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Warming

Aldy indicates China and US only amount to 35% amount of GHG emissions – not sufficient to limit emissions by 65%

China and the United States, the two largest greenhouse gas (GHG) emitters in the world, together accounted for 35%2 of global GHG emissions in 2012. While there are major socioeconomic and political differences between the two countries, it is widely acknowledged that action by China and the United States is necessary for the world to effectively address global climate change.

1. No solvency- Aff only enforces existing commitments like Paris, whereas their 1AC Roberts evidence indicates that this is insufficient. Double bind: either post Paris renewable rise is sufficient or warming inevitable

Mishra, 1-5-2016 (Ankit Techcrunch, Nancy Pfund, head of DBL Partners, "Will The Paris Climate Change Deal Prove To Be The Catalyst For Cleantech?," https://techcrunch.com/2016/01/05/will-the-paris-climate-change-deal-prove-to-be-the-catalyst-for-cleantech/)//SZ

Fast forward to Paris, where governments from nearly 200 countries recently came together to agree for the first time on a universal agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions and create a legally binding process for reviewing national emissions targets every five years. The strong consensus from COP21, which also included Bill Gates’ announcement of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, was positively received by clean energy investors and venture capitalists. The International Investors Group on Climate Change, a network managing €13 trillion in assets, said the decision would help trigger a shift away from fossil fuels and encourage greater investments in renewable energy. So with the cleantech crash, and now, the Paris Climate Change Deal, the question remains: Are we going to see a cleantech revival? Or will the Paris summit result in another bubble? When asked, well-known investors are confident that cleantech will deliver in the near future. Venture capitalist Nancy Pfund, the founder of DBL Partners (who has supported some of the most successful modern clean energy companies, including Tesla, SolarCity, PowerLight, BrightSource and NexTracker), seems confident that the sector will see a turnaround following COP21, and investors will again support cleantech entrepreneurs. “You are seeing renewed interest from venture capitalists, corporate investors and foundations in recognizing that we have a significant problem to solve. Where there are big problems to solve, there is opportunity for successful investment,” says Pfund. On the prospects of cleantech in the coming years, Pfund goes onto add that, “We have a very informed group of people keen to invest in cleantech; and we also have many high-quality entrepreneurs coming into the sector.” Clean energy investor Jonathan Silver, also agreed that the Paris Climate Change Deal was a step forward and should encourage cleantech investment. “The world community is coming together in support of a clean economy and this should encourage further investment,” says Silver. “I suspect we will see a number of new sector-specific funds raised soon” he says. Silver is the managing partner at Tax Equity Advisors, which invests in clean energy projects and the CEO of Greenbanc Global, a clean energy investment/consulting firm. He previously headed federal government’s $50 billion clean energy investment fund and has been named one of the country’s top 10, greentech “influencers.”

