Minnesota held the line on warming good and got to semisCo2 good SHORT 1NC (:30

Co2 key to biodiversity and foodFerrara 14 (Peter, **Graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, senior fellow for entitlement and budget policy @ Heartland, senior fellow at the Social Security Institute, White House Office of Policy Development under President Reagan, Associate Deputy Attorney General of the United States under the first President Bush**, The Period Of No Global Warming Will Soon Be Longer Than the Period of Actual Global Warming, 2/24, http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2014/02/24/the-period-of-no-global-warming-will-soon-be-longer-than-the-period-of-actual-global-warming/, CMR)

In addition, CO2 is actually essential to all life on the planet. Plants need CO2 to grow and conduct photosynthesis, which is the natural process that creates food for animals and fish at the bottom of the food chain. The increase of CO2 in the atmosphere that has occurred due to human emissions has actually increased agricultural growth and output as a result, causing actually an increased greening of the planet. So has any warming caused by such human emissions, as minor warming increases agricultural growth. The report states, CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere greens the planet and helps feed the growing human population.

Co2 solves ice age- extinctionMarsh 12 (Gerald E. Marsh, Retired Physicist from the Argonne National Laboratory and a former consultant to the Department of Defense on strategic nuclear technology and policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Administration, The Coming of a New Ice Age, http://www.winningreen.com/site/epage/59549_621.htm, 2012)

CHICAGO Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age. What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended. How much longer do we have before the ice begins to spread across the Earths surface? Less than a hundred years or several hundred? We simply dont know. Even if all the temperature increase over the last century is attributable to human activities, the rise has been relatively modest one of a little over one degree Fahrenheit an increase well within natural variations over the last few thousand years. While an enduring temperature rise of the same size over the next century would cause humanity to make some changes, it would undoubtedly be within our ability to adapt. Entering a new ice age, however, would be catastrophic for the continuation of modern civilization. One has only to look at maps showing the extent of the great ice sheets during the last Ice Age to understand what a return to ice age conditions would mean. Much of Europe and North-America were covered by thick ice, thousands of feet thick in many areas and the world as a whole was much colder. The last little Ice Age started as early as the 14th century when the Baltic Sea froze over followed by unseasonable cold, storms, and a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. That was followed by the extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland and the loss of grain cultivation in Iceland. Harvests were even severely reduced in Scandinavia And this was a mere foreshadowing of the miseries to come. By the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, wiping out farms and entire villages. In England, the River Thames froze during the winter, and in 1780, New York Harbor froze. Had this continued, history would have been very different. Luckily, the decrease in solar activity that caused the Little Ice Age ended and the result was the continued flowering of modern civilization. There were very few Ice Ages until about 2.75 million years ago when Earths climate entered an unusual period of instability. Starting about a million years ago cycles of ice ages lasting about 100,000 years, separated by relatively short interglacial periods, like the one we are now living in became the rule. Before the onset of the Ice Ages, and for most of the Earths history, it was far warmer than it is today. Indeed, the Sun has been getting brighter over the whole history of the Earth and large land plants have flourished. Both of these had the effect of dropping carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to the lowest level in Earths long history. Five hundred million years ago, carbon dioxide concentrations were over 13 times current levels; and not until about 20 million years ago did carbon dioxide levels dropped to a little less than twice what they are today. It is possible that moderately increased carbon dioxide concentrations could extend the current interglacial period. But we have not reached the level required yet, nor do we know the optimum level to reach. So, rather than call for arbitrary limits on carbon dioxide emissions, perhaps the best thing the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climatology community in general could do is spend their efforts on determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide needed to extend the current interglacial period indefinitely. NASA has predicted that the solar cycle peaking in 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries and should cause a very significant cooling of Earths climate. Will this be the trigger that initiates a new Ice Age? We ought to carefully consider this possibility before we wipe out our current prosperity by spending trillions of dollars to combat a perceived global warming threat that may well prove to be only a will-o-the-wisp. **Adaptation solves but mitigation trades offRidley 14 (Matt, BA and DPhil degrees from Oxford University, he worked for the Economist for nine years as science editor, Washington correspondent and American editor, before becoming a self-employed writer and businessman, fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Academy of Medical Sciences, and a foreign honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, We have a new climate change consensus and it's good news everyone, http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9176121/armageddon-averted/)

Nigel Lawson was right after all. Ever since the Centre for Policy Studies lecture in 2006 that launched the former chancellor on his late career as a critic of global warming policy, Lord Lawson has been stressing the need to adapt to climate change, rather than throw public money at futile attempts to prevent it. Until now, the official line has been largely to ignore adaptation and focus instead on mitigation the misleading term for preventing carbon dioxide emissions. That has now changed. The received wisdom on global warming, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, was updated this week. The newspapers were, as always, full of stories about scientists being even more certain of environmental Armageddon. But the document itself revealed a far more striking story: it emphasised, again and again, the need to adapt to climate change. Even in the main text of the press release that accompanied the report, the word adaptation occurred ten times, the word mitigation not at all. The distinction is crucial. So far, the debate has followed a certain bovine logic: that global warming is happening, so we need to slow it down by hugely expensive decarbonisation strategies green taxes, wind farms. And what good will this do? Is it possible to stop global warming in its tracks? Or would all these green policies be the equivalent of trying to blow away a hurricane? This question just how much can be achieved by mitigation is one not often addressed. There is an alternative: accepting that the planet is warming, and seeing if we can adjust accordingly. Adaptation means investing in flood defences, so that airports such as Schiphol can continue to operate below existing (and future) sea level, and air conditioning, so that cities such as Houston and Singapore can continue to grow despite existing (and future) high temperatures. It means plant breeding, so that maize can be grown in a greater range of existing (and future) climates, better infrastructure, so that Mexico or India can survive existing (and future) cyclones, more world trade, so that Ethiopia can get grain from Australia during existing (and future) droughts. Owen Paterson, the Secretary of State for the Environment, in repeatedly emphasising the need to adapt to climate change in this way, has been something of a lone voice in the government. But he can now count on the support of the mighty IPCC, a United Nations body that employs hundreds of scientists to put together the scientific equivalent of a bible on the topic every six years or so. Whereas the last report had two pages on adaptation, this one has four chapters. Professor Chris Field is the chairman of Working Group 2 of the IPCC, the part devoted to the effects of climate change rather than the cause. The really big breakthrough in this report, he says, is the new idea of thinking about managing climate change. His co-chair Vicente Barros adds: Investments in better preparation can pay dividends both for the present and for the future adaptation can play a key role in decreasing these risks. After so many years, the penny is beginning to drop. In his book An Appeal to Reason, Lawson devoted a chapter to the importance of adaptation, in which he pointed out that the last IPCC report in 2007 specifically assumed that humans would not adapt. Possible impacts, the report said, do not take into account any changes or developments in adaptive capacity. That is to say, if the world gets warmer, sea levels rise and rainfall patterns change, farmers, developers and consumers will do absolutely nothing to change their habits over the course of an entire century. It is a ludicrous assumption. But this assumption was central, Lawson pointed out, to the estimated future cost of climate change the IPCC reported. A notorious example was the reports conclusion that, assuming no adaptation, crop yields might fall by 70 per cent by the end of the century a conclusion based, a footnote revealed, on a single study of peanut farming in one part of India. Lawson pointed out that adaptation had six obvious benefits as a strategy, which mitigation did not share. It required no international treaty, but would work if adopted unilaterally; it could be applied locally; it would produce results quickly; it could capture any benefits of warming while avoiding risks; it addressed existing problems that were merely exacerbated by warming; and it would bring benefits even if global warming proves to have been exaggerated. Ask yourself, if you were a resident of the Somerset Levels, whether you would prefer a government policy of adapting to anything the weather might throw at you, whether it was exacerbated by climate change or not, or spending nearly 50 billion (by 2020) on low-carbon technologies that might in a few decades time, if adopted by the whole world, reduce the exacerbation of floods, but not the floods themselves. It is remarkable how far this latest report moves towards Lawsons position. Professor Field, who seems to be an eminently sensible chap, clearly strove to emphasise adaptation, if only because the chance of an international agreement on emissions looks ever less likely. If you go through the report chapter by chapter (not that many people seem to have bothered), amid the usual warnings of potential danger, there are many sensible, if jargon-filled, discussions of exactly the points Lawson made. Chapter 17 concedes that adaptation strategies can yield welfare benefits even in the event of a constant climate, such as more efficient use of water and more robust crop varieties. Chapter 20 even acknowledges that in some cases mitigation may impede adaptation (e.g., reduced energy availability in countries with growing populations). A crucial point, this: that preventing the poor from getting access to cheap electricity from coal might make them more vulnerable to climate change. So green policies may compound the problem they seek to solve.Co2 Good 1NC (2:30

