AT Spark - Michigan 7 2023 CFMP

AFF
Offense
Yes Extinction---2AC
Extinction---nuke winter, ag
Steven Starr 17. Director, University of Missouri’s Clinical Laboratory Science Program; senior scientist, Physicians for Social Responsibility. 1/9/2017. “Turning a Blind Eye Towards Armageddon — U.S. Leaders Reject Nuclear Winter Studies.” Federation of American Scientists. https://fas.org/2017/01/turning-a-blind-eye-towards-armageddon-u-s-leaders-reject-nuclear-winter-studies/
Now 10 years ago, several of the world’s leading climatologists and physicists chose to reinvestigate the long-term environmental impacts of nuclear war. The peer-reviewed studies they produced are considered to be the most authoritative type of scientific research, which is subjected to criticism by the international scientific community before final publication in scholarly journals. No serious errors were found in these studies and their findings remain unchallenged.
Alan Robock et al., “Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences,” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 112 (2007).
Owen Brian Toon et al., “Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7 (2007).
Michael Mills et al., “Massive global ozone loss predicted following regional nuclear conflict,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 105, no. 14 (2008).
Michael Mills et al., “Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict,” Earth’s Future 2.
Alan Robock et al., “Climatic consequences of regional nuclear conflicts,” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics 7 (2007).
Working at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics at the University of Colorado-Boulder, the Department of Environmental Sciences at Rutgers, and the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at UCLA, these scientists used state-of-the-art computer modeling to evaluate the consequences of a range of possible nuclear conflicts. They began with a hypothetical war in Southeast Asia, in which a total of 100 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs were detonated in the cities of India and Pakistan. Please consider the following images of Hiroshima, before and after the detonation of the atomic bomb, which had an explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.
The detonation of an atomic bomb with this explosive power will instantly ignite fires over a surface area of three to five square miles. In the recent studies, the scientists calculated that the blast, fire, and radiation from a war fought with 100 atomic bombs could produce direct fatalities comparable to all of those worldwide in World War II, or to those once estimated for a “counterforce” nuclear war between the superpowers. However, the long-term environmental effects of the war could significantly disrupt the global weather for at least a decade, which would likely result in a vast global famine.
The scientists predicted that nuclear firestorms in the burning cities would cause at least five million tons of black carbon smoke to quickly rise above cloud level into the stratosphere, where it could not be rained out. The smoke would circle the Earth in less than two weeks and would form a global stratospheric smoke layer that would remain for more than a decade. The smoke would absorb warming sunlight, which would heat the smoke to temperatures near the boiling point of water, producing ozone losses of 20 to 50 percent over populated areas. This would almost double the amount of UV-B reaching the most populated regions of the mid-latitudes, and it would create UV-B indices unprecedented in human history. In North America and Central Europe, the time required to get a painful sunburn at mid-day in June could decrease to as little as six minutes for fair-skinned individuals.
As the smoke layer blocked warming sunlight from reaching the Earth’s surface, it would produce the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1,000 years. The scientists calculated that global food production would decrease by 20 to 40 percent during a five-year period following such a war. Medical experts have predicted that the shortening of growing seasons and corresponding decreases in agricultural production could cause up to two billion people to perish from famine.
The climatologists also investigated the effects of a nuclear war fought with the vastly more powerful modern thermonuclear weapons possessed by the United States, Russia, China, France, and England. Some of the thermonuclear weapons constructed during the 1950s and 1960s were 1,000 times more powerful than an atomic bomb.
During the last 30 years, the average size of thermonuclear or “strategic” nuclear weapons has decreased. Yet today, each of the approximately 3,540 strategic weapons deployed by the United States and Russia is seven to 80 times more powerful than the atomic bombs modeled in the India-Pakistan study. The smallest strategic nuclear weapon has an explosive power of 100,000 tons of TNT, compared to an atomic bomb with an average explosive power of 15,000 tons of TNT.