2. Warming doesn’t cause human extinction – geological reconstruction

Costello et al. 11 (Anthony Costello, Professor of International Child Health and head of the Centre for International Health and Development at the UCL Institute of Child Health, Mark Maslin, Professor of Climatology at University College London. He is a co-founder and Executive Director of Carbon Associates Ltd., Hugh Montgomery, director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance at University College London, Anne M. Johnson, Professor of Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Co-Director of the Institute for Global Health at University College London, and Paul Ekins, professor of energy and environment at the University College London Energy Institute, May 11, “Global health and climate change: moving from denial and catastrophic fatalism to positive action”, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 13 May 2011 vol. 369 no. 1942 1866-1882)
At the other end of the scale are doom-mongers who predict catastrophic population collapse and the end of civilization. In the early nineteenth century, the French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier first addressed catastrophism and explained patterns of extinction observed in the fossil record through catastrophic natural events [10]. We know now of five major extinctions: the Ordovician–Silurian extinction (439 million years ago), the Late Devonian extinction (about 364 million years ago), the Permian–Triassic extinction (about 251 million years ago), the End Triassic extinction (roughly 199 million to 214 million years ago) and the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction (about 65 million years ago). These mass extinctions were caused by a combination of plate tectonics, supervolcanism and asteroid impacts. The understanding of the mass extinctions led Gould & Eldredge [11] to update Darwin’s theory of evolution with their own theory of punctuated equilibrium. Many scientists have suggested that the current human-induced extinction rates could be as fast as those during these mass extinctions [12,13]. For example, one study predicted that 58 per cent of species may be committed to extinction by 2050 due to climate change alone [14], though this paper has been criticized [15,16]. Some people have even suggested that human extinction may not be a remote risk [17–19]. Sherwood & Huber [7] point to continued heating effects that could make the world largely uninhabitable by humans and mammals within 300 years. Peak heat stress, quantified by the wet-bulb temperature (used because it reflects both the ambient temperature and relative humidity of the site), is surprisingly similar across diverse climates and never exceeds 31°C. They suggest that if it rose to 35°C, which never happens now but would at a warming of 7°C, hyperthermia in humans and other mammals would occur as dissipation of metabolic heat becomes impossible, therefore making many environments uninhabitable. However, these studies do not take account of geological reconstructions. We know that during the Eocene some 50 million years ago global temperature was at least 5°C higher than today, with forests on Antarctica and rainforest extending as far north as Canada and as far south as Patagonia [20]. Some scientists argue that this was the golden age of life, as there could have been at least twice as much living biomass on the Earth as today. At the beginning of this period, there was an extreme period of global warming called the Paleocene–Eocene thermal maximum when global temperatures were at least another 5°C warmer [21,22]. This did lead to some extinction in the oceans but it was not the end of life on the planet nor did mammals suffer mass extinctions. So, while history suggests that imminent catastrophe is as false as climate change denial, it could be as big a threat to action. Catastrophic speculation, especially when based on limited evidence and without specific time frames, may induce an unnecessary sense of fatalism and helplessness when, in the shorter term, there is a huge scope for positive action.

3. Solar isn’t the only dispute- Territorial disputes in the SCS hurt US-China coop

Yang, 7-18-2016, (Xi, Xinhua net, "China-US ties should not be marred by South China Sea issue, http://www.china.org.cn/world/2016-07/18/content_38907885.htm)//SZ

The United States should stop meddling in the South China Sea issue to keep its relations with China on the right track, experts have said. Widely deemed as one of the most important relationships in the world, the China-U.S. ties have recently been overshadowed by the South China Sea issue, in which the United States is not a direct party, experts said here during a two-day international security forum that ended Sunday. The World Peace Forum, an annual event that groups hundreds of political figures, scholars, experts and journalists from across the world to discuss major security issues, was co-organized by Tsinghua University and the Chinese People's Institute of Foreign Affairs. "The U.S. flexing of military muscles in the South China Sea has deeply hurt the Chinese people," said Chen Xiaogong, member of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the National People's Congress, China's top legislature. Last month, the United States deployed two aircraft carriers in seas east of the Philippines and started monitoring the South China Sea with guided-missile destroyers, a few days before a law-abusing ad hoc tribunal issued an ill-founded award on the South China Sea arbitration case, unilaterally initiated by the former Philippine government. U.S. officials have repeatedly pressed China to accept the award sweepingly siding with the Philippines and denying China's long-standing historic rights in the South China Sea. The award was excessive in its vitriol towards China's presence in the South China Sea, said Chen, who just concluded a tour to the United States, adding that it seems as if Washington had already known the results of the arbitration before the award was issued on July 12. Meanwhile, he said, although quite a hotspot in recent media coverage, the South China Sea issue simply cannot represent the overall relationship between China and the United States, whose significance has stretched out the realm of bilateral ties. With critical issues on the agenda such as global economic growth and climate change, it is a collective responsibility for both China and the United States to properly manage their relations, he noted. Yuan Peng, vice president of China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations, said that despite the two countries' continued cooperation in such areas as economy and diplomacy, the South China Sea issue has garnered most attention of the public and media. Echoing Chen, Yuan called on China and the United States to properly handle the issue. "The ball is not in our court," he said, adding that the United States should "show sincerity" by not sitting behind the absurd arbitral farce of the South China Sea. Foreign experts attending the the forum, themed "the Order of Common Security: Cooperation, Inclusiveness, and Open-access," also agreed on the urgency and significance of properly managing the China-U.S. ties. Former Australian Foreign Minister Robert Carr, who is now leading an Australian thinktank, said at a panel dedicated to the South China Sea issue that the United States should not view the topic as a matter of competition for leadership, dominance and primacy against China. Even if the United States tries to maintain its allies within the region, he said, defining the South China Sea issue as a matter of competition would generate more conflicts with China.