Co2 key to food, biodiversity, and halting land conversionCarter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, 2014, p. 473-475. Gender edited

The key findings of this chapter are listed below. Rising atmospheric CO2 and warming temperatures, both of which IPCC claims constitute a significant threat to the biosphere, benefited agriculture in the ancient past and in the twentieth century. Empirical studies suggest a future warming of the climate coupled with rising atmospheric CO2 levels will boost global agricultural production and help meet the food needs of the planets growing population. When model-based studies fully account for the growth-enhancing and water-conserving benefits of atmospheric CO2 enrichment, they project significant gains for future agricultural production. The vigor of the terrestrial biosphere has been increasing with time, revealing a great greening of the planet that extends across the globe. Satellite-based analyses of net terrestrial primary productivity (NPP) reveal an increase of around 6 13% since the 1980s. There is no empirical evidence to support the model-based claim that future carbon uptake will diminish on a global scale due to rising temperatures. Earths land surfaces were a net source of CO2- carbon to the atmosphere until about 1940. From 1940 onward, the terrestrial biosphere has become, in the mean, an increasingly greater sink for CO2- carbon. Over the past 50 years, global carbon uptake has doubled from 2.4 0.8 billion tons in 1960 to 5.0 0.9 billion tons in 2010. The observed greening of the Earth has occurred in spite of the many real and imagined assaults on the planets vegetation over this time period, including fires, disease, outbreaks of pests, deforestation, and climatic changes (primarily in temperature and precipitation). The atmospheres rising CO2 contentwhich IPCC considers to be the chief culprit behind its concerns about the future of the biosphereis most likely the primary cause of the observed greening trends. In the future, plants should be able to adjust their physiology to accommodate a warming of the magnitude and rate of rise typically predicted by climate models to accompany the projected future increase in atmospheric CO2 content. The rise in the airs CO2 concentration and its antitranspiration effect, which improves plant wateruse efficiency, are enhancing and will continue to enhance the vegetative productivity of Africa. The rise of the airs CO2 concentration and temperature to their highest values of the past century enhanced the terrestrial vegetative productivity of all parts of Asia, including deserts, forests, grasslands, and the Tibetan Plateau. Evergreen vegetation, woody plants, and other plant life have increased across Australia over the past 200 years as a result of CO2 enrichment. Over the last two decades of the twentieth century, Europe as a whole became greener and much of it is seeing an increase in woodlands due to the recent rise in atmospheric CO2, which has tended to offset the detrimental effects of climate change in the region. Opposite the forecasts promulgated by the models used by IPCC, land-based plants of the Arctic and near-Arctic regions of North America are thriving, thanks in large part to the ongoing rise in the atmospheres CO2 concentration and global warming. Late twentieth-century increases in air temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentration did not negatively affect plant communities in the eastern United States. Rather, the temperature and CO2 increases significantly enhanced local and regional productivity, and there is little reason to think such enhancements will not continue throughout the foreseeable future. The late twentieth-century rise in temperature and atmospheric CO2 concentrations improved the productivity of plant communities in the central region of the United States, notwithstanding model-based concerns to the contrary. The late twentieth-century rise in temperature and atmospheric CO2 improved the productivity of plant communities in the western region of the United States, notwithstanding model-based projections of unprecedented ecological disaster due to rising temperatures and drought. Warmer temperatures and higher CO2 concentrations are resulting in net primary productivity increasing across tropical South America, overcoming the effects of deforestation, forest fires, and incursions by human civilization into natural areas. It is likely the greening of the planet will continue in the future, even if the largest temperature increases predicted by the models occur, because the optimum temperature for plant growth and development typically rises with increasing levels of atmospheric CO2. This response, coupled with expected increases in plant photosynthetic rates from the rise in the airs CO2 concentration, is more than enough to compensate for any temperature-induced plant stress caused by global warming. Real-world observations reveal plants have many ways of adjusting to changes in climate in addition to their ability to spread from places of rising warmth to cooler habitats, and these observations suggest the planets current assemblage of plants is likely to be around a good deal longer than many theoretical models have predicted. A major cause of biodiversity reductions is not rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations, but instead the direct encroachment of [hu]man[s] upon the world of nature. Anthropogenic global warming, to whatever extent it exists, is helping plants overcome these assaults and thrive despite the growing human presence. As good as things currently are for world agriculture, and as much better as they are expected to become as the atmospheric CO2 content continues to rise, there may be additional substantial room for both natural selection and bioengineering to remove the constraints of low CO2 adaptation in several important agricultural crops and thereby create novel genotypes able to exploit high CO2 conditions to theirand our advantage. The ongoing rise in atmospheric CO2 content is likely exerting significant selection pressure on Earths naturally occurring terrestrial plants, which should improve their performance in the face of various environmental stressors via the process of microevolution. Plants may be much better prepared than most scientists once thought to meet whatever climatic challenges, including global warming, the future may pose for them. Evidence continues to accumulate for substantial heritable variation of ecologically important plant traits, including root allocation, drought tolerance, and nutrient plasticity, which suggests rapid evolution based on epigenetic variation alone should be possible.Food wars cause extinction outweighs warming Cribb 10 (Julian Cribb, principal of JCA, fellow of the Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, 2010, The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It, google books,)

The character of human conflict has also changed: since the early 1990S, more wars have been triggered by disputes over food, land, and water than over mere political or ethnic differences. This should not surprise US: people have fought over the means of survival for most of history. But in the abbreviated reports on the nightly media, and even in the rarefied realms of government policy, the focus is almost invariably on the playersthe warring national, ethnic, or religious factionsrather than on the play, the deeper subplots building the tensions that ignite conflict. Caught up in these are groups of ordinary, desperate people fearful that there is no longer sufficient food, land, and water to feed their childrenand believing that they must fight the others to secure them. At the same time, the number of refugees in the world doubled, many of them escaping from conflicts and famines precipitated by food and resource shortages. Governments in troubled regions tottered and fell. The coming famine is planetary because it involves both the immediate effects of hunger on directly affected populations in heavily populated regions of the world in the next forty yearsand also the impacts of war, government failure, refugee crises, shortages, and food price spikes that will affect all human beings, no matter who they are or where they live. It is an emergency because unless it is solved, billions will experience great hardship, and not only in the poorer regions. Mike Murphy, one of the worlds most progressive dairy farmers, with operations in Ireland, New Zealand, and North and South America, succinctly summed it all up: Global warming gets all the publicity but the real imminent threat to the human race is starvation on a massive scale. Taking a 1030 year view, I believe that food shortages, famine and huge social unrest are probably the greatest threat the human race has ever faced. I believe future food shortages are a far bigger world threat than global warming.2 The coming famine is also complex, because it is driven not by one or two, or even a half dozen, factors but rather by the confluence of many large and profoundly intractable causes that tend to amplify one another. This means that it cannot easily be remedied by silver bullets in the form of technology, subsidies, or single-country policy changes, because of the synergetic character of the things that power it.