Strategic nuclear weapons produce much larger nuclear firestorms than do atomic bombs. For example, a standard Russian 800-kiloton warhead, on an average day, will ignite fires covering a surface area of 90 to 152 square miles.
A war fought with hundreds or thousands of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons would ignite immense nuclear firestorms covering land surface areas of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. The scientists calculated that these fires would produce up to 180 million tons of black carbon soot and smoke, which would form a dense, global stratospheric smoke layer. The smoke would remain in the stratosphere for 10 to 20 years, and it would block as much as 70 percent of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Northern Hemisphere and 35 percent from the Southern Hemisphere. So much sunlight would be blocked by the smoke that the noonday sun would resemble a full moon at midnight.
Under such conditions, it would only require a matter of days or weeks for daily minimum temperatures to fall below freezing in the largest agricultural areas of the Northern Hemisphere, where freezing temperatures would occur every day for a period of between one to more than two years. Average surface temperatures would become colder than those experienced 18,000 years ago at the height of the last Ice Age, and the prolonged cold would cause average rainfall to decrease by up to 90%. Growing seasons would be completely eliminated for more than a decade; it would be too cold and dark to grow food crops, which would doom the majority of the human population.2
Even if not directly existential---that spurs system collapse AND pandemics, which are
Julian Cribb 19. Author, journalist, editor and science communicator, principal of Julian Cribb & Associates who provide specialist consultancy in the communication of science, agriculture, food, mining, energy and the environment, more than thirty awards for journalism. 10/03/2019. “6 - Food as an Existential Risk.” Food or War, 1st ed., Cambridge University Press. DOI.org (Crossref), doi:10.1017/9781108690126.
Humanity is facing its greatest test in the million-year ascent of our kind. This isn’t a single challenge. It’s a constellation of huge man-made threats, now coming together to overshadow our civilisation’s stability and even, maybe, its future survival. These ten intersecting risks are: ecological collapse, resource depletion, weapons of mass destruction, climate change, global poisoning, food insecurity, population and urban failure, pandemic disease and uncontrolled new technologies (like killer robots, artificial intelligence and universal surveillance) – reinforced by a prodigious capacity for human self-delusion. But sticking our heads in the sand and trying to ignore them will not remove the danger.
These threats are known as ‘existential risks’ because they imperil our future existence, both as individuals, as a civilisation and maybe even as a species.
Their most important feature is the fact that they are not isolated from one another. They are deeply interwoven. They play into and feed one another. They cannot be addressed separately or singly, because to do so creates a situation where curbing one risk only makes other risks worse. Together they constitute a single existential emergency facing all of humanity.
An example of why they cannot be addressed piecemeal is trying to solve the global food problem by intensifying agriculture worldwide using fossil fuels, fertilisers and petrochemicals: this will only destroy the very climate, resources and ecosystem services on which agriculture, itself, depends – and is not, consequently, a viable or enduring solution. Other answers must be sought. Another example is that trying to end the Sixth Extinction of wildlife on our planet by turning half of it back to forest and grassland will not work on its own, because it would involve the sacrifice of half the current human food supply: consequently, we need a solution that achieves both aims – sustainable food for all and a sufficient haven for the Earth’s other species. So, the problem of extinction needs to be solved, in part, by solving the problem of food – and that, in turn, entails solving the problems of climate, global poisoning, resource depletion and other mega-risks. It is absolutely clear from this that the solutions we adopt must be cross-cutting. They must comprehensively address all the perils we face, not just one or a handful of them.
Take these ten great risks together and what you have is the focal issue of our time – the greatest and most profound challenge ever to confront human civilisation. The risks are all selfinflicted, a direct result of the overgrowth in human numbers and our unbridled demands on the planet – for food, resources, space and a healthy environment. By solving them together, we ensure our future. By denying them or failing to solve them all in time, we knowingly create untold misery and suffering for most of humanity and generations to come through the centuries ahead. We are gambling with the very survival of our civilisation and species. The risks are described below, along with observations about how they play into the Food or War scenario. The detail, the scientific sources and the solutions, collective and individual, to each risk are described in more detail in Surviving the 21st Century.
