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Often time’s issues plaguing the environment are looked over in mainstream media, unless there is a major crisis. Unfortunately that type of nonchalance about the environment carries over to politics as well, things like immigration, reproductive rights and wars overshadow climate change. We are reaching a critical threshold, and we have reached a point where I feel safe to say “how bad do you want the future to be?”  because we have overstepped the point of return, and our only hope now is to improve things before our future begins to look even worse. President Barak Obama has made some positive steps towards slowing down climate change and aiding the environment, but some scientists and environmentalists believe he has not done nearly enough.

Obama currently has a bill proposed that would force a reduction of greenhouse emissions by 2% every year until the year 2025. According to the New York Times “The bill has no chance of passage in the Republican-controlled Congress, but Democrats say they believe that forcefully pushing for climate change policies could help them win control of the Senate in 2016.”(Davenport) The issue with this is the longer we wait to take action the harder taking action becomes. It is also difficult to pass important issues through all forms of government when the different parties are hell-bent on disagreeing with each other. Despite issues with-in his own government “Obama will meet with President Xi Jinping of China at the White House, and they are expected to discuss their joint efforts to cut emissions” (Davenport) on this Thursday (9/24/2015) and Friday (9/25/2015).

The President recently made a trip to Alaska, being that they are the part of the country that will see the effects of climate change the soonest (and already have been seeing it). During his trip he did a conference, where he spoke about climate change he “sought to underscore his message that fixing climate change is an urgent cause” (Silverstein), it is also notable that Obama has brought the issue of global climate change further than any of his predecessors. Climate change is often times something that is more of a concern for more liberal people and that may be the reason it has become a focus of Obama’s recent administration.

Obama faces a lot of criticisms surrounding his approach on climate change, often by people within his own party. Bill McKibben, The Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies from Middlebury College and the 2013 winner of the Gandhi Prize and the Thomas Merton Prize, was highly critical of the President in his 2013 article for Rolling Stone. “We’ve seen the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded north of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, and the largest wind field ever measured, both from Hurricane Sandy. We’ve watched the Arctic melt, losing three quarters of its summer sea ice. We’ve seen some of the largest fires ever recorded in the mountains of California, Colorado and New Mexico”, writes McKibben.

Discussing Obama and climate change can be difficult because some people accredit him with doing exceptional work based on the environment and other say he has not helped in the slightest, and if anything has made things worse. The thing most necessary at this juncture is not a party issue, their has to be a unifying motion to end climate change and global destruction.

Works Cited:

Davenport, Coral. “Senate Democrats to Unveil Climate Change Bill.” New York Times [New Work] 22 Sept. 2015: n. pag. Print.

 

Mckibben, Bill. “Obama and Climate Change: The Real Story.” Rollingstone.com. Rolling Stone, 17 Dec. 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2015.

 

Silverstein, Ken. “Obama Puts Alaska at Epicenter of Climate Change With Big Oils Blessing.” Www.forbes.com. Forbes, 4 Sept. 2015. Web. 23 Sept. 2015.

 

Throughout the course of two classes Basic Two-Motor NTX Cars were built and tested. A drawing of the NTX car can be found here, 9797-Basic-Car. (http://www.firstroboticscanada.org)

The cars were being tested to see if their changing power levels effected the distance in which the car traveled in one second. The vehicles were timed on the Lego Mindstorm system, as to limit human error. The space was also flat and clear of wires and other obstacles so they did not interact with the distance traveled. Each time the power level was changed all other conditions remained the same.

The results found:

Trial 1-

Time- 1 second

Power 1- 75

Power 2- 75

Circumference of wheels- 0.1700 meters

Distance Measured- 0.275 meters

Distance Computed- 0.275778 meters

Velocity- 0.275778 meters per second

Number of wheel turns- 1.6222 turns

Rotation 1- 584

Rotation 2- 576

 

Trial 2-

Time- 1 second

Power 1-50

Power 2-50

Circumference of wheels- 0.1700 meters

Distance Measured-0.181 meters

Distance Computed-0.170944 meters

Velocity- 0.170944 meters per second

Number of wheel turns- 2.31389 turns

Rotation 1- 362

Rotation 2- 366

 

Trial 3-

Time- 1 second

Power 1-100

Power 2-100

Circumference of wheels-0.1700 meters

Distance Measured-0.389 meters

Distance Computed-0.393361

Velocity-0.393361 meters per second

Number of wheel turns-2.31389 turns

Rotation 1-833

Rotation 2- 821

Graph of Power Differences– The graph shows that according to the study done, as you increase the power of your engine you increase the distance it will travel in 1 second. That is something that may be tested an infinite amount of times, because there are an infinite number of power settings.

After running each trial the percent error was found for the difference of computed distance and measured distance.