4. Warming inevitable – no chance of stopping 350 ppm

Paltsev et al. ’13 (Sergey, John Reilly and Andrei Sokolov, Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change @ Massachusetts Institute of Technology, What GHG Concentration Targets are Reachable in this Century?, MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, Report 247)

As noted at the outset, some have called for CO2 concentration targets well below the nearly 400 ppm level we have already reached. We have shown here that even if anthropogenic emissions were to drop immediately to zero, levels would still remain above 350 ppm through at least the end of the century. Since CO2 is not destroyed but rather reallocated among reservoirs— the oceans, atmosphere, and vegetation—our addition to these pools through the combustion of fossil fuels results in, for practical purposes, a permanent increase in the CO2 that is cycling among these pools. That said, equilibrium with the deep ocean is a very slow process and so over hundreds or thousands of years atmospheric concentrations would continue to slowly decline if we were to reduce emissions to zero. Of course, it is not possible to transform our energy and industrial systems overnight—extremely aggressive policies might imagine such a transformation over 50 years. Of course, we have not considered negative CO2 emissions technologies, from the simple, such as planting more trees, to the more complex and costly, such as using biomass for energy and capturing and storing carbon when biomass is burned. Somewhat surprisingly we find a 350 CO2-eq target possibly within range but this depends on eliminating all human influence on methane (and nitrous oxide). Rice agriculture is the biggest human contributor to methane and nitrogen fertilizer use to nitrous oxide. Thus, to achieve these levels requires not only transformation of the world’s energy sector but also its agricultural sector.

5. Warming inevitable – CO2 remains trapped in ocean and other sinks, impacts like sea level rise are irreversible in squo

Knutti 15 (Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, The legacy of our CO2 emissions: a clash of scientific facts, politics and ethics, http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-015-1340-3)//SZ

