Week 9 21v-25v07
Some review problems from Julie are here or below.
SIFF..film festival: lots of environmental films. The Journals of Knud Rasmussen Sat 2 vi 07 at 11.00 am at Pacific Place Cinema.
Get tickets online.
Note: the final essay on human adaptability is due the day and time of the final, Monday 4 June (previously stated deadline was Fri 1 June).
Final quiz is Monday 4 June 8.30-10.20 in usual classroom (MGH 242).
Updated review notes are now posted here and below.
Slightly altered lecture 12 notes are now posted (a bit added on last 3 pages).
Some review problems for the final are here and below. We will add more problems on chemical bonding, carbon cycle and photosynthesis later this week.
Some review notes on the whole course are posted below...this document will likely be tweaked with some more material soon (under Lecture Notes...)
Lecture slides and notes on global energy, Natural Capitalism and PAT are posted below (lecture 12).
Julie's carbon cycle lecture is posted below (as Lecture 11)
The lecture slides and some notes on Water are posted below
as Lecture 10.
Weds. 23 May: Kristin Laidre lecture described her close-up
encounters with whales in the waters around Greenland, her research into
their migration and diving behaviors, and the place of
the Greenland in global climate.
The final essay (#4) assignment is posted below. Due at the end of term (last day of class or at latest day of the final quiz).
The final quiz is scheduled for Monday June 4, 8.30-10.20 in the regular classroom, MGH 242. As with the mid-term you can bring a two-sided 8 1/2 x 11" paper with written notes on it (not too microscopic please), but no other materials. There will be a course-review handed out soon. Any equations or 'numbers' necessary will be provided on the quiz.
Lab this week
(Mon/Fri) looks at some energy alternatives (electrolysis of
water and the hydrogen fuel cell, solar cells, electic motors,
biofuels, and human-powered electricity generation (to toast a
marshmallow) and a microscopic look at ocean plankton, the grass
and cows of the seas that contribute much of Earth's
photosynthesis and respiration. Diatoms and dinoflaggelates. You
see a remarkable analogy in this lab between eletrolysis of water
(splitting it into hydrogen and oxygen gas by energizing it with
electricity) and photosynthesis, in which sunlight, instead of
electricity, promotes the breakdown of water; chlorophyll is a
catalyst and oxygen gas is a product. Instead of hydrogen gas,
glucose is produced, which is schematically CH2O. So,
sunlight
and photosynthesis, the primary production of the biosphere, and
the human energetics of producing hydrogen (to be used in
hydrogen fuel cells which run the reaction backwards to make
electricity) have analogous properties. Here, courtesy of Julie,
is a dinoflaggelate feeding on diatoms. It "feeds by exuding its
stomach and engulfing a chain of diatoms with its digestive
membrane. It digests the diatoms externally by dissolving them
within their silica cases and drawing the nutrients out of them
back into itself."
This week's reading completes the reading for this course.
Please review the section from Diamond's Collapse. Then
read Roberts The End of Oil excerpt from our course-pack,
and Hawken, Lovins & Lovins
Natural Capitalism
Ch.1 (The Next Industrial Revolution), Ch. 3 (Waste Not),
Ch. 14 (Human Capitalism), and a summary article from
the
Harvard Business Review.
It's difficult not to assign the whole
book! If you have the time add in as much of Chs. 4-9 as you can.
This gives an introduction
to the idea
that business and industry, if it comes to value the environmental
resource base as it values other capital, will both profit and
improve the Earth. There is much more to this book, and you may want
to download more of it.
Week 8 14v-18v07
Week 7 7v-11v07
Week 6 30iv-4v07
See this week's reading. We are finishing the reading on
Greenland and moving to Alaska with Charles Wohlforth. This is where
the native involvement with oil, Europeans/Americans and challenges
of the modern world, are particularly intense. It is our 'intro' to
the global oil problem.
There is a typo in the Notes on Solar Radiation (Chaps 2-3) pdf:
The important number on p4 for the average incoming radiation is 1/4
of 1372 watts/meter2 = 343 watts/meter2 (not
368 as
written). Please correct your handout.
In the science core Julie lectures on photosynthesis/biological
energetics Monday. It is the final, and grandest link in the energy
chain. Then we take up the heat-engine of climate more by
looking at the ocean/atmosphere circulation that ventilates the
Arctic and keeps it warmer than it would be based purely on
radiation. This climate material will help develop our sense of the
geography of the Arctic, the zones of boreal forest (taiga), tundra,
ice and ocean, and show more clearly why indigenous people have
settled where they are.
Week 5 Week 4 News on the environment gets ever more intense. Listen to almost-President
John Kerry and former conservative Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in an
intense global warming debate in New York last week on NPR here. Both are articulate
politicians close to the top of the heap, one conservative and one liberal.
