on the other, aiming to create a world without politics characterized by scientists just and
objective management of the global climate. This position, Hamilton maintains, is nave: science cannot be

isolated, at least not when political, corporate, and military actors also aspire to exert
influence over this powerful tool to regulate the conditions of life .35 These warnings combined
with the admitted fear constitute a solid approach to creating legitimacy for these technologies. The more the risks
of geoengineering are emphasized, combined with advice to consider geoengineering
options, the more inevitable tests and deployment seem. When the problem is
formulated, as it is by Stephen Schneider, for example, as a choice of the lesser of two evils, who can
advocate choosing the most evil?36 The implication of these confessed fears is that geoengineers, unlike most other
scientists and engineers, have both understood and emphasized the risks and side effects of the technologies they are
developing, so they do not need to be criticized by environmentalists. This does not change anything, however, because
there exist no alternatives in view of impending climate catastrophe.37 In light of this understanding, a Time journalists
declaration that the real disaster would be to delay developing geoengineering until climate change had assumed
catastrophic proportions seems consistent.38 Geoengineering is, unlike other large-scale technologies, not

accompanied with promises of a better world. The spokespeople of geoengineering do not offer
future prosperity; instead, their legitimacy is based on negative expectations. These negative
expectations are, as illustrated, related to both global climate conditions and the direct consequences of geoengineering, in
accordance with the logic that the more severe the global climate crisis is expected to become, the more environmental
degradation and risks must be accepted as a consequence of geoengineering. In addition, several leading researchers in
the field openly affirm the inadequacy of our present and future knowledge of geoengineering. This is seldom made into an
objection to these technologies in spite of the repeatedly declared acuteness of the need to come to terms with global
warming. On the contrary, this knowledge deficit is used as an argument for intensified efforts to test and evaluate
geoengineering, about which researchers know almost nothing apart from its indispensability for saving the planet.39 In
this light, contradictory geoengineering stands out in some important respects as the first

grand-scale technology with clear postmodern tendencies.40 It differs from CO2 capture and
storage, for example, in that it has abandoned linear modernitys promises of a prosperous future
and technological development controlled by the natural sciences. Such promises of
progress and objective truth are no longer the legitimation grounds for research into and
deployment of the technology. Geoengineering is guided by a promise to attempt, in a situation
characterized by despair and uncertainty, but not necessarily to succeed.41 This is also why geoengineerings
proponents do not have to outline the advantages of actual grand-scale deployment, but can restrict themselves to making
a case for intensified research into the potential of these technologies, although history indicates that research and

deployment are seldom strictly demarcated. However there seems to be a contradiction between the lack of promises and
the absent belief in progress on the one hand and the totalizing, modern ambition to manage climate change with the help
of grand-scale global deployment of technologies amplifying the notion that scientific engineering carries the only
possibility to save the planet. This grand narrative is surely not compatible with the

epistemologically humble position that is central to the discourse advocating

geoengineering. Accordingly, the storyline about scientists double fear includes the vague notion of a solution to the
problem.42 The climate situation is described as so alarming that it has become urgent to
take extreme, extraordinary, risky, or even dangerous measures to make the survival of
civilization possible. 43 Implicit in this storyline is the notion that climate researchers and
geoengineering scientists are the worlds saviours, acting like gods by creating new atmospheric and
planetary conditions to benefit all organisms. The notion of humble, selfcritical scientists aware that
their knowledge and ability to understand the complexity of the environment are greatly
limited stands in sharp contrast to the claim, usually made by journalists, that
geoengineers are in a position to save the world, if only they are allowed to develop and deploy the
lifesaving technologies they are advocating. This tension is fundamental to the storyline, yet never explicitly touched on.
The failure of politics and cynical industrial fatalism The storyline of the failure of international climate

negotiations and political initiatives to reduce global CO2 emissions constitutes a point of
departure for the geoengineering discourse as important as alarm concerning climate change. Amidst an
increasingly pressing climate situation, national governments and international
institutions are repeatedly judged unable to implement relevant measures. Accordingly, both
scientists and popular science journalists have concluded that international political negotiations have come to the end of
the road, and that other options for managing climate change must now be considered . Geoengineering is

