Welcome to Module 12: Biodiversity, Global Warming, and the Future
Video: The Value of Optimism on Climate and Energy (2:36)
Dr. Richard Alley, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, Department of Geosciences: "We're going to start with a little on the value of being optimistic on climate and energy. Let's be honest in the big picture on climate and energy, uh the news is not always good. But before you start jumping to bad conclusions, uh consider this uh like many, many other people I helped the United Nations on energy and climate uh with the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This is us in Paris in 2007 (photo of Dr. Richard Alley and Colleagues at in Paris for the IPCC), the year the committee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. If you took the tens of thousands of pages of IPCC reports, and you squeeze them into 35 words."
Dr. Richard Alley: "Compared to business as usual, efficient responses on climate and energy will give a larger economy with more jobs, improved health, and greater national security in a cleaner environment, more consistent with the golden rule. This really is correct; this is what the scholarship says. The good news is if you're a young person today, you're part of the first generation in human history that can build a sustainable economic energy system that'll power everyone essentially forever. But we have to remember that we can solve problems and then go out and solve them. And we can solve problems this is a cell phone (holds up cell phone), and I have a picture here of a do-it-yourself cell phone kit. It's just a little bit of quartz or sand for the glass (circles photo of sand on screen), and it's a little bit of organic material such as oil for the plastic (circles photo of oil on screen), and it's the right rocks, the ones with the rarer elements and the Palladium and such (circles photo of rocks on screen). And that's all it is, is sand, oil, and rocks. And science, and engineering, and design, and marketing, and banking. There's a GPS in here that knows where you are. It has relativity special and general relativity from Einstein. If it didn't have those it would begin to get lost in 2 minutes. It has quantum mechanics in the computer. If we can do this, we can surely do energy.
It's a cold night. You wake up, curled in a little ball, shivering, and you remember that there is a nice, warm blanket in the hall closet. What do you do?
- Stay in bed, because if you get up, your pajama pants, loose from your recent weight loss inspired by your lead role in the new blockbuster movie based on your bestselling novel, will fall off, and losing your pajama pants will make you colder than before.
- Stay in bed, because if you get up, your significant other, the handsome/beautiful actor/actress (choose one of each) who will play the lead next to you in the new movie, will steal the covers already on the bed, you won't notice, and you'll end up colder than before.
- Stay in bed, because if you get up, you'll spill the glass of imported water with the lemon slice that you keep next to the bed for your significant other, soaking the sheets and making you colder than before.
- Get up and get the blanket.
If you picked D, you probably should be thinking about wise responses to global warming, because the physical basis for expecting that the ongoing human addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will raise the Earth's average temperature is at least as strong as the physical basis for expecting warming from putting another blanket on the bed. It’s now extraordinarily unlikely that nature will do something bizarre enough to offset what we're doing—a huge number of volcanoes erupting and throwing things into the stratosphere to block the sun, or space aliens coming and getting in the sun's way—because we're putting a “blanket” on the planet, it is warming the planet, and we are almost guaranteed to get even warmer.
However, that doesn't tell us what, if anything, to do, so let's go take a look at the options. There's some money to be made here and disasters to be avoided and good to be done.
Please note, the topics covered in Module 12 are appropriate for our course and do matter for your future. Old people like Dr. Alley were raised in a world in which these topics were not especially political; scientists did science, engineers did engineering, and voters, politicians, and businesspeople did their jobs without picking sides on the science and engineering. Many things happened over the last few decades, though, and the topics in Module 12 are considered to be political by many people today, even though most of the information is science, not politics.
We’ll try to give you a short enough version of the information to avoid overloading you or driving you crazy, but long enough to give you a good start if you want to know more. We will try to be scrupulous in avoiding taking sides on political issues… but recognize that in the modern politicized environment, it is impossible to even mention some of these issues without being accused of politicization by some people.
For what it’s worth, the progress in developing new energy sources has been so spectacularly fast that Dr. Alley remains optimistic, and he has put that optimism into a book, a three-hour TV miniseries, and various other outlets including about 1000 public talks. The full scholarship really does indicate that we can build a sustainable energy system that will supply more energy to more people at lower cost and with less environmental damage than from our current energy system, providing a larger economy, more jobs, improved health and greater national security in a cleaner and more ethical world. If we remain committed over the next 30 years or so.
Learning Objectives
- Understand how different fossil fuels form, how slowly that occurs, and why, despite the huge value we get from use of fossil fuels, we must move to other energy sources
- Explain how fossil-fuel burning contributes to climate change that is making our lives harder, and thus how moving toward a sustainable energy system will help us to have a bigger economy, improved health, and other benefits
- Discuss reasons why maintaining or reestablishing natural ecosystems connecting national parks will help preserve the valuable biodiversity in those national parks.
What to do for Module 12?
You will have one week to complete Module 12. See the course calendar for specific due dates.
- Take RockOn #12
- Submit Exercise #6
- No StudentSpeak this week
Questions?
If you have any questions, send an email via Canvas, to ALL the Teachers and TAs. To do this, add each teacher individually in the “To” line of your email. By adding all the teachers, the TAs will be included. Failure to email ALL the teachers may result in a delayed or missed response. For detailed directions on how to do this, see How to send an email in GEOSC 10 in the Important Information module.
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