Co2 solves ice age- extinctionMarsh 12 (Gerald E. Marsh, Retired Physicist from the Argonne National Laboratory and a former consultant to the Department of Defense on strategic nuclear technology and policy in the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Administration, The Coming of a New Ice Age, http://www.winningreen.com/site/epage/59549_621.htm, 2012)

CHICAGO Contrary to the conventional wisdom of the day, the real danger facing humanity is not global warming, but more likely the coming of a new Ice Age. What we live in now is known as an interglacial, a relatively brief period between long ice ages. Unfortunately for us, most interglacial periods last only about ten thousand years, and that is how long it has been since the last Ice Age ended. How much longer do we have before the ice begins to spread across the Earths surface? Less than a hundred years or several hundred? We simply dont know. Even if all the temperature increase over the last century is attributable to human activities, the rise has been relatively modest one of a little over one degree Fahrenheit an increase well within natural variations over the last few thousand years. While an enduring temperature rise of the same size over the next century would cause humanity to make some changes, it would undoubtedly be within our ability to adapt. Entering a new ice age, however, would be catastrophic for the continuation of modern civilization. One has only to look at maps showing the extent of the great ice sheets during the last Ice Age to understand what a return to ice age conditions would mean. Much of Europe and North-America were covered by thick ice, thousands of feet thick in many areas and the world as a whole was much colder. The last little Ice Age started as early as the 14th century when the Baltic Sea froze over followed by unseasonable cold, storms, and a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. That was followed by the extinction of the Norse settlements in Greenland and the loss of grain cultivation in Iceland. Harvests were even severely reduced in Scandinavia And this was a mere foreshadowing of the miseries to come. By the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, wiping out farms and entire villages. In England, the River Thames froze during the winter, and in 1780, New York Harbor froze. Had this continued, history would have been very different. Luckily, the decrease in solar activity that caused the Little Ice Age ended and the result was the continued flowering of modern civilization. There were very few Ice Ages until about 2.75 million years ago when Earths climate entered an unusual period of instability. Starting about a million years ago cycles of ice ages lasting about 100,000 years, separated by relatively short interglacial periods, like the one we are now living in became the rule. Before the onset of the Ice Ages, and for most of the Earths history, it was far warmer than it is today. Indeed, the Sun has been getting brighter over the whole history of the Earth and large land plants have flourished. Both of these had the effect of dropping carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to the lowest level in Earths long history. Five hundred million years ago, carbon dioxide concentrations were over 13 times current levels; and not until about 20 million years ago did carbon dioxide levels dropped to a little less than twice what they are today. It is possible that moderately increased carbon dioxide concentrations could extend the current interglacial period. But we have not reached the level required yet, nor do we know the optimum level to reach. So, rather than call for arbitrary limits on carbon dioxide emissions, perhaps the best thing the UNs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the climatology community in general could do is spend their efforts on determining the optimal range of carbon dioxide needed to extend the current interglacial period indefinitely. NASA has predicted that the solar cycle peaking in 2022 could be one of the weakest in centuries and should cause a very significant cooling of Earths climate. Will this be the trigger that initiates a new Ice Age? We ought to carefully consider this possibility before we wipe out our current prosperity by spending trillions of dollars to combat a perceived global warming threat that may well prove to be only a will-o-the-wisp.

negative feedbacks check--Co2 key to forests, wetlands, and topsoil Carter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Summary for Policymakers, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, 2014 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2014, p. 6.

Key Findings: CO2, Plants, and Soils Results obtained under 3,586 separate sets of experimental conditions conducted on 549 plant species reveal nearly all plants experience increases in dry weight or biomass in response to atmospheric CO2 enrichment. Additional results obtained under 2,094 separate experimental conditions conducted on 472 plant species reveal nearly all plants experience increases in their rates of photosynthesis in response to atmospheric CO2 enrichment. Long-term CO2 enrichment studies confirm the findings of shorter-term experiments, demonstrating that the growth-enhancing, water-conserving, and stress-alleviating effects of elevated atmospheric CO2 likely persist throughout plant lifetimes. Forest productivity and growth rates throughout the world have increased gradually since the Industrial Revolution in concert with, and in response to, the historical increase in the airs CO2 concentration. Therefore, as the atmospheres CO2 concentration continues to rise, forests will likely respond by exhibiting significant increases in biomass production and they likely will grow more robustly and significantly expand their ranges. Modest increases in air temperature tend to increase carbon storage in forests and their soils. Thus, old-growth forests can be significant carbon sinks and their capacity to sequester carbon in the future will be enhanced as the airs CO2 content continues to rise. As the atmospheres CO2 concentration increases, the productivity of grassland species will increase even under unfavorable growing conditions characterized by less-than-adequate soil moisture, inadequate soil nutrition, elevated air temperature, and physical stress imposed by herbivory. The thawing of permafrost caused by increases in air temperature will likely not transform peatlands from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Instead, rapid terrestrialization likely will act to intensify carbon-sink conditions. Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations likely will enhance the productivity and carbon sequestering ability of Earths wetlands. In addition, elevated CO2 may help some coastal wetlands counterbalance the negative impacts of rising seas. Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations likely will allow greater numbers of beneficial bacteria (that help sequester carbon and nitrogen) to exist within soils and anaerobic water environments, thereby benefitting both terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. The aerial fertilization effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment likely will result in greater soil carbon stores due to increased carbon input to soils, even in nutrient-poor soils and in spite of predicted increases in temperature. The carbon-sequestering capability of Earths vegetation likely will act as a significant brake on the rate-of-rise of the airs CO2 content and thereby help to mute the magnitude of any CO2-induced global warming. The historical increase in the airs CO2 content has significantly reduced the erosion of valuable topsoil over the past several decades; the continuing increase in atmospheric CO2 can maintain this trend and perhaps even accelerate it for the foreseeable future.

Humans adapttheir models are flawedIndur Goklany, former IPCC review, Is Global Warming the Number One Threat to Humanity? BRIEFING PAPER n. 7, Global Warming Policy Foundation, 1212, p. 5-6.

The paper notes that global warming impact studies systematically overestimate negative impacts and simultaneously underestimate positive consequences. The net negative impacts, therefore, are likely to be substantially overestimated because these studies fail to consider adequately societys capacity to adapt autonomously to either mitigate or take advantage of climate change impacts. This violates the IPCCs methodological guidelines for impact assessments, which require consideration of autonomous or automatic adaptations. These adaptations depend on, among other things, adaptive capacity, which should advance with time due to the assumption of economic growth embedded in each IPCC emission scenario (see Figure 1). 16 However, these advances are rarely accounted for fully in impacts assessments. For example, the FTAs water resource study totally ignores adaptive capacity while its malaria study assumes no change in adaptive capacity between the baseline year (1990) and projection year (2085) (see here17). Consequently, the assessments are internally inconsistent because future adaptive capacity does not reflect the future economic development used to derive the emission scenarios that underpin global warming estimates.their authors are hacksDr. William Happer, The Truth About Greenhouse Gases, George C. Marshall Institute, 52311, www.marshall.org/article.php?id=953, accesse 6-28-11.

The management of most scientific societies has enthusiastically signed on to the global warming bandwagon. This is not surprising, since governments, as well as many states and foundations, generously fund those who reinforce their desired outcomes under the cover of saving the planet. Certain private industries are also involved: those positioned to profit from enacted controls as well as financial institutions heavily invested in green technologies whose rationale disappears the moment global warming is widely understood to be a non-problem. There are known connections and movements of people involved in government policy, scientific societies, and private industry, all with the common thread of influencing the outcome of a set of programs and investments underpinned by the supposed threat of global warming.

CO2 2NC

--A2 Distribution Thumps

Distribution not a concernNGOs and empiricsDavid Leonhardt David Leonhardt is the managing editor of a new New York Times website covering politics and policy (The Upshot), scheduled to begin in 2014. He was previously the papers Washington bureau chief, as well as an economics columnist. He is the author of the e-book, Heres the Deal: How Washington Can Solve the Deficit and Spur Growth, published by The Times and Byliner. Africas Economy Is Rising. Now What Happens to Its Food?, The Upshot (New York Times), JAN. 22, 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/upshot/africas-economy-is-rising-now-what-happens-to-its-food.html?rref=upshot&abt=0002&abg=0

