Week 10 For help in reviewing, the mid-term quiz is posted here. A cheatsheet for the final quiz is here. There was a typographical error in the REVIEW handout: on p.2, line 7, the wavelength of radiation varies inversely with the temperature (red is longer wave light than blue). The review problems and mid-term review essay for the mid-term (posted below as "midterm course outline" and "more quiz review problems 3 Nov 04") are still relevant. Posted next to these are some new review problems for the final quiz, and the latest course summary...essay.
Slides from the last several lectures are posted below too (called
Lecture 9....Lecture 12).
Week 9
This week we want to assess where we have been and use the final 2 weeks as effectively as possible. The central topics are global energy supplies, and the atmosphere/ocean system which regulates our climate, and is responding to human use of energy. You can see the interesting, dual role of energy in this course: natural energy stored as fossil fuel, hydropower and sunlight, transformed for human use; this contrasting with the natural energy of the ocean/atmosphere 'heating and ventilating' system. While we have spent much of our time on the physics and chemistry of energy and environment, the biology of ecosystems is strongly in mind.
The attention we have given to the settlements in the Arctic has given some perspective, in showing how vigorous native populations have successfully lived in the most challenging climate regime on Earth. These people on the edge of the ice are witness to the most rapid climate change (in terms of global warming), and have a narrower base of food, shelter, habitat than most of the rest of the world.
The Lovins/Hawkins writing on 'Natural Capitalism' (handout) is particularly significant. It gives a new perspective to many of our ideas in this course. Note the emphasis on valuing natural systems and human 'capital' as well as classic economic capital.
The lecture slides on global energy are posted below ('Lecture 8').
The final exam is scheduled for Monday, Dec. 13, 10.30-12.20, in MGH
238.
Week 8
The Tuesday class before Thanksgiving was a visit to the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory in the School of Oceanography. Visit us again at www.ocean.washington.edu/research/gfd/gfd.html. Some of the things you looked at were familiar, and some will come up during the next few lectures:
- an experiment showing hydrolysis of water: breaking water into hydrogen and oxygen gas by passing an electric current through it. This is a good demonstration of energy in chemical bonds, both the polar water molecule and the resultant hydrogen and oxygen molecules. It takes net energy to do this. You get the electrical energy back if you reverse the experiment, which you can do in the same apparatus. This is the basis of the hydrogren fuel cell which will likely be increasingly used in powering small electrical devices and maybe one day automobiles (there are demonstration hydrogen fuel cell cars already). We looked at a hydrogen fuel cell with a spinning propellor, an electric motor driven by hydrogen and oxygen sources (the hydrogen coming from methyl alcohol).
- the buoyancy of air and water when it is heated or cooled, and the resulting 'overturning circulation' of the atmosphere and oceans (as seen in a layer of water cooled at the surface in the 'Arctic' and warmed at the surface in the 'tropics').
- revisting the Stirling engine and the chemical energy
released by burning a petrochemical...a candle. Here we had a precision
balance that read to 0.0001 grams; the burning candle sat on it and
'lost weight' It was a puny flame yet it warmed the water in a soda-can
hanging above by several degrees C. Some heat was not captured by the
water, but stayed in the air. Candle wax has energy content similar to
oil: about 42 million Joules per kg... 42 MJ/kg.
Thus every gram of weight loss turns into 42,000
Joules of heat energy, or 1/100 gram into 400 Joules of heat energy.
That 400 Joules can warm 100 grams of water by 1 degree C, because for
water the specific heat capacity relating heat input to temperature
change is 4.187 Joules per gram, per degree C. It may help with these
big numbers to remember that a 250-kilocalorie candy bar equals 1
million Joules of chemical energy that is released on burning (or
eating, which is not the same, but similar to burning) it.
- a time-lapse video of warm lake water evaporating and forming fog/cloud over Lake Washington showed the intense movement of heat: evaporation turns liquid water to gas...water vapor whose thermal energy is higher...the lake is cooled. When the water vapor condenses into liquid again, this time as cloud droplets, that heat is given off, and the cloudy air becomes warm and buoyant...making strong up-and-down winds. The change of state from liquid to gas and back is akin to a chemical reaction because hydrogen bonds between water molecules are broken and then reformed. The net effect is that some heat has moved from the lake water to the clouds overhead, and in the presence of gravity some of this lakewater thermal energy becomes mechanical energy...potential and kinetic...of the strong cloud motions.