Extinction and Ecological Collapse
More than half of the large animals that once inhabited the Earth have been wiped from it by human action since 1970, according to the Worldwide Fund for Nature’s Living Planet Index.3 So, too, have half the fish in the sea on which humans rely for food.4 Humans are, in the words of the great biologist E. O. Wilson, ‘tearing down the biosphere’, demolishing the very home that keeps us alive.5
Extinction, it should be noted, is a part of life: 99.9 per cent of all species ever to evolve on this planet have disappeared, and new ones like ourselves have arisen to replace them. But extinction rates like today’s – a hundred to a thousand times faster than normal – are a freak occurrence that usually takes tens of millions of years, not mere decades. Animal, plant and marine species are presently vanishing so fast that scientists have dubbed our time “the Sixth Extinction” – the sixth such megadeath in the geological history of the Earth.6 By the end of the present century, Wilson says, it is possible that up to half of the eight million species thought to exist here will be gone. Furthermore, in all previous extinctions, natural events like asteroid strikes and vast volcanic outbursts have been to blame. This will be the only time in the Earth’s history when the wipe-out was caused by a single species. Us.7
The probability of humans becoming extinct during the twentyfirst century is not high – but there are scenarios, such as an all-out nuclear war, runaway climate change (+5–10 C or more), or a compound collapse in the Earth’s main life support systems, in which it must be regarded as a possibility – and the fact that it is unpleasant to contemplate is no excuse for doing nothing to stop it.
However, there are also a number of credible scenarios in which large-scale ecosystem collapse could endanger civilisation and cause very high mortality among the world’s population. These revolve around the notion of ‘environmental security’ which is, in turn, very closely tied to human security – i.e. peace or war. An ecosystem is a biological community of mutually dependent species – and the removal of one species after another can undermine it and render it dysfunctional, in the same way that pulling one brick at a time out of your home will eventually cause it to fall down. Ecosystems support all life on the planet, and maintain the quality of air, water and soil on which it depends. For humans, they provide food and clean water (provisioning services), disease and climate regulation (regulatory services), spiritual and aesthetic fulfilment (cultural services), useful chemical energy (from plants) and soil formation (support services). As ecosystems decay, the decline and loss of these services often causes significant harm to human wellbeing and can inflame the tensions that lead to conflict.
The most destructive object on the planet, as we noted in Chapter 3, is the human jawbone. The need to keep it fed is responsible, every year, for the loss of up to 75 billion tonnes of topsoil, the wasting of six trillion tonnes of water, the release of five million tonnes of pesticides, and 30 per cent of the world’s climate-wrecking carbon emissions. In addition, the contemporary food system is the chief driver of deforestation, desertification, wildlife extinctions and impaired ecosystems. Among the most striking examples of food’s impact on the wild world are the 400+ ‘dead zones’ spreading through the world’s oceans from the Arabian Sea, to the Baltic and the Mississippi delta. These are oxygenless layers in the sea, where fish cannot survive. They are caused by topsoil dislodged by land clearing, over-farming and over-grazing, the use of huge quantities of artificial fertilisers, toxic chemicals and human sewage. Along with overfishing they contribute to an ongoing collapse in world wild fisheries and are a clear example of how the activity of one part of the food system can impair another. Similarly, most inland rivers and lakes in populated regions are eutrophic and polluted – and no longer capable of producing as much food as in the past. The loss of wild fisheries increases tensions between nations and fishers over what remains and can lead to ‘fish wars’. 8
The existing global food production system is therefore a major contributor to the decline and failure of ecosystem services needed to support the human population. This in turn rebounds on the food system itself. Furthermore, the extinction of wild animals and plants deprives the food industry of many edible species that may be needed as part of a healthy, diverse global diet in future.