stressed as the most promising such option. This argument emphasizes that researchers
believe that they must develop geoengineering because politics has failed and can no
longer reverse the situation. Matthew Watson, the principle investigator of the SPICE project,44 notes that every
time the politicians, in the context of international climate negotiations, prioritize economic growth or their own reelection, they also indirectly make intensified geoengineering efforts more necessary. This creates antagonism

between political negotiations regarding cuts in CO2 emissions and geoengineering, the
latter being assumed to replace the former. Some actors frame geoengineering and its consequences as the
price to be paid for political failure.45 It is claimed to be possible to replace political solutions with what are depicted as
non-political and purely technical solutions. Politics is seen as obstructing efficient climate change

management, while technology and science are depicted as unproven but uncomplicated ,
although this picture is supplemented by the reservation that geoengineering can only complement reduced CO2
emissions.46 In particular, the Kyoto Treaty and UN processes are described as toothless. The Treaty is seen as not having
helped reduce global emissions, as its signatories have not fulfilled their commitments. It is concluded that the Kyoto
process is more or less a waste of time and that the international negotiations are far too slow. Even if a new and
substantially more ambitious UN climate treaty were agreed on, it would take decades for net global emissions to
decrease, so faster-acting measures are needed.47 In particular, this rationale was made explicit before and during the UN
negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009. Before the conference, several sources claimed that the Royal Society had
announced a warning that geoengineering was the only alternative if negotiations did not result in a treaty on significant
reductions in CO2 emissions.48 Another way to put it was that failure in Copenhagen would result in a big breakthrough
for geoengineering.49 Logically, in the wake of the vague accord formulated at Copenhagen, some journalists drew the
radical conclusion that we will have to engineer the climate.50 The resignation evident in this storyline

rests on fatalism at the impossibility of changing industrial societys

aspirations for economic growth. Despite the alarming projections of climate change, it is claimed that
world electricity use will increase by 50% by 2030, and that 77% of this increased power will be produced by fossil fuels.
The International Energy Agency projects that coal and oil use will continue to rise, as if there were no choice despite the
greenhouse gas emissions. The governments of the world, it is said, are not prepared to compromise their economic
growth rates; in particular, countries such as India and China are claimed to be far from accepting expensive emissions
cuts. There are also severe doubts as to what Caldeira calls the transcendent human capacity for self-sacrifice.51 All

these factors emphasize the need for geoengineering, a solution that does not interfere
with the contemporary industrial rationality. Accordingly, the question is not whether geoengineering
should be done, but how.52 Given the socio-economic structure of contemporary industrial capitalism, there is really no
choice. Ulrich Beck calls this position industrial fatalism, and it is usually combined with

an optimistic belief that things will turn out well in the end.53 However, when it comes to
the geoengineering discourse, there are no such reassurances. Instead the future is
described as insecure and threatening. The discourse is permeated by a cynical

industrial fatalism, which claims that there is no other choice than deploying geoengineering,
even though such technologies might have environmentally devastating consequences and worsen an already catastrophic
situation. The scientists and journalists advocating geoengineering are not forced to describe the future in glowing terms,
as proponents of grand-scale technologies usually do, because they benefit from the despair and desperation evoked by
climate change. For example, John Shepherd declared that it had become necessary to invest in geoengineering research
since there were strong reasons to be less optimistic about reducing CO2 levels.54 Geoengineering was a price to be
paid, not a promise.55 Geoengineering has made the fatalism of industrial society cynical. Pure technology: a bridge to a
sustainable future The geoengineering discourse is overflowing with metaphors and figurative

language. The development of geoengineering is referred to as plan B; 56 it constitutes a last-ditch