- waves on the surface of a shallow layer of water showed the ability to 'organize'. A messy splash turned into a row of humps on the surface that stayed together while moving back and forth in the water channel. This is an example of organization into patterns that happens widely in the environment.
- tornados were produced by sucking some water out of the center
of a cylinder of water, while injecting the same amount of water at the
outside rim of the cylinder. The slow spinning of the water is
concentrated as it draws close to the outlet. This is a first model of
many kinds of spinning storms in atmosphere and ocean.
We pointed out some courses on environmental studies/environmental
sciences that are upcoming. Our lab-based course, currently numbered
Envir 215, will be offered in Spring 2005. Much of the work involves
constructing and carrying out lab experiments relevant to the global
environment with some emphasis on oceans and atmospheres. It will be
taught this year by Prof. William Wilcock. The previous year's website
is here.
While the resemblance of the material to the present course is
obvious, in practice the class is centered on experimentation, as a way
to learn the core of science of the environment.
Week 7
Below is posted a map showing where US oil imports come from.
Notice that Canada is our largest supplier. Recall that the US uses
1/4 of the worlds marketable energy production.
Oil use is roughly 20 million barrels per day. The fraction of that
being imported is roughly 1/2, but is increasing. US oil production is
also shown below.
Global energy and oil is an exercise in large numbers, yet also
small ones. Oil is transported in ships, and supertankers are more than
1000 feet long, carrying about 300,000 tonnes of oil (3 x 10^8
kg....three times ten to the eighth power). Working through it, you
will find that Japan's entire energy use can be supplied by 3
supertanker loads of oil per day; US oil imports could be carried in
4.3 supertankers per day! (A barrel of oil is 42 gallons, or 130 kg,
with energy content of about 6.1 x 10^9 Joules).
In your 1st draft essays, 'Is there an oil crisis?' for Tuesday,
pick a narrow focus from the discussion handed out, and use the
readings to illuminate this focus (the McNeill sections on energy,
which were the first reading assignment, the Roberts' discussion of oil
supplies, and Lomborg's discussion of energy). Web resources should
provide you with more than enough data, for example if you want to look
at the profile of energy use in a particular country and compare it
with the US. I have found some sources that disagree with the figure
below, regarding imports to the US from Canada vs. those from Saudi
Arabia, for example. In searching try to establish more than one
source, when possible estimate their reliability, and see what the
consensus is.
Thanks for your
interesting presentations in class Tuesday (16xi04).
The idea of team-projects is very appealing, and the net results really
covered a lot of ground.
Lomborg handout should be read in conjunction with the new
essay/problem assignment posted below. This '1st draft' of your essay
should be handed in Tues. 23 November.
***We will try to have class at 4.30 pm
on Tuesday 23 November,
owing to a lecturing conflict. I will let you know the room. If for
some reason you can't make it send me your assignment via email.
***Opportunity to meet Gretel Ehrlich and hear about her new
book The Future of Ice, which looks at global climate change at
high latitudes: Elliott Bay Book Company (Pioneer Square, downtown
Seattle), 7.30 pm, Thurs. 18 Nov. 2004: see elliottbaybook.com; likely
need to get there early for a seat.
***Richard Dawkins, the articulate and exciting author of many
books on Darwinian evolution, is speaking at Town Hall on Weds. 17 Nov.
at 7.30pm. His relationship with Energy and Environment may not be
apparent, yet evolution is a key, controlling process that defines
ecosystems and the vast variety of life.
See
his website.
Week 6
No class this Thursday (Veteren's Day, Nov. 11)
Reading posted below.
Standup presentations next Tues. Nov. 16. Grab the assignment
here.
Week 5
Billy's lecture on the carbon cycle is posted below, as is
a sheet of useful equations.
The quiz has been postponed to Tuesday, 9 November (see today's email).
Election day: what does it mean to energy and environment? There are strong opinions from all sides. And abrupt change is everywhere ($50-55 per barrel of oil today, as little as $12 per barrel in 1998, $28 per barrel one year ago) Energy independence? The USA uses about 1/4 of the world's energy resources. Oil is the largest part of our energy profile, currently 20 million barrels per day, half of that imported.