For decades, the economies of Africa were the worlds economic laggards. They arent anymore. Over the last decade, Africas per capita income has grown at a rate nearly identical to that of the rest of the world. Its reasonable to imagine that the continent is in the early stages of a trajectory that could mimic that of Latin America or, more ambitiously, parts of Asia. With the world experiencing one of the greatest extended reductions in poverty on record, Africa has finally become part of the story. A middle class is beginning to develop in West Africa, from Ghana and Nigeria down to Angola. Some severely poor countries, like Ethiopia and Liberia, are at least making rapid progress. Along with Africas economic stirrings come many of the same questions that have confronted the rest of the developing world. And some of the most important revolve around food. Will the economic growth prove lasting and broad enough to end the continents tragic famines? Will those Africans who today live almost entirely on starches like cassava be able to switch to a more varied and nutritious diet? How will farmers on the continent likely to suffer some of the worst consequences of climate change cope with it and how can Africas rising food production avoid accelerating that climate change? Photo Rice farming in eastern Rwanda last year. Africas farmers are vastly less productive than farmers elsewhere, which needs to change in order for the continent to catch up economically. Credit Ben Curtis/Associated Press One of the biggest players in this area has become the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. It is better known for its efforts to reduce disease in Africa, but it has also spent more than $3 billion in grants on African agriculture. On Thursday, Mr. and Ms. Gates will be in Brussels to mark the 15th anniversary of their foundation and to announce their goals for the next 15 years. Among them: financing programs to help Africa feed itself. Africas farmers today are vastly less productive than farmers elsewhere getting less than one-fifth the yield on corn that American farmers do, for instance. The foundation plans to finance more scientific research, new programs to disseminate that research (especially to female farmers, who particularly struggle), better food storage and more mobile phones, all with the goal of lifting African agriculture. A more efficient agricultural sector, the Gateses write in their annual letter about their work, can drive massive poverty reduction and improve life across the continent. There is a fascinating tension in this focus on food. Worries about the availability of food stretch back centuries, not just in Africa. The crux of the essay that made Thomas Malthus famous, in 1798, argued that food production grew arithmetically while the population grew geometrically, dooming the human species to a grim future. The best-selling 1968 book, The Population Bomb, made a modern version of the same case. The food pessimists, of course, could hardly have been more wrong. It turns out that the fruits of human ingenuity grow geometrically, too more than rapidly enough to keep pace with population growth. The share of income that societies devote to food has fallen sharply even as the worlds population has grown to 7.3 billion. As countries have become wealthier, they have rarely had trouble feeding themselves. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story And the Gateses are hardly pessimists. The lives of people in poor countries will improve faster in the next 15 years than at any other time in history, they write. When I spoke with them recently, I asked why food production needed to be among their big new goals. After all, private market economies have generally managed to deliver enough food, at least to countries on the rise. The same cant be said about medical care or education, two of the foundations other main areas of emphasis. Specifically, I mentioned Paul Ehrlich and his well-known $10,000 bet with the economist Julian Simon in 1980, over the price of a basket of commodities. Mr. Ehrlich thought the prices would rise by 1990, in a sign that the resources could not keep up with population growth. Mr. Simon thought otherwise and won handily. Even Simons view was that humans would have to change to innovate, Mr. Gates said. Innovation, in other words, is not preordained. Indeed, its happened much more in some societies than in others. And it has happened, Mr. Gates was arguing, because people and institutions took steps to remove the barriers to progress. With African agriculture, those barriers include roads that are too narrow to transport grain quickly, lack of knowledge about how crops fare best in some places and a dearth of basic information on market prices, for instance that hampers farmers. They get taken by the middlemen, Ms. Gates said. If they have a cellphone, theyre informed. All of those problems are at least partly market failures, and they wont automatically fix themselves. They are the kind of failures that governments or foundations can address. Its far too early to know whether the Gates Foundations attempts to do so in Africa will work. Some other experts have criticized the foundation, for example, for giving most of its money dedicated to African agriculture to groups outside of Africa like European universities, which may not know what the continent really needs. The foundation replies that the bulk of the money is ultimately spent in Africa. Either way, Africa today offers an argument against fatalism. Many parts of the affluent world from Japan to the United States to Europe may be in a bit of a funk, struggling with slow-growing incomes. And climate change, left unaddressed, presents grave dangers for everyone. At the same time, much of the world is enjoying one of historys most rapid increases in prosperity. Life expectancy has risen more than six years just since 1990. The world, to quote the title of a book by the economist Charles Kenny, is Getting Better. As Mr. Gates says: The world is actually improving a lot. Were trying to deliver both the good news on the progress and the possibility to do more.

Both are important- resolving scarcity is a necessary conditionAWFW 11 (at least 2011card internally cites that date. A Well-Fed World (AWFW) is a hunger relief & animal protection organization. Persons writing for it include: Dawn Moncrief two masters degrees from The George Washington University: one in International Relations, the other in Womens Studies, both focusing on economic development. D. Maurice Herrings formal education on health and wellness includes a B.S. in pre-med biology and chemistry from Seton Hall University and an M.S. in community nutrition and food science from Cornell University. Melanie Hiller holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Justice & Social Inquiry from Arizona State University. In addition to compiling reports on topics central to our organizational mission, she helps facilitate outreach to the general public and collaborate with other organizations and advocates. Ashley Capps received an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Her first book of poems is Mistaking the Sea for Green Fields Gary Loewenthal is the co-founder of Compassion for Animals and founder of the Worldwide Vegan Bake Sale (WVBS). In 2009, the WVBS was honored by VegNews Magazine as Veg Event of the Year as well as featured on CNN in 2010. Scarcity vs. Distribution http://awfw.org/scarcity-vs-distribution/

Its common to hear that theres plenty of food, the problem is distribution not scarcity. But its not a simple either/or situation. Both scarcity and distribution are complex and interconnected issues. Increasing population and dwindling resources make food scarcity a current problem and a crisis in the making. Distribution in terms of governments and other institutions not providing enough food to those in need is a heart-breaking reality that is connected with issues of scarcity. Isnt there more than enough to feed everyone? Theoretically we can feed nine billion people, but not when vast amounts of food are fed to animals to produce meat and other animal-based foods. Animals are extremely inefficient converters of food that is, they eat much more food than they produce. Animal-based foods (such as meat, dairy, and eggs) are highly resource-intensive and require much more food, land, water and energy than eating plant-based foods directly. A majority of the extra food is redistributed away from those who need it most and used as animal feed to produce meat for those who can afford it most. As such, animal-based foods are a form of overconsumption and redistribution that reduces the amount of available food and increases the price of basic food staples. In short, those with financial resources outbid the poor and increase hunger. Scarcity Finally Accepted? Global hunger results from a web of immensely complex factors, including BOTH food scarcity and distribution. Thinking that hunger is mostly a problem of distribution is dangerous in that it leads people to dismiss the issue of scarcity and results in practices that are inappropriate and harmful. Food scarcity at the global level is an issue now with past surpluses being drawn down and it is fast becoming a critical issue as our seven billion population expands towards nine billion by 2050. As our population increases, available land, water, energy and other finite resources decrease. So we have more people to feed and fewer resources to feed them. Scarcity is further exacerbated by our appetite for resource-intensive animal-based foods. Animals-based foods, include but are not limited to all types of animal flesh (cows, pigs, goats, sheep, birds, and aquatic animals). Animal-based foods also include products that are produced from animals, most notably their reproductive products such as dairy and eggs. Meat as Overconsumption & Redistribution Animals used for food (livestock) are highly inefficient converters of food, energy, and natural resources. In short, livestock consume much more than they produce. Eating 1,000 calories of meat can easily use more than 7,000 calories in plant-based foods, plus the associated use of natural resources. By using more than their fair share, animal-based foods are a form of redistribution that exacerbate food scarcity, especially in low-income countries. (See supply-and-demand below) There are obvious differences in the amount of food consumed in low-, middle- and high-income countries, but the quantity in terms of calories consumed is less important than the type of food. When the true caloric values are calculated that include the use of animal feed, the disparities are shockingly large. Exporting Food as Redistribution During the mid-1980s famine, Ethiopia was a net exporter of food. The government and businesses exported food to be used as feed to produce meat and other animal-based foods for wealthier countries and individuals. Those with greater financial resources bid food away from those who have less because theyre able to pay higher prices. Its hard to believe but exporting large quantities of food is a common practice that continues today in Ethiopia, Kenya and other countries with large populations of hungry, malnourished, and food-insecure people. Basic Supply-and-Demand Agricultural supply-and-demand is a complicated process with many political and other variables, but this is the basic concept which holds true under many scenarios: As the supply of food tightens, decreasing supply relative to demand prices increase and fewer people can afford the basic food staples needed for survival. When food is exported from a poor region their local supply of food decreases, which can lead to higher food prices and more deaths from hunger and hunger-related causes. On a global scale, when staple foods (grains, soy, corn, etc) are used as animal feed to produce resource-intensive animal-based foods, the global food supply is lower relative to demand and food prices are higher than many can afford. There are many other factors involved, but that is the basic concept. The biofuels example illustrates it best. Biofuels, Meat and the Food Crisis The most prominent example of food supply-and-demand is the way in which biofuels increased demand for food staples, thus increasing the price of food and contributing to a global food crisis. Food-intensive biofuels were demonized as a top contributor to the mid-2000s food crisis, but there was no mention of the impact of food-intensive meat, dairy and egg consumption. Reducing the global consumption of animal products would have an immensely greater impact on the supply and availability of food relative to reducing, even eliminating, biofuels. While food supplies can be tightened and relaxed by agribusiness and policymakers, in the long run food is a limited resource. Reducing consumption of animal-based foods would take pressure off our limited food and environmental resources. It would decrease demand relative to supply, allowing for a downward pressure on food prices to fall.

