Week 10 1-5 June 2009
Back in 2000, Canadian energy expert Jeff Rubin was one of the first economists to predict that crude oil prices would soar to over $100 a barrel. Now, with the world’s oil reserves disappearing, he has another prediction, and it’s not as dire as you might think. Rubin says future oil shortages will lead to the end of globalization, changing the way we travel, the way we shop, and the way we eat. But he’s hopeful we can all benefit from this new global economy, personally, politically, and economically. Rubin says American industries such as steel and agriculture will be revitalized, carbon tariffs will increase competition and productivity, and green alliances between labor and management will benefit businesses as well as the air we breathe. Rubin, author of Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller and former chief economist at CIBC World Markets, has been named Canada’s top economist ten times.
Presented by the Town Hall Center for Civic Life, with Elliott Bay Book Company.
Tickets are $5 available at www.brownpapertickets.com, 800/838-3006 and at
the door beginning at 6:30 pm.
Week 9 25-29 May 2009
Week 8 18-22 May 2009
Reading: for the coming week:
Lecture on Peak Oil by Prof. Jim Murray.
Marcela's handout on photosynthesis (accompanies her lecture 11 below; note all lecture notes are collected toward the bottom of this page (click on Lecture Notes at top of page)).
New car and light truck efficiency standards! Pres. Obama announced new requirements cars (39 mpg) and light trucks (30 mpg). This is about a 40% increase in efficiency over the current US gov't CAFE standard (currently 27.5 mpg for cars, 22.2 for light trucks) which could make a major dent in US oil imports. The improvement has to be reached in the next 7 years (by 2016). Obama said the proposal would save 1.8 billion barrels of oil over the lifetime of the vehicles sold in the next five years, akin to removing 177 million cars from the roads over the next 6 1/2 years. In that period, he said, the savings in oil burned to fuel American cars, trucks and buses would amount to last year's combined U.S. imports from Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, Libya and Nigeria. Read more.
Read NY Times columnist/Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman on green energy and China.
UW has a climate action plan relating to carbon emissions, green energy...have a look: here.
Week 7
READING through coming week:
Assignment for Thursday (14.v.09): do your personal carbon profile: how much carbon to you put into the atmosphere per year? (Note that 'kg carbon' and 'kg CO2' differ numerically by a factor 44/12 from their molecular weights). You might start with transportation (car, bus, airplane trips), and home heating. If you are in a dorm perhaps use your home's heating by gas, oil or electricity. For estimates of carbon from electricity, typically 30% of the energy in coal reaches you as electrical energy; coal has an energy density is given by Smil's book; coal is mostly carbon. There is one big question here: do you count the carbon going into making all the things you buy.. from food to IPods? That's difficult but it might lead in an interesting direction: the 'carbon intensity per $' in our marketplace. Estimates of carbon intensity could then quickly allow you to convert your annual $ spending to C spending.
Week 6
Because of the quiz on Thursday May 7, the reading takes second place to reviewing/practicing problems. But try to do the reading by Tues 12 May.
The quiz will be 1 hour long, with some short calculations from the 'science core' and an essay based more on the reading, and the implications of the science core to issues important to humans and the global ecosystem. Example quizzes can be seen in the prior years' websites, although note that the syllabi for those years were not identical to this year's.
Week 5
Lectures7/8 on atmospheric circulation
Week 4
Reading end of week 4 to Tues of week 5: Smil Ch.4 through p.111; Spherical Cow p15-18 (The Greens We Eat) and Ch.IIa p23-39 only; posted lecture notes (Lec. 5 on thermal energy; Lec 6 on chemical bonding).
Marcela's lecture 6 on chemical energy.
For the essay on Energy in Cities, an underlying theme is the initiative led by Seattle's mayor Greg Nickels, to declare energy standards and greenhouse gas reduction standards by cities themselves, rather than waiting for federal government to lead. This was begun several years ago when there was very little action on the part of the federal administration toward greenhouse gas limitation in the US, although the US does sponsor a huge effort in scientific research in this area. Mayor Nickels claims that more than 1000 cities with 80 million people in the US have signed on to this program of local energy efficiency and control, working through the U.S. Conference of Mayors. His office describes the Seattle energy initiative here. Already the Mayor's office claims that the city's electricity generation puts zero net carbon into the atmosphere.