alternative,57 parachute,58 airbag,59 and last resort.60 These expressions and metaphors
suggest that there is a technological way out of a political dilemma and that geoengineering is
pure technology, unlike carbon emissions cuts, which are complicated political measures that raise severe conflicts of
interest. This storyline is also commonly spelled out in the geoengineering discourse, which depicts geoengineering as a
technological fix. These strictly technological measures will not solve the problem, but they could buy time, which is
found to be absolutely necessary, since the international political process is so inefficient.61 This notion is closely related
to the idea that geoengineering will serve as a bridge to a future carbon-free society based on renewables, buying time
for the countries of the world to transform their energy systems. Problems related to this claim that are not touched on
concern whether it really will be easier to develop renewables in the future, once geoengineering is deployed, and whether
it will be possible to stop geoengineering once these technologies are implemented. Another lacuna in the discourse is the
implicit assumption that geoengineering will not generate the same type of political conflicts of interest and deadlocks as
the calls for renewables and CO2 emission decreases have. Geoengineering is without argumentation or problematization
assumed to be pure technology devoid of all political considerations. The question of political tensions that may arise if
geoengineering is deployed is avoided, as if there were any such thing as a politically neutral technology or engineering
practice. In rare cases, governance issues are mentioned, but are not considered serious problems.62 This view of
technology is dependent on the commonly proclaimed idea that it is possible to test, study, and identify the environmental
consequences of geoengineering in advance. At first sight this idea appears to contradict the storyline about the scientists
double fear and warnings that geoengineering may cause harmful side effects, but intensified research is supposed to
ensure that the ecological impacts of geoengineering are understood and under control before deployment, enabling the
fine-tuning of various technologies. Field tests are said to guarantee this, and grand-scale research programmes are
implemented to insure against unanticipated side effects.63 The potential risks are cited to underscore the urgent need
for considerable research, and carrying out tests in due time will, according to the pure technology storyline, enable the
slow and cautious deployment of various geoengineering technologies, while maintaining the possibility of reversing the
process if something goes wrong. The alternative of introducing the technology under panic conditions, without careful
testing, should be avoided.64 The technological rationality on which this storyline rests is strictly instrumental and
presupposes that it is possible to project the complex reactions of global ecosystems over several coming centuries by
conducting minor field tests, although at the same time it is repeatedly admitted that such assumptions are highly
problematic. Although there is an explicit awareness that the ecological side-effects are unknown, they are not perceived
as beyond the scope of contemporary engineering science but as calculable and knowable. However, the discourse

also contains some accounts of the new technology that threaten to undermine the image
of geoengineering as purely science based. Some journalists enthusiastically speak of their personal
favourite geoengineering techniques, fascinated by the Blade Runner atmosphere and praising the beauty of this
system. This boyish sci-fi feel reveals that there might be other grounds for developing these wild ideas than strictly
scientific ones.65 An aesthetics of technology and a fascination with the sublime aspects of

the grand-scale enterprise of altering the planets climate are echoed in some of the texts
advocating geoengineering. This is counteracted by declarations that geoengineering is
absolutely not a science-fiction playground for imaginative scientists and engineers ,
although some of the suggestions might evoke a Jules Verne novel or Mary Shelleys Frankenstein. The need for such
demarcations indicates a worry among geoengineering advocates that this new set of technologies might be associated
with romantic fantasies and praised for the wrong reasons. This explicit technological romanticism that

tries to slip in through the back door is immediately refused entrance and shown away, but is
there not a kind of romanticism hidden even in the hard-headed geoengineering schemes
chosen to save the planet? We would argue that this is the case and that this is a strong reason to dismiss all
aesthetic praise of geoengineering schemes. Is not the idea of a pure and politically unpolluted technology, saving the
world from its final destruction in the spirit of Jules Verne, truly romantic at heart, no matter what the scientists and
engineers claim? Would not Captain Nemo have felt fairly comfortable in that company?66 Just mimicking nature In

the geoengineering discourse, even scientists and journalists advocating the technologies in
question highlight the methods controversial character. Geoengineering is said to be rife with
controversy or to involve highly controversial proposals, but what the controversy is all about is seldom discussed.
Instead, as noted above, the matter of controversy is subordinated to the overwhelming global environmental problems
that the technologies are supposed to solve and to the urgency of this task. In this way, the contentiousness of the subject
is both recognized and downplayed or disregarded.67 This is why John Shepherd, in sharp contrast to scientists
promoting technologies in several other areas, emphasizes that geoengineering is no silver bullet or magical bullet.68
It will not solve all our problems and it will not be without considerable coststo use a common expression, it is no get-

