Wednesday, September 8, 2010

A Fellow Greenie

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/heat_wave_los_angeles.html
Was it hot today or what? I mean, living in LA is like living in a frying pan, you walk 10 feet out of your house and you are already drenched in sweat. You sit in class and your afraid to take your backpack off because the pretty girl always sits behind you. Which is problematic, due to the large sweat stain that has formed on your back. Then as you descend deeper in your chair, to hide the shame, you think... I need to buy a bike to avoid this humiliation in the future. 


What does this have to do with anything? 


Well the US has had one of the hottest summers on record; some might say it’s due to global warming. I personally don’t believe that climate change is the cause but hey I’m no climate scientist. But for the sake of this blog post, lets just say climate change is to blame for the back sweat. So if climate change is the culprit than clearly high levels of green house gas emissions are the means used to inflict such humiliation. Then as you sit in class listening to your professor ramble on about Jane Goodall and her chimps, you open up your computer and start learning about this newfound foe, climate change.

That’s when after hundreds of searches you stumble onto Bravenewclimate. A blog by Professor Barry Brook the Director of Climate Science at The Environment Institute at the University of Adelaide. You do some quick research, to make sure he is credible and find out that his climate blog ranks 22nd on the list of green blogs on Technorati and has an authority level of 533. Satisfied with your findings, you read on and are pleased to realize that he makes a new post about three times a week and generally has on average about 50 comments after one of his posts. The posts are very descriptive although they definitely are geared towards a more academic audience. As an environmental major, I’m glad that you also stumbled onto this blog, in much the same way as I did.

Bravenewclimate is a blog that  focuses on the fields of alternative energy and climate change. Although this is a purely academic blog, he does a great job making posts that are sometimes science heavy but mostly pretty layman friendly. He succeeds at spelling out the issues we face when dealing with climate change. He offers many case studies on possible solutions to this growing problem. In this post, he does a great job describing the causes and consequences of climate change in a way that is really easy to understand.

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/07/18/ccbasics1/ 


“Just one species – humans – are now the agent of global change. As we develop our modern economies and settlements at a frantic rate, we have caused deforestation and fragmentation of natural habitats, over-hunting of wild species we use for food, chemical pollution of waterways and massive draw-downs of rivers, lakes and groundwater.”

As you can see he really embodies all the causes of climate change in a very straightforward paragraph.

One thing I really enjoyed about his blog, was his passion for nuclear energy as one of the best short-term solutions to climate change. Like him, I think that nuclear energy offers the best solution to climate change in the future due to a. The vastness of our uranium and plutonium resources and b. The efficiency of fission reactions to generate a large amount of energy. However, the media as well as world governments are often intimidated by the use of nuclear energy because of its potential risks i.e. nuclear weapons, meltdowns, and radioactive waste. I will quickly interject, advancements, in safety for nuclear power plants has made them almost foolproof. Here is a great post on nuclear energy.

http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/08/25/pb-ahtr/

In this post, he describes the benefits of a new type of reactor, Pebble Reactor, which could potentially give us very low cost nuclear energy.

Mr. Brook's blog is very focused on alternative energy and climate change. I think this will help me in future blog posts, because I will definitely devote a few posts to this subject. However, the purpose of my blog is to not only focus on climate change, but to focus on a whole range of environmental problems from our depleted oceans to deforestation. I hope to share a broader view of the problems facing humans in the future. 



Sincerely,
          
 That Guy

1 comment:

  1. A.) I don't sweat. B.) I control the weather, which in turn means that I control climate. Suck on that fishpond.

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