In case it was not clear in the assignment for Essay 2, try to pick out just one or two aspects of energy in cities...we don't expect you to answer all or even many of the suggested questions!
By the way one page of font 12 Times New Roman, at 1 1/2 line spacing is about 450 words, so we are looking for essay lengths of roughly 2250 words. It does not need to be formatted at 1.5 line spacing (Google Docs would have trouble doing so).
Use standard citations at the end of the text. You can either refer to them in
the text as 'Watson, 2000' or using superscript numbers as with footnotes.
Then the References or Biblography section has entries like
Watson, A.J., 1993, Finding pleasure in frisbee, J. Sports Medicine,
23, p16-17
or
Watson, A.K., 2000, quoted in Newseek.,1 April 2000,p. 16-17.
or
Watson A.M.2003, http://www.ocean.washington.edu/research/gfd/
Often the author is not evident on web
sites (for example, try figuring out the author of Wikipedia entires) but
try to give a good enough ref. that others can go right to the document
you cite.
There are good resources for essays in many media. It is good to have a mixture of scholarly journals, 'intelligent' popular press like Science News, Atlantic Monthly, New York Times..., and web sites. As we saw with Louise Richards, Head Librarian of Ocean and Fisheries Library, the web is complex. Here are her web searching notes. Web of Science was a great resource for digging into a research area (recall how to get there from the UW Libraries home page: www.washington.edu => Libraries => Articles and Research Databases => Web of Science, or directly to Web of Science,
For environment there are some key sites like Encyclopedia of the Earth, and www.realclimate.org We also saw the CIESIN, Center for International Earth Science Information Network, website at Columbia University in our web lecture.
For energy one useful website is the US Energy Info. Agency.
Wikipedia is often a place to start, but not to end! It is impressive but uneven, and normally does not dig very deep. Nor is the authorship very clear. Naked Google searching is also a place to start, and work on the more expert search techniques like Google Scholar and its emphasis on academic research litearture, with .edu suffix. You can design your own advanced searches with Google also. PR 19.iv.2009
Week 3
Week 2
Earth Day is coming (Weds 22 April)...how can we 'activate' for this? Please visit Earthdaynetwork, Nature Conservancy, and bring to class a suggestion: how we might 'activate' as a class.
One idea: Saturday 18 April 8.30 am, a working event at the UW Botanical Gardens; a day of dirty hands improvements involving plants, good and evil. The Botantical Garden's buildings and parking lot are in the magenta circle on the figure below.
Another idea: visit the UW wetlands (walk past Husky Stadium through parking lots to
the little footbridge...) and the UW Urban Horticulture Center which is on the far (east)
side for a refreshing encounter with Nature...then write about in your G.D. See image below
showing both the Botantical Gardens (across Montlake drawbridge..to the south) and the UW
wetlands to the north.
Here
is an
aerial photograph (click to enlarge). The green line shows a good walking route over the
footbridge by HEC-ED Pavilion, past Husky] Stadium, to the wetlands and at the green
circle,
the Urban Horticulture Center with interesting gardens, library and architecture of the
building itself. You can even take an audio-headset guided tour. UW offers a B.S.degree
in Forest Resources with a major in Environmental Science and Resource Management.
Week 1
"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: TBA |
Teaching Assistant:Marcela EwertSchool of Oceanography jjoolzz@gmail.com Office hours: TBA |
Meets: Tues/Thurs 10.30-12.20Room 284, Mary Gates Hall and occasionallabs in Room 206, Ocean Teaching Building, School of Oceanography |
Times and Locations: Lectures: Mary Gates Hall room 284 Tuesday/Thursday 10.30-12.20 |
return to top
Grading policy: Essays: 30%; Google Document journal and projects 25%, problem sets 20%, quizzes and exam: 25% | Textbooks: Something New Under the Sun: an Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, by J.R. McNeill, W.W. Norton Co., NY, 2000. For 2009 we will also read Energy-a beginner's guide by Vaclav Smil (2006, OneWorld Press, Oxford). and selections from Consider a Spherical Cow by John Harte, University Science Books.,NY, 1988. Shorter readings from other sources:
|