out-of-jail-free card.69 Geoengineers

are not forced to promise anything and they can even

stress the uncertainties and risks of their technology without losing support. On the contrary,
this is a way of gaining credibility. However, the storyline of geoengineering as a way of mimicking nature tends in quite
the opposite direction. As early as 2007, Kurt Zenz House declared that some geoengineering technologies just used the
cleaning process that Nature herself uses for greenhouse gas accumulation.70 In this storyline, scientists artificially
made natural processes more efficient, but in principle there was no difference between, for example, volcanic eruptions
and human efforts to release huge volumes of sulphur aerosols into the atmosphere.71 The implied meaning of this
storyline was that geoengineering was not a hazardous human endeavour.72 How could it be hazardous if nature had used
the same processes before humans existed? This storyline stands in sharp contrast to the one emphasizing the double fear
of scientists or the contentiousness of geoengineering, downplaying the extraordinary aspects of the actual technologies.
In 2009, several journalists, referring to declarations of scientists, argued that the most promising geoengineering
technologies obtained their proof of concept from nature, explicitly mentioning that the 1991 volcanic eruption of Mount
Pinatubo in the Philippines had a cooling effect on the planet for more than two years. This leads to the conclusion that
injecting sulphur aerosols into the stratosphere is nothing but mimicking nature, implying that there is nothing strange,
unnatural, or even hazardous about geoengineering.73 Since the end of 2011, this storyline has steadily gained influence.
Mimicking nature is repeatedly characterized as a natural and logical scientific activity, as almost inevitable.74 Nature has
shown the way and humanity just has to follow.75 Ken Calderia even argues that geoengineering concepts have been
tested by nature,76 implying that geoengineers have an ally in nature and that technologies that cannot be tested in
laboratories can be understood as safe and having been tested in full-scale experiments by nature for eons Accordingly, no
other technologies have been as thoroughly tested as have some of the geoengineering technologies that the researchers
know so well. If we cannot trust nature, what or who can we trust? Over the last two or three years, this storyline

has more or less come to replace the storyline of the scientists double fear. The
naturalness of and consequent trust in certain geoengineering technologies have
increasingly been emphasized, in other words, geoengineering is increasingly depicted as a positive solution,
and less as a desperate measure. Concluding Discussion The public debate on geoengineering is dominated by the
advocacy discourse, which in turn is dominated by natural scientists and engineers.77 In a previous paper Anshelm and
Hansson have demonstrated that the public debate on geoengineering is permeated by an unusual degree of critical
reflexivity, and that problems with geoengineering in several cases were highlighted by the advocates before they reached
the discourse critical of geoengineering.78 Clark claims that social scientists have been quick to consider this critique akin
to their own. As mentioned, Clark explains that, in light of the emergency, there is a risk of retreating from

the political. It may be too obvious to state the importance of the environmental humanities avoiding too uncritically
advancing the depoliticized emergency framings in the storyline or merely reacting to initiatives or arguments made by
engineers and natural scientists. A not too obvious step could be, as Clark argues, to use

geoengineering to sensitize the dynamics of the geological and earth systems

thresholds or even intentional human geoclimatic agency. We do not dismiss that idea but
claim that a preceding step should be to scrutinize and understand the present discourse, and as a first step we attempt to
find inconsistencies in the storylines. A discourse cannot be expected to be coherent and free of

inconsistencies. The aim of analyzing the inconsistencies in the storylines examined here
is not to claim that geoengineering advocates statements are less trustworthy or more
dishonest than statements made in more consistent discourses. Instead, by analyzing these inconsistencies we hope to
create a richer understanding of this public discourse. The inconsistencies become more obvious when comparing or
combining the different storylines, analyzing what is omitted or marginal in the discourse and making comparisons with
what is claimed in other contexts.79