The solution to the extinction crisis is to cease farming and grazing on about half the currently farmed area of the planet (25 million square kilometres), transfer food production to the cities where it can take advantage of all the nutrients and water currently being wasted, and employ many of the world’s farmers and indigenous people as Stewards of the Earth to manage the rewilding and regeneration of former farmlands. Food production can continue on the remaining 24 million square kilometres using eco-agriculture. This process is further described in Surviving the 21st Century and in Chapter 9 of this book.
How the existing food system plays into the risk of war can also be viewed through the lens of environmental security: war damages environments, making it harder for humans to sustain and feed themselves – and ruined environments themselves become cauldrons of war. This is plainly to be seen in the cases of Syria, South Sudan, Yemen and the Horn of Africa. What we most need are food systems that do not cause knock-on damage to either the environment and wildlife, the climate, the oceans or to consumer health – and which ease tensions, so promoting peace, not conflict. These are described in Chapters 8 and 9.
Resource Scarcity
The average citizen of planet Earth today uses at least ten times the volume of resources used by their grandparents a century ago. Since the human population has also quadrupled over the same time, this means humanity’s gargantuan appetite for minerals, metals, timber, water, food and energy has grown fortyfold in barely a hundred years. As the Global Footprint Network explains, we are presently using enough ‘stuff’ for 1.6 Earths, not just the one we have. We now outrun the Earth’s natural ability to supply our needs in August each year.9 As with the mining of groundwater, the decline and collapse of global resources like soil, water and phosphorus, is often imperceptible to the individual: people have simply no idea they are living on borrowed time and, with that, comes enormous risk.
To make the issue of resource consumption a little more personal: you (as an average individual citizen of the planet) will in your lifetime
– use 99,720 tonnes (i.e. 40 Olympic pools) of fresh water
– displace 750 tonnes of topsoil
– consume 720 tonnes of metals and materials
– use 80 billion joules of energy
– release 288 tonnes of CO2
– release 320 kilograms of toxic chemicals
– waste 13.4 tonnes of food
– destroy 800 square metres of forest.
Because of the long, cryptic, industrial and international trade chains which hide it, most of us are unaware of the vast damage we do to the planet through our simple habit of shopping.
Yes, some of us have a notion that some of our purchases may be bad for gorillas in the Congo, orangutans in Borneo or flamingos in the Atacama – but we mostly have no true appreciation of the wider havoc we inflict on the Earth and its natural systems by the ‘innocent’ act of consumption, which business and governments try constantly to convince us is essential to ‘growth and jobs’.
It should therefore come as no surprise that the world finds itself increasingly short of key resources like fresh water, soil, phosphorus, timber and certain minerals – and that these shortages are giving rise to tensions and even to conflicts. Indeed, resource scarcity has for some time been considered by strategic experts to be one of the most likely causes of war in the twentyfirst century.10
However, people are not equally responsible for the devastation of Planet Earth. The diagram below (Figure 6.1), from [[FIGURE 6.1 OMITTED]] Oxfam, illustrates how just one tenth of humanity consumes five times as much in the way of material resources (expressed here in the form of their carbon footprint) as the poorest half of the world population. The affluent are chiefly responsible for the destruction taking place on a global scale as they seek to sustain lifestyles that the planet can no longer afford or support.
The significance of this blind spot around consumption for global food security is very great. As described in earlier chapters, the world food system depends critically on soil, water, nutrients and a stable climate, to supply humanity’s daily need for nutriment – and all of these essential resources are in increasingly short supply, chiefly because of our own mismanagement of them and our collective failure to appreciate that they are finite. On current trends, the existing food system will tend to break down, first regionally and then globally, owing to resource scarcity from the 2020s onward, and especially towards the mid century – unless there is radical change in the world diet and the means by which we feed ourselves. This will le

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