Food Wars M 2NCIts a conflict multiplier most probable scenario for nuclear war Future Directions International 12 (International Conflict Triggers and Potential Conflict Points Resulting from Food and Water Insecurity Global Food and Water Crises Research Programme, May 25, http://www.futuredirections.org.au/files/Workshop_Report_-_Intl_Conflict_Triggers_-_May_25.pdf,)

There is a growing appreciation that the conflicts in the next century will most likely be fought over a lack of resources. Yet, in a sense, this is not new. Researchers point to the French and Russian revolutions as conflicts induced by a lack of food. More recently, Germanys World War Two efforts are said to have been inspired, at least in part, by its perceived need to gain access to more food. Yet the general sense among those that attended FDIs recent workshops, was that the scale of the problem in the future could be significantly greater as a result of population pressures, changing weather, urbanisation, migration, loss of arable land and other farm inputs, and increased affluence in the developing world. In his book, Small Farmers Secure Food, Lindsay Falvey, a participant in FDIs March 2012 workshop on the issue of food and conflict, clearly expresses the problem and why countries across the globe are starting to take note. . He writes (p.36), if people are hungry, especially in cities, the state is not stable riots, violence, breakdown of law and order and migration result. Hunger feeds anarchy. This view is also shared by Julian Cribb, who in his book, The Coming Famine, writes that if large regions of the world run short of food, land or water in the decades that lie ahead, then wholesale, bloody wars are liable to follow. He continues: An increasingly credible scenario for World War 3 is not so much a confrontation of super powers and their allies, as a festering, self-perpetuating chain of resource conflicts. He also says: The wars of the 21st Century are less likely to be global conflicts with sharply defined sides and huge armies, than a scrappy mass of failed states, rebellions, civil strife, insurgencies, terrorism and genocides, sparked by bloody competition over dwindling resources. As another workshop participant put it, people do not go to war to kill; they go to war over resources, either to protect or to gain the resources for themselves. Another observed that hunger results in passivity not conflict. Conflict is over resources, not because people are going hungry. A study by the International Peace Research Institute indicates that where food security is an issue, it is more likely to result in some form of conflict. Darfur, Rwanda, Eritrea and the Balkans experienced such wars. Governments, especially in developed countries, are increasingly aware of this phenomenon. The UK Ministry of Defence, the CIA, the US Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Oslo Peace Research Institute, all identify famine as a potential trigger for conflicts and possibly even nuclear war.

Food crisis destabilizes Russia, China, and IndiaGlobal Torchlight, (Global Torchlight, specialised consultancy advising on a full spectrum of international political and security issues, founding members include John C. Amble, former intelligence officer at the Defense Intelligence Agency, and David J. Chmiel, MA from the War Studies Department at Kings College London, "Drought, Rising Food Prices, and Political Instability," 8--20--12, http://globaltorchlight.com/?p=2289, accessed 11-6-12.

Adverse climatic conditions this year in regions such as the United States, the Black Sea, and India are combining to generate lower than average crop yields and put upward pressure on food prices that will last well into 2013. While those with international business interests will be attuned to the economic and financial consequences of such price increases, equal attention should be paid to their potential impact on the political and security risk environment in emerging and developing markets over the coming months. Such risks could take many forms, but three warrant particular mention. First, substantial and sustained rises in food prices are likely to place pressure on governments in many emerging markets to subsidise the prices of staple foods. As has been noted in previous analysis on globaltorchlight.com, such subsidies often do more harm than good to an economy in the long run. They distort market mechanisms and give rise to increased potential for fraud and corruption in how the program is administered. Nevertheless, when confronted with prospects of civil unrest relating to rising food prices, political leaders may judge subsidies the easiest means of placating a restive population. Second, this will also mean that existing subsidy programs will likely remain in place while food prices continue to rise. In the past couple of years, countries as disparate as Bolivia, Nigeria, and Tunisia have experienced civil unrest following decisions to reduce or eliminate subsidies on food, fuel, and other staples. The prospects of similar disruption to internal security will be fresh in the minds of many governments. Countries that do choose to abolish subsidies are likely to confront considerable resistance when doing so. Finally, the effects of this issue are not limited to smaller developing economies but could generate political upheaval in some of the worlds most important economies, including China, Russia, and India. It is widely acknowledged that food price inflation is an issue of significant political sensitivity in China and any sustained increase in food prices could cause grave concern in Chinas Communist government. In Russia, similar inflationary trends could impact hardest upon the rural and poorer parts of the country on which President Vladimir Putin traditionally relies for support. Protest movements against Putin have previously lacked momentum due to his ongoing support in Russias hinterland; however, an erosion in support for his government in those parts of the country could alter that dynamic. However, the potential consequences of food price insecurity would perhaps be most deeply problematic for India, whose government is already struggling with the challenge of restoring order following the eruption of sectarian violence in the north-eastern Assam state. Any civil unrest related to rising food prices would present the government with a further substantial challenge to its attempts to sustain the countrys economic growth and attract further foreign investment capital.

Russian instability causes global nuclear warDimitriSimes, Senior Associate, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, The Return of Russian History, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, January/February 1994, p. 67+, LN.

For the United States, neither Yeltsin's political future nor even the future of Russian democracy should be ends in themselves. What the United States needs most in its greatly weakened but still potentially formidable superpower rival is a combination of domestic stability and a system of checks and balances.Stability is important for a nation with thousands of nuclear weapons and continuing territorial tensions with its newly independent neighbors. Too much disunity in Russia (as appealing as it is to those who "love" that country so much that they would prefer to see several Russias) increases the likelihood of a civil war that could easily engulf most, if not all, of the post-Soviet states, creating not only nuclear and environmenta ldisasters but a grave threat to world peace as well. Thus, it is in the U.S. interest to have a government in Moscow that is strong and determined enough to draw the line and to prevent centrifugal, separatist trends from going out of control.Conversely, the more stable the Russian government, the more the United States should be interested in seeing that there are meaningful checks and balances to prevent the reemergence of a unitary authoritarian state. Without such checks and balances, there would be no assurance that Russia would not again become a threat to its neighbors and a destabilizing factor in world politics. The United States has a vested interest in seeing Russian governments rely more on democratic legitimacy than on the support of the military and security services.

china instability causes nuke warHerbert Yee 2, Assc. Prof. Government @ Hong Kong Baptist University and Ian Storey, Asst. Prof. @ the Asian-Pacific Center for Security Studies, 2 (China Threat: Perception, Myths and Reality, p. 5)

The fourth factor contributing to the perception of a China threat is the fear of political and economic collapse in the PRC, resulting in territorial fragmentation, civil war and waves of refugees pouring into neighbouring countries. Naturally, any or all of these scenarios would have a profoundly negative impact on regional stability. Today the Chinese leadership faces a raft of internal problems, including the increasing political demands of its citizens, a growing population, a shortage of natural resources and a deterioration in the natural environment caused by rapid industrialisation and pollution. These problems are putting a strain on the central governments ability to govern effectively. Political disintegration or a Chinese civil war might result in millions of Chinese refugees seeking asylum in neighbounng countries. Such an unprecedented exodus of refugees from a collapsed PRC would no doubt put a severe strain on the limited resources of Chinas neighbours. A fragmented China could also result in another nightmare scenario nuclear weapons falling into the hands of irresponsible local provincial leaders or warlords.12 From this perspective, a disintegrating China would also pose a threat to its neighbours and the world.