In studying the Arctic
environment this pall of global fuel consumption hangs over us: we will
see how ocean and atmosphere react to human energetics during the
remainder of the term. The Arctic is melting, ecosystems shifting, but
its behavior is not simple. With US oil production declining, how do we
manage the near future? In the end we will see that climate change and
the dynamics of human activity are tightly linked. Our response to the
problem will have implications to every aspect of life, and especially
to our relations with the rest of the world.
[let's do the numbers: one barrel of
oil is
42 gallons, that is 159 liters. It has 6 x
10^9
Joules (6 billion J) of chemical energy. Dividing by 42, one gallon
of oil has
1.4 x 10^8 Joules...like 140 candy bars. The more common unit is
Joules per kg.of fuel, which for crude oil is about 4.0 to 4.5 x 10^7
Joules/kg; quite similar to many other fuels, except hydrogen which is
the clear winner (see figure below).
Gauge this against your daily activity:
20 million barrels per day divided by 295M US
citizens is .067 barrels per person each day, or 2.8 gallons of oil
per person per day.
And..only 19.5 gallons of gasoline can be refined from
the 42 gallons of oil in a barrel. How do you imagine the
energy use per person compares with other countries, and with
Greenland? ]
Interesting , how the number 42
keeps coming up
(gallons of oil per
barrel, approximate energy content of crude oil (megajoules per kg of
oil), specific heat capacity of
water (kilojoules per degree C
per kg)). In Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, 42 is 'the answer to Life the
Universe and Everything' spit out by the computer Deep Thought
after some millenia of thinking. But then, realized Ford
Prefect, 'What was the question?'. The book begins:
'Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of
the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded
yellow sun.
Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles
is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-
descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still
think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most
of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time.
Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these
were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces
of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn't the small
green pieces of paper that were unhappy.
And so the problem remained; lots of the people were mean, and
most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.
Many were increasingly of the opinion that they'd all made a big
mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And
some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no
one should ever have left the oceans.
And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man
had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be
nice to people for a change, one girl sitting on her own in a
small cafe in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that
had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the
world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was
right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to
anything.
Sadly, however, before she could get to a phone to tell anyone
about it, a terribly stupid catastrophe occurred, and the idea
was lost forever.'
Perhaps the Hitchhiker's Guide should be one of our
textbooks for this course.
Chemical energy in fuels: this is the heat that would be liberated by
burning a kg. of fuel. The horizontal axis is MJ (millions of Joules)
per kg.Source: Ronneau (1993) p.33
http://www.people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/energycontent.html
Week 4
Finally the midterm outline and review problems are posted below
(click on Lectures...). The reading this week is due Tues 2 Nov. Quiz
on
Thursday 4 Nov. will involve both the 'science core' and the
Arctic material we have introduced. The format will include an essay
similar in character to those on the 'review problem' sheet. BB will
lecture on the carbon cycle and the biological side of
E&E (energy and environment). There will be an opportunity to do more
practice with problem solving before the quiz.
Week 3
BB: My lecture on chemical bonds is posted below in the Lectures section. For more information, I
recommend
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/
I think the problem-solving session went well today. If anybody still has
any troubles with any of the problems,
let me know, and we'll get them straightened out.
For your essay construction, here are the books I put on the screen in
class Tuesday 19x04:
o People of the Deer - Farley Mowatt
o Among the Tundra People - Harald U. Sverdrup (excerpts handed out Tues 19x04)
o The Whale and the Supercomputer - Charles Wohlforth
o Arctic Dreams - Barry Lopez
o This Cold Heaven, 7 Seasons in Greenland - Gretel Ehrlich
o Greenland by the Polar Sea - Knud Rasmussen
o Fifth Thule Expedition - " "
Kristin Laidre's lecture should also give you much to think
about.
I have put a little discussion of those two problems, sc1, sc2 below (click on 'Reading and some problems...' above).
Posted below are lecture 3 and 'notes' on energy numbers...sizes of energy and power in interesting natural and human cycles. This Tuesday (20 Oct) Kristin Laidre will be telling us about narwhals in Greenland, and on Thursday Billy Brazelton will lecture on chemical energy and begin to discuss energy in living systems, and the carbon cycle.
Also there is
a 'spherical cow' solving session as a group activity that day.
