Instructors:Peter.RhinesOcean Sciences Bldg. 319 tel: 543-0593 rhines@ocean.washington.edu Office hours: by arrangement Fritz Stahr Marine Sciences Bldg. 270 tel: 543-6043 stahr@ocean.washington.edu Office hours: by arrangement |
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Times and Locations: Lectures: Tues. and Thur. 9.30-10.20 am, Ocean Teaching Building room 205 Lab sections: Tues. and Thur. either 10.30 am -12.20 pm (section BB) or 1.30-3.20 pm (section BA) Ocean Teaching Building room 206 |
| Textbooks: Something New Under the Sun: an Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, by J.R. McNeill, W.W. Norton Co., NY, 2000. Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, by Paul Hawkins, Amory Lovins, L. Hunter Lovins; Rocky Mountain Institute, Colorado, 2003. |
"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.
"We need a Manhatten Project for energy independence in the US." -- Dennis O'Brien, University of Oklahoma.
The policy on plagiarism at the University of Washington is here. If in doubt about how to cite your sources, please ask the instructors. This guide from Univ. of Massachussets is also quite good and has examples.
Quiz on Energy Unit. Tues. Jan 28: Includes readings in MacNeill's book, Amory Lovins Natural Capitalism (chapter 1) and Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist (chapter 11). This will be a 30 minute closed-book quiz involving basic ideas, not memorization of numbers. To prepare, review the reading, your lecture notes and lab-books.
Quiz on Air
Unit. Thur. Feb 27
(note change, see Calendar for more
detail)
Quiz on Water Unit. Thur. Mar 13 (last day of class)
As in the Amory Lovins assignment above, there are important
archives of lectures that you can listen to: a pleasant and easy
way to soak up environmental information. Some of these are listed
with our Links. Using your audio accessories
like RealPlayer or WinAmp you can skip around these talks...going
back over interesting sections. Here are a couple (these are not formal assignments...yet):
KUOW 94.7 Public Radio Seattle Weekday
with Steve Scher: listen to some very expert people, even your
instructor (12/21/01 on Global Warming). Page through using
More Stories button. Here is the sorted
list of environment shows.
Living
on Earth from National Public Radio, an
excellent environment program.http://www.loe.org/index.php
Talk of the Nation: Science Friday
from National Public Radio.
Enivironmental
archives at http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/environment.html
even more can be found by searching at
the site homepage for environment, such as this show on the hydrogen
economy.
After listening to this, a bit of sleuthing can take
you to the labs and offices of the panelists: for example Dan
Kammen, Director of the Renewable
and Appropriate Energy Labortory, Univ. of California Berkeley.
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. For the in-lab solar cooker project 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.