**Food shortages cause global instability*biggest internal link turns aff war mpx Keating 14 (Joshua, staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs and writes the World blog, Which governments are most likely to be toppled when hungry people riot?, http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/feed_the_world/2014/04/food_riots_and_revolution_grain_prices_predict_political_instability.single.html,)

People may vote with their pocketbooks, but more often than not, they revolt with their bellies. If you want to predict where political instability, revolution, coups detat, or interstate warfare will occur, the best factor to keep an eye on is not GDP, the human development index, or energy prices. If I were to pick a single indicatoreconomic, political, socialthat I think will tell us more than any other, it would be the price of grain, says Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, who has been writing about the politics and economics of food since the 1950s. Food, of course, is never the sole driver of instability or uprising. Corruption, a lack of democracy, ethnic tensionthese better known factors may be criticalbut food is often the difference between an unhappy but quiescent population and one in revolt. Take Venezuela, where a toxic combination of gas subsidies, currency controls, and hoarding have led to chronic food shortagesa major factor motivating the anti-government protests that have wracked the country since the beginning of this year. Its not always high prices that are to blame. Behind the ongoing protests against Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in Thailand, in addition to concerns over corruption and a debate on the future of the countrys democracy, is a probe over a controversial rice-hoarding scheme that has led to a global glut. This idea isnt exactly new. Weve known since the times of the Roman poet Juvenalhe of bread and circuses famethat food is an inherently political commodity, says Cullen Hendrix, a political scientist at the University of Denvers Korbel School of International Relations and a leading authority on the relationship between food and conflict. If youre the dictator of a small, rich country, you can theoretically feed your population indefinitely. Two events have renewed interest among scholars in the relationship between food prices and political instability. The first was the 200708 food crisis, which triggered food riots in countries from Haiti to Bangladesh to Mozambique. The second was the Arab Spring, the first signs of which were riots in response to high food prices in Algeria and Tunisia. The revolutions that swept the Middle East that year were, of course, primarily the result of a population frustrated by decades of dictatorship and corruption, but according to Hendrix, Egypts revolution, in particular, is impossible to fully understand without taking into account the role of food. Autocratic governments have a habit of keeping food and fuel prices artificially low through subsidies and price controls. As Hendrix puts it, Rational leaders have an incentive to cater to the preferences of urbanites. They are closer to the center of power, they face lower costs for collective action, they live in dense environments in which protests are particularly threatening to a leader. So what do these urbanites want? They want cheap food. If youre the dictator of a small, rich country, you can theoretically feed your population indefinitely. In 2011, for instance, while revolutions were sweeping the region, oil-rich Kuwait announced that it would commemorate the anniversary of the countrys liberation from Iraq by giving every citizen a grant of 1,000 dinars ($3,545) and free food for 13 months. The message to citizens was pretty clear. Egypt is the most populous country in the Arab world and is not blessed with a significant amount of arable land or oil reserves; its rulers dont have options like Kuwaits. Egypt has a history of food-based instability. In 1977, under pressure from the World Bank, Anwar Sadat severely curtailed food subsidies. In the resulting bread intifada, strikes and rioting lasted for two days and around 800 people were killed. By 2011, food and fuel subsidies accounted for a staggering 8 percent of Egypts GDP. Hosni Mubaraks government could no longer afford to feed his population into submission. Even with subsidies, grain prices jumped 30 percent in Egypt between 2010 and 2011, and the uprising began in January 2011. The Arab Spring may become the textbook example of the geopolitics of food pricesthe food riots and subsequent revolutions transfixed the world. But shifts in food price may be responsible for an even more profound reordering of global power. Food may explain why everything changed during the 1980s. After a price shock in the late 1970s, food prices underwent a slump during the early and mid-1980s. A confluence of factors included slowing economic growth; the spread of the green revolution, which improved the efficiency of agriculture in developing countries; and the falling price of oil.

Co2 Ag: L 2NCMassive food crisis coming absent co2also solves carbon cycleCarter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, 2014, p. 481.

Several researchers have expressed concerns about a looming food production crisis on the horizon, suggesting just a few decades from now the evergrowing human population of the planet will need a near-doubling of present-day agricultural production. One example is the brief Perspective article published in Science, where Running (2012) resurrected shades of Meadows et al.s 1972 treatise on The Limits to Growth.Noting terrestrial plant production is the foundation of the biospheric carbon cycle and that water and atmospheric CO2 are transformed into plant carbohydrate matter with the help of solar energy, Running states this plant matter sustains the global food web and becomes the source of food, fiber and fuel for humanity. A problem Running sees, however, is that for more than 30 years, global net primary production (NPP) has stayed near 53.6 Pg per year, with only ~1 Pg of inter-annual variability, citing two studies of which he was a coauthor (Nemani et al., 2003; Zhao and Running, 2010). He thus speculates, if global NPP is fixed by planetary constraints, then no substantial increase in plant growth may be possible.If true, this would indeed have catastrophic consequences, for it is almost universally agreed, as Running writes, the projected 40% increase in human population by 2050 CE, combined with goals to substantially improve standards of living for the poorest 5 billion people on Earth, implies at least a doubling of future resource demand by 2050. The most important of these resources is food.But is a doubling of food production by midcentury realistic? Agriculture already consumes 38% of the worlds land surface, and Running notes many analyses now conclude that freshwater use for irrigation has already reached a planetary boundary. Furthermore, with massive river pollution and ocean anaerobic dead zones, he states, if anything, future increases in NPP must be achieved with less, not more, irrigation and fertilizer use. Others have noted additional challenges, such as Tilman et al. (2009) noting land previously allocated to food production is transformed to bioenergy production, raising food prices for the people who can least afford it. Has the planet reached a limit to its growth? In a 2012 paper published in Nature, titled Increase in observed net carbon dioxide uptake by land and oceans during the past 50 years, Ballantyne et al. (2012) suggest it has not. The five U.S. scientists state their mass balance analysis shows net global carbon uptake has increased significantly by about 0.05 billion tonnes of carbon per year and that global carbon uptake doubled, from 2.4 0.8 to 5.0 0.9 billion tonnes per year, between 1960 and 2010. They conclude, there is no empirical evidence that carbon uptake has started to diminish on the global scale. In fact, as their results indicate, just the opposite appears to be the case, with global carbon uptake actually doubling over the past half-century. There are many reasons why this doubling has occurred: breeding of better crop varieties that are higher-yielding, more competitive with weeds, less tasty to insect pests, more nutritious, and more drought-resistant, as well as smarter ways of farming, improved technologies, and the worldwide aerial fertilization and transpiration-reducing effects of the historical and still-ongoing rise in the atmospheres CO2 content. The latter two phenomena benefit agriculture and nature simultaneously.Also concerned about adequately meeting the food needs of a growing world population, Parry and Hawkesford (2010) note food production needs to increase 50% by 2030 and double by 2050 to meet projected demands. They say while the demand for food is increasing, production is progressively being limited by non-food uses of crops and cropland, such as the production of biofuels. In their UK homeland, for example, they note, by 2015 more than a quarter of wheat grain may be destined for bioenergy production, which is both sad and puzzling, as they also point out currently, at least one billion people are chronically malnourished and the situation is deteriorating, with more people hungrier now than at the start of the millennium.The two researchers turn their discussion to photosynthesis, the all-important process by which plants convert light energy into chemical energy, which is used in the assimilation of atmospheric CO2 and the formation of sugars that fuel growth and yield. These phenomena make this natural and lifesustaining process a major target for improving crop productivity both via conventional breeding and biotechnology, they write.Next to a plants need for carbon dioxide is its need for water, the availability of which, in the words of Parry and Hawkesford, is the major constraint on world crop productivity. They state, since more than 80% of the [worlds] available water is used for agricultural production, there is little opportunity to use additional water for crop production, because as populations increase, the demand to use water for other activities also increases. Hence they conclude, a real and immediate challenge for agriculture is to increase crop production with less available water. They provide an example of a success story: the Australian wheat variety Drysdale, which gained fame because it uses water more efficiently. This valued characteristic was achieved by slightly restricting stomatal aperture and thereby the loss of water from the leaves. They note this ability reduces photosynthetic performance slightly under ideal conditions, but it enables plants to have access to water later in the growing season thereby increasing total photosynthesis over the life of the crop.Of course, Drysdale is but one variety of one crop, and the ideal goal would be to get nearly all varieties of all crops to use water more efficiently. That goal in fact can be reached without doing anything new, because allowing atmospheric CO2 concentrations to rise will cause the vast majority of plants to reduce the apertures of their stomata and thereby lower the rate at which water vapor escapes from them into the air. The result is even better than that produced by the breeding of Drysdale, because the extra CO2 in the air more than overcomes the photosynthetic reduction that results from the partial closure of plant stomatal apertures, allowing even more yield to be produced per unit of water transpired in the process.Human ingenuity can make the situation better still, by breeding and selecting crop varieties that perform better under higher atmospheric CO2 concentrations than the varieties people currently rely upon, and by employing various technological means of altering them. Humanity can succeed even though the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of substantially reducing the worlds hungry by 2015 will not be met, as Parry and Hawkesford conclude. This truly seems to be the path to take, as they write at least one billion people are chronically malnourished and the situation is deteriorating, with more people hungrier now than at the start of the millennium.