The response of temperature to a one-time emission pulse of a gas is determined by the dependence of the radiative forcing on the concentration of the gas (causing a change in the radiative balance), and the residence time of the gas in the atmosphere (Solomon et al. 2010). That lifetime ranges from weeks for aerosols to thousands of years for Hexafluorethan (C2F6). CO2 is contrast does not have a single lifetime. About half of each year’s CO2 emissions currently remain in the atmosphere (the so-called airborne fraction); the rest is taken up by the ocean and land biosphere. The response of the atmospheric concentration (Fig. 1b) to an emission (Fig. 1a) is characterized by several reservoirs and processes that remove carbon on multiple timescales: decades for the biosphere and the surface ocean, centuries for the deep ocean, and even longer for sediments formed from shell-building (calcifying) organisms. Depending on the size of the emission pulse, about 15–40 % of the carbon remains in the atmosphere longer than 1000 years (Joos et al. 2013; Plattner et al. 2008; Zickfeld et al. 2013). The radiative forcing per concentration unit CO2 decreases for higher CO2, but the airborne fraction of emissions increases as the efficiency of the ocean and biosphere sink decrease. Fact 1 is that CO2 is the largest contributor to the total forcing and surface warming both in the past and future (Huber and Knutti 2012), and a large fraction of the CO2 emitted stays in the atmosphere for centuries and longer. The ocean today acts like a huge heat sink. It has absorbed about 90 % of the energy increase of the Earth since 1950 (Church et al. 2011). The atmosphere and land adjusts within hours to years to a change in radiative forcing, but the ocean takes centuries to respond (Plattner et al. 2008; Zickfeld et al. 2013). As a result, global surface warming would continue to increase for centuries if we kept atmospheric concentrations fixed (Meehl et al. 2005; Plattner et al. 2008). If emissions of a certain gas are eliminated entirely, the forcing decreases on a timescale determined by the respective lifetime of the gas in the atmosphere. For CO2, the timescales on which it is removed from the atmosphere (Fig. 1b) by the ocean and biosphere are similar to those for ocean heat uptake. The decreasing forcing compensates the realization of the committed warming, and as a result temperature remains nearly constant for centuries if CO2 emissions are stopped (Friedlingstein et al. 2011; Frölicher et al. 2014; Gillett et al. 2013, 2011; Matthews and Caldeira 2008; Plattner et al. 2008; Solomon et al. 2009), as shown in Fig. 1c. Sea level rise from thermal expansion and melting of large ice sheets, however, would continue for millennia after surface temperatures are stabilized (see IPCC (2013a) sections 12.5, 13.5). Eliminating emissions of short-lived greenhouse gases would result in a cooling, whereas eliminating aerosols would result in an rapid warming of a few tenths of a degree (IPCC 2013a, FAQ 12.3). In summary, fact 2 is that climate change is irreversible in the sense that a large fraction would persist for millennia even if CO2 emissions are stopped. Past emissions commit many future generations to changes and challenges we do not know how to deal with today, and potentially to impacts we may not even be aware of today. From a radiative forcing point of view, climate change is reversible if CO2 is removed actively from the atmosphere (see below), but some aspects, like sea level rise, will not be reversed for hundreds of years even when concentrations are returned to near preindustrial levels (Solomon et al. 2010). Despite the fact that Article 3 of the UNFCCC specifically emphasizes “threats of serious or irreversible damage” (UNFCCC 1992), those results have only recently gotten much attention.

6. Other emissions massively outweigh power generation

   1. Agriculture

Earth Save 2011 (Date is last mod citing Jim Hansen, heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, also an adjunct professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, , March 1, A New Global Warming Strategy, www.earthsave.org/globalwarming.htm)