Percent Error Formula- (D Measured – D computed)⁄(average of D measured and D computed)

Trial 1- (0.275-0.275778) ⁄ 0.275389=0.0028250947

Trial 2- (0.181-0.170944) ⁄ 0.175997= 0.0571373376

Trial 3- (0.389-0.393361) ⁄ 0.3911805 = 0.011483062

Having such low percent differences means the distance measured is similar to the distance computed, and one may infer that means a fairly accurate measurement.

If the experiment were to be redone, it would be best to have more trials. Having three trials at a power level 75, three trails at a 100 and three trials at 50 would give you a better overall average based on how far the cars travel based on their power levels.

Works Cited:

© 2008 Legoengineering.com & Tufts University Center For Engineering    Educational Outrea. “9797 NXT LEGO Kit: Basic Car Building Instructions.” 9797 NXT LEGO Kit: Basic Car Building Instructions (n.d.): n. pag. Www.firstroboticscanada.org. Tufts University Center for Engineering Educational Outreach, 2008. Web. 21 Sept. 2015.

Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a topic widely debated by scientists, scholars, politicians and even every-day concerned parents. GMOs have been blamed for childhood allergies, higher amounts of cancer and even the wide spread suicides of farmers in India; GMOs are also accredited with saving the soil and providing enough food for our exponentially increasing population. The article “A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops” by Amy Harmon was written for the New York Times, and while that is typically a reliable news source the article is fairly biased and does present a lot of information for only one side of the GMO argument, which seems unfair.

I do not, however, completely disagree with Harmon’s findings. The information begins in 2013 when there was a proposed bill to ban all growing of genetically modified in the state of Hawaii. The bill banning the GMOs on the islands gained more support than even the ever-popular bill to decriminalize marijuana, which is something very surprising. Often environmental concerns go unnoticed by the majority of people in the United States, but seeing people rallying around this one idea is very promising about the future of environmental causes. The unfortunate part of this rallying is a constant communication of misinformation.

When someone is looking up information on GMOs the only information they are likely to find is negative, because it seems the people that are most vocal on the subject are the most negative. People often refer to the study that showed a diet of genetically modified corn lead to cancer in lab rats, but as Harmom’s article points out that experiment was disputed by majority of scientists because it was conducted on too small a sample and used rats that commonly have tumors regardless of diet. Scientists with the University of Hawaii urged the council voting on the GMO ban read the Global Consensus, which upholds the idea that GMOs do no more harm than their non-modified counter parts and says there may even be more benefits to growing GMOs. Those benefits being less soil loss and more food per area allotted for growing.

I am not completely against the use of GMOs because nearly everything we consume has been altered in someway. The “natural” fruits, vegetables and grains we eat now have been cross bread or selectively bread for their positive qualities, much in the way new genetic modification happens. That may have been five years ago in a lab or three hundred years ago by the Native Americans while they were selecting which traits they preferred in corn. It is not likely that anything we may be eating is completely natural or the exact same way it was at its origination on the planet.

The reason I do not fully agree with Harmon’s article’s apparent support of GMOs is because of large agricultural corporations, like Monsanto, that fund and support most of GMO and production work. Monsanto is a company that is typically not in the publics view, but plays a significant role in global food production. Monsanto is a biotechnological food production giant, they are the largest seed company in the world and responsible for pesticides like Round-Up (a commonly used invasive plant killer); the issue with Round-Up is it leads to pesticide resistant weeds and promotes people to buy even more of Monsanto’s products to kill the now stronger plants. Monsanto also promotes an unsafe way of growing food, they encourage the growth of strictly cash crops (crops that are easily marketed and sold), and that promotion leads to monocultures; the problem with monocultures is they are unsustainable and ruin soil quality.

Some people who oppose GMO crops are not calling for a ban, they are calling for all GMO foods to be clearly labeled, in the same way that organic crops are packaged and labeled. Seed companies, like Monsanto, are afraid that labeling products as GMOs will limit sales, but as a consumer it is usually better to be aware of what is in your food or where your food is coming from; that way you can make an educated and conscious decision on what it is you would prefer to eat. It also alleviates blame for the farmers and companies, because if it is labeled as a GMO people have the option of whether or not they want to eat it and cannot claim they were unaware.

Harmon’s essay is well thought out and well researched; it is also easy to understand even with minimal knowledge of GMOs. She uses reliable sources and proves the unreasonable nature of some claims being made on GMOs. I find her work to be interesting and finding out about the disproved rat experiment thoroughly caught my attention, as did the rest of what she was saying on the topic.

 

Works Referred to-

Harmon, Amy. “A Lonely Quest for Facts on Genetically Modified Crops.” The New                                    York Times. The New York Times, 04 Jan. 2014. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.