590 studies prove co2 agCarter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Summary for Policymakers, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, 2014 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2014, p. 4-5.

Carbon dioxide is the basis of nearly all life on Earth. It is the primary raw material utilized by most plants to produce the organic matter from which they construct their tissues. Not surprisingly, thousands of laboratory and field experiments conducted over the past 200 years demonstrate that plant productivity and growth both rise as the CO2 concentration of the air increases.As early as 1804, de Saussure showed that peas exposed to high CO2 concentrations grew better than control plants in ambient air; and work conducted in the early 1900s significantly increased the number of species in which a growth-enhancing effect of atmospheric CO2 enrichment was observed to occur (Demoussy, 1902-1904; Cummings and Jones, 1918).By the time a group of scientists convened at Duke University in 1977 for a workshop on Anticipated Plant Responses to Global Carbon Dioxide Enrichment, an annotated bibliography of 590 scientific studies dealing with CO2 effects on vegetation had been prepared (Strain, 1978). This body of research demonstrated increased levels of atmospheric CO2 generally produce increases in plant photosynthesis, decreases in plant water loss by transpiration, increases in leaf area, and increases in plant branch and fruit numbers, to name but a few of the most commonly reported benefits.Five years later, at the International Conference on Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Plant Productivity, it was concluded a doubling of the airs CO2 concentration likely would lead to a 50% increase in photosynthesis in C3 plants, a doubling of water use efficiency in both C3 and C4 plants, significant increases in biological nitrogen fixation in almost all biological systems, and an increase in the ability of plants to adapt to a variety of environmental stresses (Lemon, 1983). In the years since, many other studies have been conducted on hundreds of different plant species, repeatedly confirming the growth-enhancing, water-saving, and stress-alleviating advantages that elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations bestow upon Earths plants and soils (Idso and Singer, 2009; Idso and Idso, 2011).Chapter 1 focuses on basic plant productivityresponses to elevated CO2 and includes in two appendices tabular presentations of more than 5,500 individual plant photosynthetic and biomass responses to CO2-enriched air, finding nearly all plants experience increases in these two parameters at higher levels of CO2. Chapter 1 also examines the effect of elevated CO2 on ecosystems including forests, grasslands, peatlands, wetlands, and soils. This review of the literature reveals elevated CO2 improves the productivity of ecosystems both in plant tissues aboveground and in the soils beneath them. The key findings of Chapter 1 are presented in Figure 4.

Higher CO2 levels help plantsten reasonsCell divisionProtein synthesisGlomalin productionDisease resistanceHerbivory resistancePollination and nectar productionRoot systemstanninCarter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Summary for Policymakers, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, 2014 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2014, p. 7.

Key Findings: Plant Characteristics Atmospheric CO2 enrichment (henceforth referred to as rising CO2) enhances plant growth, development, and ultimate yield (in the case of agricultural crops) by increasing the concentrations of plant hormones that stimulate cell division, cell elongation, and protein synthesis. Rising CO2 enables plants to produce more and larger flowers, as well as other flower-related changes having significant implications for plant productivity and survival, almost all of which are positive. Rising CO2 increases the production of glomalin, a protein created by fungi living in symbiotic association with the roots of 80 percent of the planets vascular plants, where it is having a huge positive impact on the biosphere. Rising CO2 likely will affect many leaf characteristics of agricultural plants, with the majority of the changes leading to higher rates and efficiencies of photosynthesis and growth as well as increased resistance to herbivory and pathogen attack. Rising CO2 stimulates photosynthesis in nearly all plants, enabling them to produce more nonstructural carbohydrates that can be used to create important carbon-based secondary compounds, one of which is lignin. Rising CO2 leads to enhanced plant fitness, flower pollination, and nectar production, leading to increases in fruit, grain, and vegetable yields of agricultural crops as well as productivity increases in natural vegetation. As rising CO2 causes many plants to increase biomass, the larger plants likely will develop more extensive root systems enabling them to extract greater amounts of mineral nutrients from the soil. Rising CO2 causes plants to sequentially reduce the openness of their stomata, thus restricting unnecessary water loss via excessive transpiration, while some plants also reduce the density (number per area) of stomates on their leaves. Rising CO2 significantly enhances the condensed tannin concentrations of most trees and grasses, providing them with stronger defenses against various herbivores both above and below ground. This in turn reduces the amount of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, released to the atmosphere by ruminants browsing on tree leaves and grass. As the airs CO2 content rises, many plant species may not experience photosynthetic acclimation even under conditions of low soil nitrogen. In the event that a plant cannot balance its carbohydrate sources and sinks, CO2-induced acclimation provides a way of achieving that balance by shifting resources away from the site of photosynthesis to enhance sink development or other important plant processes.The net effects on plant productivity are positiveCarter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, Summary for Policymakers, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, 2014 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), 2014, p. 5.

Chapter 2 examines these and other effects of atmospheric CO2 enrichment on plant characteristics. Extensive research finds those effects are overwhelmingly positive. For example, rising CO2 levels promote plant growth by increasing the concentrations of plant hormones that stimulate cell division, cell elongation, and protein synthesis; by enabling plants to produce more and larger flowers; by increasing the production of glomalin, an important protein created by fungi living in symbiotic association with the roots of most vascular plants; and by affecting leaf characteristics of agricultural plants that lead to higher rates and efficiencies of photosynthesis and growth as well as increased resistance to herbivory and pathogen attack. The key findings of Chapter 2 are presented in Figure 5.

A2 Short-Term

CO2 benefits for plants remain consistent in the long-termstudies proveCarter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, 2014, p. 14.

1.1.3.1 Non-Woody Plants Several long-term studies of various non-woody plants reveal sustained beneficial responses to elevated concentrations of atmospheric CO2 over periods of many years.In Switzerland, Niklaus et al. (2001) exposed a species-rich but nutrient-poor and water-limited, calcareous grassland dominated by Bromus erectus (which accounted for approximately half of the ecosystems aboveground vegetative biomass) to atmospheric CO2 concentrations of approximately 360 and 600 ppm for six years, using screen-aided CO2 control (SACC) technology. CO2-induced increases in biomass production in years one through six of the experiment were, respectively, 5%, 20%, 22%, 27%, 31%, and 18%, for an average of 23.6% over the last five years of the study (Niklaus and Krner, 2004). This biomass increase ultimately increased carbon stocks in plant shoots and roots by 17 and 24%, respectively, and enhanced carbon stocks in vegetative litter by 34%. The net effect of these increases was an initial air-to-soil carbon flux of 210 g C m-2 year-1. After six years of treatment, however, the CO2-enriched soils held only about 44% of the carbon expected from this influx rate, due to the low soil residence time of the newly input carbon. Nevertheless, the study showed atmospheric CO2 enrichment can in fact enhance plant growth and carbon sequestration in low-nutrient and waterlimited soils.In Italy, Bettarini et al. (1998) measured the stomatal densities and conductances of the leaves of 17 species of plants growing in the vicinity of a natural CO2-emitting spring that has produced twiceambient atmospheric CO2 concentrations for at least two centuries, while making similar measurements on plants of the same species located further from the spring, where normal CO2 concentrations prevail. The elevated CO2 decreased leaf stomatal conductances in all but one of the species by 19 to 73%. These reductions, however, were not accompanied by decreases in stomatal density, which remained unaffected by long-term atmospheric CO2 enrichment in all but three species. Consequently, life-long exposure to elevated CO2 reduced plant water use primarily by controlling leaf stomatal function, not by changing leaf anatomical features (i.e., the number of stomata per unit leaf area).