Both have just written books on the crisis of the global environment! This
never could have happened a few years ago. You can stream or
download a Podcast/ MP3 of the debate. One focus is, how, through the
public
sector or
private,
should we attack this problem? Surprisingly you will find as much agreement as
much as disagreement.
The Washington State legislature this week passed a bill to limit
carbon emissions and regulate new coal-fired electricity generating
plants. More and more states and cities are taking such initiatives;
California stands out.
Julie's lecture on chemical bonds is posted below.
Regarding the problem set, PS1:
A recent question on the greenhouse radiation (#2), in the last item
you
were asked to compare with a 1.5 watt per square meter change in
radiation due to human injection of carbon dioxide into the
atmosphere...it's just asking you to compare that number with the
watts/meter squared you found from the albedo change..nothing
more. The question 'what is wrong...' asks you to
comment on the logic of the table of energy-related numbers from V. Smil's book (are
these apples and oranges or all apples?). Not asking you to check the numbers. The
'what is wrong' question about the planets is unfortunately based on an ill-posed
idea about the surface temperatures...so here I suggest you focus on the sizes of the
planets! The problem of the coasting car uses the idea that a plot of velocity
against time will have a slope .. rate of change .. that is the acceleration
ΔV/Δt. When the car is steadily driving along, the engine provides a force to
balance the wind and friction, which exert drag forces. When you take your foot off
the throttle, those same forces decelerate the car, and F=MA applies. An estimate of
A is made as suggested in the problem set, giving you F. Also you could compare that
power needed with the energy released by burning gasoline, per unit time. Take its
chemical energy content to be 44 million Joules per kg. Then you need to find the
relationship between kilograms and gallons if you are using your knowledge of
miles-per-gallon performance of the car. You can work toward Joules per
second...it's good to write these conversions with the units carried along, so that
for example you know that the number of kg in one gallon will be needed. If you
don't happen to know
the mass of a gallon of gasoline, it helps to know that gasoline
has mass density 737 kg per cubic meter, that a cubic meter is 1000 liters (liters
are 'fat quarts') and there are 3.78 liters in one gallon.
For looking up energy use on the Web, one of you has found
www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/energyconsumption.html
this link
This just in from the Wildlife Society:
Do you like birds? Do you have a green thumb? IT'S FINALLY PLANTING DAY! We
are planting native
flowers and berries that will attract birds and butterflies in our new bird garden here on campus!
Today Wednesday May 16th & Tomorrow Thursday May 17th
10:00am-2:00pm
South face of Hitchcock Hall
Be a part of history, benefit the community and wildlife by helping us
plant native plants.
Tools, music and refreshments will be provided! Insect and flower microscope
Art will also be on sale!
Lecture 9, the slides on atmosphere-ocean circulation, is posted
below. Note that the problem set 2 has a question on the heat flow in
the oceans which is discussed in these slides. Reading this week is
the section of Collapse by Jared Diamond.
Problem set 2 has been slightly revised and can be found here. Note that it is now due Weds 16 May
instead of Monday.
Julie's figure for problem
set 2, question 1.
Notes on the mid-term quiz are posted here..
Julie's extra notes on redox potential, photosynthesis and respiration here.
Web links on redox potential here.
Julie's lecture on photosynthesis is posted below.
Essay #3, final version due on Wednesday. This week we will
have a problem solving session on Monday at 1.30 and Friday at 11.30,
in the Honors Admin area. Note Julie's new posting of office hours.
The quiz will cover the class activities up to Monday 23 April
(though not the lab 2 on Monday & Friday). Reading assignment:
Review the past reading this week, texts and lecture notes, and
begin to read the final section of Ehrlich's book (pages given
below).
Mid-term Quiz next Friday April
27 10:30-11:20!
We will post review notes and practice problems, but
you may want to look at previous years' quizzes and review notes.
There may be some differences in the material owing to
syllabus-drift. In particular, this year we read McKibben which
was new, and so we haven't done as much on Greenland yet. The
lecture notes are part of the required reading, and lab session 1
also is important to think about, not in detail, but in the general
nature of the experiments.
Posted below are scenes from the lecture on 'the sense of time';
unfortunately the PDF maker would not compress as instructed to,
so I put up the powerpoint vsn (6Mb). I may figure things out and
replace it with a smaller file.
If you look at the full book by Sverdrup (downloadable .pdf
elsewhere on this page) on the Chukchi natives
you will find some interesting remarks on the way the natives
measure time (e.g., p79ff)
There will be a lab Mon 23 April at 1.30-2.20, (and Friday at 11.30)
where we will look at phase change physics, convection (a form of heat engine), a cloud chamber
with both clouds and individual atomic particles, and more.
