Environment Disadvantage -4wkj-ndi

Environment resilient and improving – their authors lie

Dutton 1 (Dr. Dennis, Professor of Philosophy – University of Canterbury (New Zealand), “Greener Than You Think”, The Washington Post, 10-21, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=& contentId=A12789-2001Oct18) That the human race faces environmental problems is unquestionable. That environmental experts have regularly tried to scare us out of our wits with doomsday chants is also beyond dispute. In the 1960s overpopulation was going to cause massive worldwide famine around 1980. A decade later we were being told the world would be out of oil by the 1990s. This was an especially chilly prospect, since, as Newsweek reported in 1975, we were in a climatic cooling trend that was going to reduce agricultural outputs for the rest of the century, leading possibly to a new Ice Age. Bjorn Lomborg, a young statistics professor and political scientist at the University of Aarhus in Denmark, knows all about the enduring appeal -- for journalists, politicians and the public -- of environmental doomsday tales, having swallowed more than a few himself. In 1997, Lomborg -- a self-described left-winger and former Greenpeace member -- came across an article in Wired magazine about Julian Simon, a University of Maryland economist. Simon claimed that the "litany" of the Green movement -- its fears about overpopulation, animal species dying by the hour, deforestation -- was hysterical nonsense, and that the quality of life on the planet was radically improving. Lomborg was shocked by this, and he returned to Denmark to set about doing the research that would refute Simon. He and his team of academicians discovered something sobering and cheering: In every one of his claims, Simon was correct. Moreover, Lomborg found on close analysis that the factual foundation on which the environmental doomsayers stood was deeply flawed: exaggeration, prevarications, white lies and even convenient typographical errors had been absorbed unchallenged into the folklore of environmental disaster scenarios.

Marine ecosystems are resilient

Kennedy 2 (Victor Kennedy, PhD Environmental Science and Dir. Cooperative Oxford Lab., 2002, “Coastal and Marine Ecosystems and Global Climate Change,” Pew, http://www.pewclimate.org/projects/marine.cfm) There is evidence that marine organisms and ecosystems are resilient to environmental change. Steele (1991) hypothesized that the biological components of marine systems are tightly coupled to physical factors, allowing them to respond quickly to rapid environmental change and thus rendering them ecologically adaptable. Some species also have wide genetic variability throughout their range, which may allow for adaptation to climate change.

Mass extinctions have occurred before, but never resulted in a permanent loss of life

Kunich 94 (John Charles Kunich, 1994, “SPECIES & HABITAT CONSERVATION: THE FALLACY OF DEATHBED CONSERVATION UNDER THE ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT,” https://litigation-essentials.lexisnexis.com/webcd/app?action=DocumentDisplay&crawlid=1&doctype=cite&docid=24+Envtl.+L.+501&srctype=smi&srcid=3B15&key=cfe32641c588ff93a47ea4b23c17be68, John Charles Kunich is a Professor of Law and Fulbright Senior Specialist based in Charlotte, North Carolina. He earned a Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School and a Master of Laws degree from George Washington University School of Law in addition to Bachelor and Master of Science degrees from the University of Illinois, published in Environmental Law) More dramatically, mass extinctions have occurred at a few points in earth's history, when many species, even the majority of [*510] all species on the planet, became extinct during a relatively brief span of time. n20 Although there is some scientific debate as to whether the extinction rates during these periods significantly exceeded the usual background rate, it is generally accepted that the fossil record evidences heavy extinction in at least five geologic ages. n21 Given the huge number of species terminated by the various mass extinctions, one may be surprised to learn that, devastating as these events were, their victims are outnumbered by the species that have expired during less remarkable epochs. Most of the literally millions of extinct species perished in relative isolation, each failing to adapt to changing conditions that threatened only a few, or even only one species. n22 Almost all of the species that ever existed on this planet have long been extinct by no act of humans, and yet more species are currently living than at any time in the past.

The survival of ecosystems are not crucially dependent on biodiversity

Grime 97 (J.P. Grime, 8/29/97, “Biodiversity and ecosystem function: the debate deepens,” http://www.uvm.edu/~pdodds/files/papers/others/1997/grime1997a.pdf, biologist in the Unit of Comparative Plant Ecology at the University of Sheffield, article published in Science volume 277.) This view that "biodiversity begets superior ecosystem function" is not shared by all ecologists[5, 6]. There are obvious conflicts with published evidence from work on natural rather than synthesized ecosystems. As early as 1982, Leps et al.[7] had suggested that ecosystem processes were determined primarily by the functional characteristics of component organisms rather than their number. The same conclusion was drawn by MacGillivray et al.[8] who showed that differences between five adjacent ecosystems in northern England in their responses to frost, drought, and burning were predictable from the functional traits of the dominant plants but were independent of plant diversity. This edition of Science (pages 1296, 1300, and 1302) includes three contributions[9-11] to this important debate. One is a report of results from the Cedar Creek synthesized plant assemblages, whereas the two others describe biodiversity-ecosystem studies conducted on natural systems (mediterranean grassland in California and northern forest in Sweden). In all three, variation in ecosystem properties is found to be related to differences in the functional characteristics, especially resource capture and utilization, of the dominant plants, and there is no convincing evidence that ecosystem processes are crucially dependent on higher levels of biodiversity. The evidence presented by Wardle et al.[10] is particularly compelling because it involves an extensive study of ecosystem properties on 50 relatively pristine forested islands of varied size and plant biodiversity. It is clearly shown that a suite of ecosystem properties -- including higher microbial biomass, high litter quality, and more rapid rates of litter decomposition and nitrogen mineralization -- coincide with the lower botanical diversity and the earlier successional state of the vegetation on larger islands (both consequences of the higher incidence of lightning strikes and more frequent fire history of larger islands). On small islands, succession proceeds uninterrupted to more species-rich vegetation, but here the dominant plants, Picea abies and Empetrum hermaphroditum, are extremely stress tolerant and produce litter of poor quality, thereby slowing the rates of ecosystem processes. This strongly supports the contention of MacGillivray et al.[8] that it is the biological characteristics of the dominant plants rather than their number that control ecosystem productivity and biogeochemistry. This same conclusion is prompted by the new data presented by Tilman et al.[9] and Hooper et al.[11]. Both of these groups have adopted a more experimental approach and created ecosystems in field plots where they can control both the functional composition and species richness of the vegetation. Here again, there is strong evidence that productivity and nutrient cycling are controlled to an overwhelming extent by the functional characteristics of the dominant plants, and evidence of immediate benefits of species-richness within functional groups remains weak.