Land Conversion 2NCLand conversion causes extinction by 2050 absent co2Carter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, 2014, p. 566-567.

Highly CO2-responsive genotypes of a wide variety of plantsranging from food crops to lumber cropscould be chosen to take advantage of their genetic ability to optimize growth in response to projected future increases in the atmospheric CO2 content. Doing so is probably essential to the well-being of mankind and to the survival of much of the worlds wildlands. As human population grows, the demand for food rises as well, as does the need for land and water to grow that food. Unless something is done to enhance the per-acre productivity of the terrestrial biosphere, some species of plants and animals may be pushed out of existence by the midpoint of the current century. A number of real-world experiments demonstrate many of Earths food- and lumber-producing plants possess the genetic potential to grow better while using less water as atmospheric CO2 content rises. In an important paper by 32 researchers from 12 countries, Ainsworth et al. (2008) made the case for breeding varieties of major food crops to best take advantage of the ongoing rise in the atmospheric CO2 content. They note, the growing world population, increasing demands for grains for animal feeds, land loss to urban expansion and demand for bioenergy production are exerting more and more pressure on global agricultural productivity, so a major challenge for plant biologists, agronomists and breeders will be to provide germplasm and seed material that maximize future crop production, particularly in the context of rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations that provide, in their words, a unique opportunity to increase the productivity of C3 crops. The scientists point out only a fraction of available germplasm of crops has been tested for CO2 responsiveness and further research is needed to elucidate the mechanisms of yield response to CO2, to assess the genetic diversity available for improving responsiveness and to devise efficient schemes for selection for adaptation to rising ambient CO2, whether based on conventional plant breeding or systems biology approaches for selecting and engineering improved genetics. They conclude, because it may take 1015 years to move from discovery of new advantaged genetics to commercial cultivars of annual grain crops, developing a robust strategy and supporting the planned work with the best possible facilities should be an urgent priority.

Species Resil 2NCSpecies adapt even to rapid warmingCarter et al 14 (Dr. Craig D. Idso, Dr. Sherwood B. Idso, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Dr. Robert M. Carter, Emeritus Fellow, Institute of Public Affairs and Dr. S. Fred Singer, Science and Environmental Policy Project, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED II: BIOLOGICAL IMPACTS, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, 2014, p. 569.

Real-world observations reveal plants have many ways of adjusting to changes in climate in addition to their ability to spread from places of rising warmth to cooler habitats, and these observations suggest the planets current assemblage of plants is likely to be around a good deal longer than many theoretical models have predicted. One of the great horror stories associated with predictions of CO2-induced global warming is of warming so fast and furious that many species of plants will not be able to migrate towards cooler regionspoleward in latitude, or upward in elevationquickly enough to avoid extinction. Realworld observations of plants show they have many ways of adjusting to changes in climate in addition to their ability to move from places of rising warmth to cooler habitats. These observations suggest the planets current assemblage of plants is likely to be around longer than many theoretical models have predicted.Under-yielding species appear to be buffered from extinction because growth enhancements of smaller plants tend to diminish the relative biomass advantages of larger plants in crowded conditions, and when species are rare in a local area, they have a higher survival rate than when they are common, resulting in the enrichment of rare species and increasing diversity with age and size class in complex ecosystems. In addition, diversity should increase as a group of individuals ages, because more common species are selectively removed by pathogens and predators, especially those commonly associated with them.Also, individuals of a species compete more intensively with conspecifics than with individuals of other species, and diversity may increase if an individual benefits nearby non-conspecifics, as such facilitation makes interspecific interactions more positive than intraspecific interactions and thus provides an advantage to locally rare species. Similarly, common trees growing closer together are more prone to deadly infections, and they may also face stiffer competition for certain resources, whereas rarer trees, by depending on slightly different sets of resources, may not have this problem.

Feedbacks 2NCDMS is unaccounted for by their models, checks any warmingNIPCC, Nongovernment International Panel on Climate Change, CLIMATE CHANGE RECONSIDERED, Craig Idso, S. Fred Singer, Warren Anderson, J.Scott Armstrong, Dennis Avery, Franco Battaglia, Robert Carter, Piers Corbyn, Richard Courtney, Joseph dAleo, Don Easterbrook, Fred Goldberg, Vicent Gray, Williams Gray, Kesten Green, Kenneth Haapala, David Hagen, Richard Alan Keen, adhav Khandekar, William Kininmonth, Hans Labohm, Anthony Lupo, Howard Maccabee, M.Michael MOgil, Christopher Monckton, Lubos Motl, Stephen Murgatroyd, Nicola Scafetta, Harrison Schmitt, Tom Segalstad, George Taylor, Dick Thoenes, Anton Uriarte Gerd Weber, 2009, p. 45-47.

More than two decades ago, Charlson et al. (1987) discussed the plausibility of a multi-stage negative feedback process, whereby warming-induced increases in the emission of dimethyl sulfide (DMS) from the worlds oceans tend to counteract any initial impetus for warming. The basic tenet of their hypothesis was that the global radiation balance is significantly influenced by the albedo of marine stratus clouds (the greater the cloud albedo, the less the input of solar radiation to the earths surface). The albedo of these clouds, in turn, is known to be a function of cloud droplet concentration (the more and smaller the cloud droplets, the greater the cloud albedo and the reflection of solar radiation), which is dependent upon the availability of cloud condensation nuclei on which the droplets form (the more cloud condensation nuclei, the more and smaller the cloud droplets). And in completing the negative feedback loop, Charlson et al. noted that the cloud condensation nuclei concentration often depends upon the flux of biologically produced DMS from the worlds oceans (the higher the sea surface temperature, the greater the sea-to-air flux of DMS). Since the publication of Charlson et al.s initial hypothesis, much empirical evidence has been gathered in support of its several tenets. One review, for example, states that major links in the feedback chain proposed by Charlson et al. (1987) have a sound physical basis, and that there is compelling observational evidence to suggest that DMS and its atmospheric products participate significantly in processes of climate regulation and reactive atmospheric chemistry in the remote marine boundary layer of the Southern Hemisphere (Ayers and Gillett, 2000). But just how strong is the negative feedback phenomenon proposed by Charlson et al.? Is it powerful enough to counter the threat of greenhouse gas-induced global warming? According to the findings of Sciare et al. (2000), it may well be able to do just that. In examining 10 years of DMS data from Amsterdam Island in the southern Indian Ocean, these researchers found that a sea surface temperature increase of only 1C was sufficient to increase the atmospheric DMS concentration by as much as 50 percent. This finding suggests that the degree of warming typically predicted to accompany a doubling of the airs CO2 content would increase the atmospheres DMS concentration by a factor of three or more, providing what they call a very important negative feedback that could potentially offset the original impetus for warming. Other research has shown that this same chain of events can be set in motion by means of phenomena not discussed in Charlson et al.s original hypothesis. Simo and Pedros-Alio (1999), for example, discovered that the depth of the surface mixing-layer has a substantial influence on DMS yield in the short term, via a number of photo-induced (and thereby mixing-depth mediated) influences on several complex physiological phenomena, as do longer-term seasonal variations in vertical mixing, via their influence on seasonal planktonic succession scenarios and food-web structure. More directly supportive of Charlson et al.s hypothesis was the study of Kouvarakis and Mihalopoulos (2002), who measured seasonal variations of gaseous DMS and its oxidation productsnon-sea-salt sulfate (nss-SO4 2-) and methanesulfonic acid (MSA)at a remote coastal location in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea from May 1997 through October 1999, as well as the diurnal variation of DMS during two intensive measurement campaigns conducted in September 1997. In the seasonal investigation, DMS concentrations tracked sea surface temperature (SST) almost perfectly, going from a low of 0.87 nmol m-3 in the winter to a high of 3.74 nmol m-3 in the summer. Such was also the case in the diurnal studies: DMS concentrations were lowest when it was coldest (just before sunrise), rose rapidly as it warmed thereafter to about 1100, after which they dipped slightly and then experienced a further rise to the time of maximum temperature at 2000, whereupon a decline in both temperature and DMS concentration set in that continued until just before sunrise. Consequently, because concentrations of DMS and its oxidation products (MSA and nss- SO4 2-) rise dramatically in response to both diurnal and seasonal increases in SST, there is every reason to believe that the same negative feedback phenomenon would operate in t