Isaac Held lecture is 7.30 pm, Weds. 18 April,
Kane Hall 130: "Global warming, drought and the Earth's hydrologic
cycle"
Essay 3 is posted below.
Week 3
On Alternative Radio (KUOW, Weds evening) Bill McKibben lectured on his new book, Deep Economy, which urges us to think local and reduce the splurge of globalization of everything. He also urges us to get outdoors on Saturday (14 April) for one of the 1000 or so non-partisan demonstrations for action to reduce human impacts on global climate. Visit the StepItUp.com website pronto! There is a UW rally Saturday at 10.00 and a BIG one downtown at 2.00.
Steven Brown, who studies birds, and directs the Manomet Center for Conservation Science in Massachusetts, gave a marvelous lecture on the birds of ANWR at Kane Hall Weds. night. Look for a new book, Arctic Wings, published by him and others, from The Mountaineers (of Seattle) press. It was startling to learn that the contested coastal plain which is a part of ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), sought after for its oil reserves, is only 5% of the coastal plain: all the other 95% is already designated as the National Petroleum Reserve. The bird life, along with the polar bears, appear already to be under stress, possibly due to the readily apparent effects of global warming. Possibly also due to the loss of wetland preserves along the long migration routes from Alaska to Argentina, Chile, Peru that are followed by these shore birds (like the American Golden Plover, who is declining in population by 8% per year according to Brown; see one at Royse Photos ).
The lecture on thermal energy is posted below (in color!). The problem set 1 (also in color, which was not the case for the paper handout) is posted below.
As always there are many extracurricular things you might do to enhance your relation with the environment. Weds. evening a lecture on Arctic bird life in ANWR. 7.00 pm Kane Hall.
Reading for Week 3 posted below.
Lecture on energy and syllabus posted below. We also sometimes revise older handouts, and if you browse the site you will see this (e.g., Course Logistics handout). It is not essential to re-read these but we try to add ideas when they occur.
A new section called 'Activism' is among the click boxes above. What are you doing for Earth Day, April 22? See here and here. Also UW's Earth Week..17-21 April . Go to earthday.net and watch some of the videos (the News section of the homepage), showing 'health' of many regions of Earth. What is the Amazon deforestation contribution to global warming? Why is Australia deep in drought? Read some activist ideas at WWF (World Wildlife Fund's website), and their ideas blog); National Climate Action Day (April 14) is coming!
This week we had
our first lab, 1.30-2.20 Monday and 11.30-12.20 Friday. A discussion
sheet is posted below (click on Lab demonstrations just above). It is a
chance to explore energy in a more hands-on way. There will be half a
dozen experiments set up, from heat engines to solar spectrum
analyzers, infrared radiation experiments, and a large water channel (a
lab 'river') to explore mechanical energy and its generation. Ocean
Teaching Building room 206. A map is here. From
the fountain, go southwest between chemistry and geophysics (Johnson
Hall) to the road, cross it veering left to the greenhouses. Leave the
greenhouses to your left, cross Pacific on the ped. bridge, and go down
the steps, as straight as possible to Boat St. Cross at the parking
kiosk and veer left around Ocean Teaching Building (cream-colored
hulk), enter on left (east) side, go up one flight to 206.
Tutoring: one of our science majors in the class has suggested
that some informal student-student discussion hours, out of class,
might be good, in which non-science students could hear some of the
science major's ideas on the energy-core of the course. This seems a
good idea. Julie and I are available too, for reviewing, explaining
etc.
Week 2
This week: Wednesday we will meet in class and procede to a computer lab for a lecture on web searching for the environment.
Essay #1 is due on Friday
We are trying to fit in a lab session in Week 3, to be discussed in this Weds class. Monday at 1.20 may be the primary time with another time for those who can't make it then.
We have posted the slides from lectures 2/3 (solar radition and the greenhouse effect) and some relating to lecture 4 (McKibben, McNeill) below. All handouts except for the short excerpt from Vaclav Smil's book have also been posted below.
Writing Center: UW has some good resources for improving your
writing: here is one that Julie has explored:
Week 1
A slightly modified 2d version of the Lecture on solar radiation and Earth's
temperature and
greenhouse effect is posted below (click Lecture Notes above).
The 2d week's essay assignment and small handout relating to Ernst Mayr also is
posted
below (these were handed out in class).
Week 2's reading assignment is also posted.
What is not yet posted is the course syllabus (coming soon) or the slides from Week 1 (also
coming soon.
The UW Bookstore still has course-paks available (4 as of Friday afternoon) for those
who do not have them. Please let us know if you cannot find one.
Note the environmental film series beginning Friday 30 March at
UW...this looks very worthwhile...see
below.