Unfortunately, the environmental community has focused its efforts almost exclusively on abating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Domestic legislative efforts concentrate on raising fuel economy standards, capping CO2 emissions from power plants, and investing in alternative energy sources. Recommendations to consumers also focus on CO2: buy fuel-efficient cars and appliances, and minimize their use. , This is a serious miscalculation. Data published by Dr. James Hansen and others show that CO2 emissions are not the main cause of observed atmospheric warming. Though this may sound like the work of global warming skeptics, it isn’t: Hansen is Director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies who has been called “a grandfather of the global warming theory.” He is a longtime supporter of action against global warming, cited by Al Gore and often quoted by environmental organizations, who has argued against skeptics for subverting the scientific process. His results are generally accepted by global warming experts, including bigwigs like Dr. James McCarthy, co-chair of the International Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group II. The focus solely on CO2 is fueled in part by misconceptions. It’s true that human activity produces vastly more CO2 than all other greenhouse gases put together. However, this does not mean it is responsible for most of the earth’s warming. Many other greenhouse gases trap heat far more powerfully than CO2, some of them tens of thousands of times more powerfully. When taking into account various gases’ global warming potential—defined as the amount of actual warming a gas will produce over the next one hundred years—it turns out that gases other than CO2 make up most of the global warming problem. Even this overstates the effect of CO2, because the primary sources of these emissions—cars and power plants—also produce aerosols. Aerosols actually have a cooling effect on global temperatures, and the magnitude of this cooling approximately cancels out the warming effect of CO2. The surprising result is that sources of CO2 emissions are having roughly zero effect on global temperatures in the near-term! This result is not widely known in the environmental community, due to a fear that polluting industries will use it to excuse their greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the Union of Concerned Scientists had the data reviewed by other climate experts, who affirmed Hansen’s conclusions. However, the organization also cited climate contrarians’ misuse of the data to argue against curbs in CO2. This contrarian spin cannot be justified. While CO2 may have little influence in the near-term, reductions remains critical for containing climate change in the long run. Aerosols are short-lived, settling out of the air after a few months, while CO2 continues to heat the atmosphere for decades to centuries. Moreover, we cannot assume that aerosol emissions will keep pace with increases in CO2 emissions. If we fail start dealing with CO2 today, it will be too late down the road when the emissions catch up with us. Nevertheless, the fact remains that sources of non-CO2 greenhouse gases are responsible for virtually all the global warming we’re seeing, and all the global warming we are going to see for the next fifty years. If we wish to curb global warming over the coming half century, we must look at strategies to address non-CO2 emissions. The strategy with the most impact is vegetarianism. Methane and Vegetarianism By far the most important non-CO2 greenhouse gas is methane, and the number one source of methane worldwide is animal agriculture. Methane is responsible for nearly as much global warming as all other non-CO2 greenhouse gases put together. Methane is 21 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than CO2. While atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have risen by about 31% since pre-industrial times, methane concentrations have more than doubled. Whereas human sources of CO2 amount to just 3% of natural emissions, human sources produce one and a half times as much methane as all natural sources. In fact, the effect of our methane emissions may be compounded as methane-induced warming in turn stimulates microbial decay of organic matter in wetlands—the primary natural source of methane. With methane emissions causing nearly half of the planet’s human-induced warming, methane reduction must be a priority. Methane is produced by a number of sources, including coal mining and landfills—but the number one source worldwide is animal agriculture. Animal agriculture produces more than 100 million tons of methane a year. And this source is on the rise: global meat consumption has increased fivefold in the past fifty years, and shows little sign of abating. About 85% of this methane is produced in the digestive processes of livestock, and while a single cow releases a relatively small amount of methane, the collective effect on the environment of the hundreds of millions of livestock animals worldwide is enormous. An additional 15% of animal agricultural methane emissions are released from the massive “lagoons” used to store untreated farm animal waste, and already a target of environmentalists’ for their role as the number one source of water pollution in the U.S.

2. Aviation

Monbiot 7 George, Professor @ Oxford Brookes University, Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, pg. 174
Aviation has been growing faster than any other source of greenhouse gases. Between 1990 and 2004, the number of people using airports in the United Kingdom rose by 120 per cent, and the energy the planes consumed increased by 79 per cent. Their carbon dioxide emissions almost doubled in that period- from 20.1 to 39.5 million tones, or 5.5 per cent of all the emissions this country produces. Unless something is done to stop this growth, aviation will overwhelm all the cuts we manage to make elsewhere. The government predicts that, if sufficient capacity were provided, the number of passenger passing through airports in the United Kingdom will rise from roughly 200 million today to ‘between 400 million and 600 million’ in 2030. It intends to ensure that this prophecy comes to pass. The new runaways it is planning ‘would permit around 470 million passengers by 2030’.

7. Cost of renewable energy is uncompetitive because of grid modifications

Robert Fares, 11-24-2015, "Deep De-Carbonization Would Increase Electricity Costs 20–90 Percent, Says J.P. Morgan," Scientific American Blog Network, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/plugged-in/deep-de-carbonization-would-increase-electricity-costs-20-90-percent-says-j-p-morgan/)//SZ