Instead of a discussion session on Thursday, we will go over some
Spherical Cow problems together in class. In preparation, please work
to
your best ability on the following exercises:
I.4 Exhausting fossil fuel resources (I) Exercises 1&2
I.5 Getting denser Exercises 1-5
I.6 The greens we eat Exercises 2-4
II.19 Altering the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels Exercises 2&3
Week 2.5: Thanks to Maggie and Callie for leading
today's discussion. We will encounter much more on oil and environment
soon. Reading for week 3 is posted below. Please also read the lecture
notes. My computer was totalled today after class, so it may take a
little while to get Lecture 3 up but you have it on paper. Next to the
reading assignment, I have put down two problems to work on (the Harte
assignment is just to review last week's pages). We will go over more
such problems, especially as they become more relevant to the
environment.
Next Tuesday (19x04) we have
Kristin Laidre to tell us about narwhal
hunting from Thule. The surprise is the Jens Danielsen, the hunter who
dragged Gretel Ehrlich across the ice (p149), is one of Kristin's co-workers.
The grading formula for the course was given out: 50% essays and handed-in
problems, 25% participation in class, 25% quiz and exam. The quiz and exam
are likely to be heavy on essay writing, but with some problem solving.
Posted under 'Reading' are short sections
from The End of Oil by Paul Roberts, in prep. for Thursday (14x2004)
discussion/debate. The essay assignment (due in 2 weeks, with length/font
details elsewhere on this site) is now posted under Essays.
The 7 Oct. lecture text and figures are posted below...the Tuesday 12 Oct. lecture on heat engines and thermal energy will be up soon. The 'Lecture-3-slides-sm.pdf' has some text I wrote on the history, culture and languages of Greenland and Nunuvut which may be helpful in the upcoming essay assignment. It is clear that a major amount of your work this term is reading, but we are anxious to get you writing too. I have tweaked this a bit Weds. morning (13 Oct).
To look at some good maps of the arctic go to maps.grida.no/arctic/ where you can look at many maps: population, soils, geology and add country boundaries, cities and labels, zoom in... You can zoom in by drawing a box with your cursor (while holding the left mouse button down). Click on 'About this map' to learn more about what you are seeing. It is worth trying to find the data sources: how would you get the numbers behind the pictures, in order to work with them?
Images of the topography of the Arctic can be found (at high resolution..beware of big file sizes) here . This is known as the IBCAO data, and is the latest and best.
Week 2: the 2d reading assignment is posted below.
The discussion this Thursday went very well; I think we all
learned something. One thing: the best alternative energy source
may be 'conservation'. Not only in the sense of giving up your
car, but also in designing energy efficiency into buildings,
transport, agriculture. We will meet Amory Lovins' ideas that see
opportunity in the wasted energy.
I will post the energy handout, links to maps of the Arctic, and more
lecture slides on the web later
today. -PBR 7x2004
Welcome to week 1 of this course. I have posted the first lecture (with some additions and corrections, such as a sketch about waves) as an Acrobat .pdf file, below. Note on Friday I added some more discussion material to it, so it is a little different than yesterday. Also the handout notes giving the essay assignment (under Essays below). See if you can make it to the Wohlforth lecture next Weds. 6 October, 3.30 pm in Ocean Teaching Building, Room OTB 14, School of Oceanography (described further in the handout above). The syllabus is also posted (click on menu bar above). It will be given in more detail soon.
This is a very important time for the course: we need to communicate so as to adjust the level of 'science intensity' to match your backgrounds and needs. When possible we will give you some flexibility in your essays, so that they can contain different amounts of science depending on your inclinations. We want them to be excellent in some way, but they do not all need to be heavy with science.
Reading assignments are posted (as well as given in the handout). The first week's reading should be done by Thurs. 7 Oct. In the case of the 'Spherical Cow' book by Harte, try doing some of the exercises. We will go over this in class.
We enjoyed doing some experiments the first day and will try to do
more, whenever possible. Give us some feedback about them.
Instructor:Peter.RhinesOcean Sciences Bldg. 319 tel: 543-0593 rhines@ocean.washington.edu Office hours: by arrangement |
Teaching Assistant:Clara Fuchsmann (2006) Billy Brazelton (2004)School of Oceanography cfuchsml@u.washington.edu |
Times and Locations: Lectures: Mary Gates Hall room 238 Tuesday and Thursday 10.30am-12.20pm |