Note the tv series Planet Earth below (or click 'Links' above). It is on
Discovery Channel and began Sunday 25 March (3 episodes
8.00-11.00 pm) but continues on Sundays and all the episodes
are shown several times. Excellent and relevant.
return to top
Links and Public Lectures
There is a huge number of resources on the web for environment and energy. We
will develop an annotated list here. A couple to start:
Public lectures, films, television
Activism
Links
return to top
"The world
looks so different after learning science. For example, trees
are made of air, primarily. When they are burned, they go back
to air, and in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was
bound in to convert the air into tree. And in the ash is the small remnant of the
part which did not come from air, that came from the solid Earth, instead.
These are beautiful things, and the content
of science is wonderfully full of them. They are inspiring and they can be used to
inspire others." -- Richard Feynmann, physicist,
California Inst. of Technology.
"We need a Manhatten Project for energy independence in the US." -- Dennis O'Brien, University of Oklahoma.
"We are living our lives as energy hunter-gatherers rather than energy farmers. The midwest is farmland for windpower and biomass; the southern states and California are farmlands for solar energy." -- Dan Kammen, Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, Univ. of California, Berkeley, on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday, 13 September 2002.
To this we should add: The World-wide Web marks the end of our 'hunter-gatherer' stage in dealing with information. Its effect on students and teachers is enormous. Having an ever increasing proportion of human knowledge at our finger-tips, it is possible to 'write' an essay on almost anything with a few cut-and-paste operations. Properly quoted and cited, this is fair enough, but what, now, does creativity mean, what is learning, and what should be our task as students and teachers? I believe we must make the best of this by moving on: solve problems, get out into the field, apply this huge information resource but do not be fooled into giving up your own, individual creative thought. Peter Rhines, 1iv2006
Hurricanes and their counterparts in the Indian Ocean (tropical cyclones) cause great financial loss in the US and great loss of life in the underdeveloped world. Patterns of global climate change affect hurricanes greatly, an example of the complexity of the environment. For example when el Nino is strongly active in the tropical Pacific, Atlantic hurricanes tend to disappear. The energy source for these whirling storms is the heat of the tropical ocean. In a warmer world these storms may become more intense.
Does the science of hurricanes matter? Obviously, satellite images
help us prepare for them, and it costs about $1 million per mile of
coastline to evacuate in anticipation of a storm, so prediction
of the path of the hurricane is valuable. Loss of life in Bangladesh
is enormous; the low-lying land is unusually prone to experience these
storms (and vulnerable to them). Yet some economists argue that public
health countermeasures following the storm, and rebuilding of jobs
and infrastructure is more important than avoiding the immediate destruction
by the storm.
Solar cookers are helping to reduce dependence on
firewood for fuel in many countries; cooking and purification of
water is carried out in units constructed very simply. This is an
example of a soft technology, which we can replicate in the lab,
and study its efficiency. Building a solar cooker project is an
interesting blend of science, engineering and common sense. Go
to this website and inspect the designs there (click on captions
beneath the illustrations for more complete descriptions). image
from http://www.solarcooking.org
In this course we will observe some of these processes, while investigating local and global aspects of fresh water supplies. About 40% of the cattle in the US once drank from underground water supplies from the High Plains aquifer, an underground 'river' that extends from Texas to North Dakota. Irrigation using this source peaked in the early 1980s, and has had to decline as the aquifer is depleted. Half the accessible water was gone by 1993, and it will be exhausted in the next 25 years or so.
There is some evidence that fresh water is moving through the global system more rapidly, because of global warming. This means more evaporation of ocean water in the tropics, more rainfall middle latitudes. Paradoxically, droughts can increase as well because climate change is full of patterns...it is not just a uniform warming or cooling of the Earth.
Instructor:Peter.RhinesOcean Sciences Bldg. 319 tel: 543-0593 rhines@ocean.washington.edu Office hours: MWF 11.20-1.00pm OSB 319 or by arrangement |
Teaching Assistant:Julie Wright (2007)School of Oceanography jjoolzz@gmail.com Office hours: MWF 11.20-1.00 pm MGH 211D W: 1-2pm Marine Sciences Building (MSB) 312 F: 12.30-2 pm MSB 312 |
Times and Locations: Lectures: Mary Gates Hall room 242 Monday, Wednesday, Friday 10.30-11.20 plus 1 hour to be scheduled |
return to top
Grading policy: Essays and homework: 65%, quizzes and exam: 35% (this had to be changed when so many of you showed up for the course! If we do succeed in some group debates etc. I can increase the % credit for class participation). | Textbooks: Something New Under the Sun: an Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, by J.R. McNeill, W.W. Norton Co., NY, 2000. There is also a course-pak at UW Bookstore with readings from other sources:
|