J.P. Morgan’s analysis confirms the findings of many in the academic community that levelized cost of energy becomes less and less meaningful for renewable energy technologies as they take on a larger role in the electricity mix. While the cost of energy generated by a solar panel or wind turbine might be competitive with the cost of energy generated from a gas or coal plant, the cost of energy from a grid dominated by renewable energy is almost certainly higher than the cost of energy from a grid powered by conventional sources—about 20–90 percent higher according to J.P. Morgan. Heavy-Renewable Grids Would Require the Same Amount of Thermal Power Plants—but They Would Be Used a Lot Less Often A primary driver for the higher cost of heavy-renewable grids versus conventional grids is the fact that backup power plants are required to meet demand during periods when renewable energy is not available. J.P. Morgan found that energy generated from renewables reduces the amount of gas or coal that is burned in power plants by about 50 percent, but approximately the same number of power plants are required to ensure adequate electricity supplies 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. Energy Storage Can Reduce Overall Emissions and the Amount of Backup Power Plants Required, but It Increases Overall Costs One technology that can mitigate the amount of backup thermal generation required by a heavy-renewable electric grid is energy storage. J.P. Morgan analyzed three of the most common energy storage technologies: pumped-hydro energy storage, battery energy storage, and hydrogen energy storage. The key advantage of energy storage in a heavy-renewable grid is its ability to store renewable energy that otherwise would have been wasted at times when renewable energy supplies exceed electric demand. By storing surplus renewable energy during these periods, energy storage can offset the need for backup generation from conventional coal or gas power plants, and reduce emissions. However, because energy storage capital and operating costs are higher than the benefits from avoided coal or gas consumption, adding energy storage increased the overall cost in all of the scenarios J.P. Morgan considered.

8. Countries other than the US can buy Chinese panels right now, but they don't – indicates solar prices are still not competitive – tech diffusion would only happen in the US, they don't have evidence indicating US-China shift to renewable energy would be sufficient to prevent GW

9. Solar diffusion and coop are both irrelevant—it’s impossible to meet the emissions targets

WSJ 15, Wall Street Journal editorial board, “We’ll Always Have the Illusions of Paris,” 12/1/15, http://www.wsj.com/articles/well-always-have-the-illusions-of-paris-1449015377

The problem is that countries like China (the No. 1 emitter) and India (No. 3) won’t undermine their economic growth or stop eradicating desperate poverty to assuage Western neuralgia. World-wide, some 1.3 billion people still live without electricity. So the negotiators simply gave up the pretense of trying to agree to a legally binding agreement.

Instead, countries will volunteer their own random carbon emissions-reduction targets and the actions they may or may not take to meet them, with no global goals. There are no consequences for failing to comply or even common standards for measuring improvement. In echt-United Nations idiom, these pledges are called Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, or INDCs.

The Chinese INDC says carbon emissions will peak sometime before 2030, maybe, unless they don’t. And even this vague aspiration was determined before the Communist Party revealed that China burned 17% more coal per year than it formerly disclosed.

But no INDC exposes the Paris farce better than America’s. Mr. Obama promises that the U.S. will reduce CO2 emissions by 26% to 28% from 2005 levels by 2025. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s greenhouse gas inventory, that would be some 1.8 billion fewer tons of CO2-equivalent in a decade. Yet the U.S. INDC outlines only about a billion tons, 45% short of the goal.

Keep in mind that the reductions the Administration has identified touch everything from coal-fired power plants to landfill management to efficiency standards for home appliances. Mr. Obama doesn’t lack ambition so much as legal authority; most of these unilateral rules are being challenged in the courts. Yet his green diplomats still can’t explain how the U.S. will meet the targets they are selling in Paris.

Not that Mr. Obama’s plan won’t damage U.S. jobs and living standards. Energy-intensive industries like manufacturing, chemicals, cement and pulp and paper will be particular victims and may decamp for overseas. The President is trading away the competitive advantage of cheap U.S. natural gas for a bag of anticarbon promises.

Moreover, nothing that emerges from Paris will have a discernible effect on world temperatures. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studied the INDCs that have been released so far and concluded that temperatures in 2100 will rise 3.7 degrees Celsius if they are followed to the letter. Then again, these are the same scientific models that predicted much higher temperatures than we’ve had.

The other big item on the Paris agenda is the one that these confabs always come down to—cash. Most developing-world INDCs are conditioned on an enormous wealth transfer. To try to resuscitate talks in 2009, Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State pledged a $100 billion public-private fund that would flow to poorer nations for climate mitigation. But the poor countries have wised up and are now demanding much more for “climate justice.”