Month: January 2013

Hurricane Sandy and how global warming may have contributed to its destructiveness

    Trenberth’s statement from his must-read paper “How to relate Climate Extremes to Climate Changes“:

The answer to the oft-asked question of whether an event is caused by climate change is that it is the wrong question. All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be….

And as Climate Progress reported last week, Munich Re, a top reinsurer, released a major new study that for the first time, links the rapid rise in North American extreme weather catastrophes to manmade climate change:

“Climate­-driven changes are already evident over the last few decades for severe thunderstorms, for heavy precipitation and flash flood­ing, for hurricane activity, and for heatwave, drought and wild­-fire dynamics in parts of North America.”

      Stating above researched parts of arcitcles about how the climate changes influence the increase in the level of nature catastrophes, such as storms, floods and forest fires and etc, proved how dangerous it can be. Some of the main reasons why climate causes more frequent events of the nature disasters are :

1)Warming-driven sea level rise makes storm surges more destructive.

2) Water vapor and higher ocean temperatures help fuel the storm, it is likely to be more intense and bigger as well

3) The unusual path of the storm — into the heavily populated east coast rather than out to see — was caused by a very strong blocking high pressure system that recent studies have linked to warming.

 

Moreover, the society’s attitude toward nature has impact on the global warming and other environment changes. To prevent the disasters from occuring over and over again and getting worse or at least try to help to reduce the level of the frequency, people have to be less neglect, they need to care more about the environment in the ways of using less plastic or any oil-consisted products. These kind of products take at least 200 years for even the smallest piece to biodegrade and in case of the burning the items, the evaporation emitts the gases to the air, which spoils the oxygen.

Overall, we need to be more considarate about the climate changes and make some attempts in solving them in order to prevent the negative consequences to occur.

Sources:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hurricane-sandy-spins-up-climate-discussion

 

Germany’s green energy policy.

 

The International Energy Agency estimates that nearly 50 % of global electricity supplies will need to come from renewable energy sourses in order to halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 and minimise significant, irreversible climate change impacts.

One of the examples where this estimation takes to consideration is Germany. This country is the world’s largest user of wind power, after China and USA, with an installed capacity of 27,215 MW by the end of 2010.

The green energy policy itself was launched not only to prevent the environment from the future harm and minimize it before the catastrophe would be seen as one of the most possible options, but also to open and build new industries, which would help partially solve employment issue and help economy grow as a result.

Hovewer there are some negative sides of the new policy. First, the cost of the new power and sourse of it became less affordable for households. They started struggle with the coming electricity bills and complaning on the «new power», which make them question their level of sustainability. Second, inspite of providing new industry and letting rise the level of employment, the prizes have increased to the point where small business can’t keep up with the electricity expenses and caused some shut downs.

In conclusion, no matter what kind of changes are being applied in a country, the policy, consequences and possible outcomes need to be analyzed, approximatelly predicted and made out of the society’s consideration.

Sources:

http://reason.org/blog/show/germanys-green-subsidies-shutting-d

http://www.canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/47243

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_Germany

Robotics Experience

Last class we had an assignment to construct a robot car. This class we( Marina Sidenko and Andrei Kozlov) measurring the data that can be extracted from the experiment:

Diameter is 5 cm,

Circumference is .157, which is computed using the formula “Pie” * diameter.

A) Rotation is 558 and Rotation 2 is 554, meanwhile the number of wheel rotations is 1.55. Therefore one rotation is 360, and 1.55 is 558 or 554, according to the data provided by experimental analysises

B) the time it took for the wheel to turn is 1 sec, which equals 1000 milliseconds.

C)the distance is 0.25. Depending on how far the robot needs to travel, the turns can be measured during the process.

The distance of the robots, that was measured manually is 30 cm or .3m, which identifies a discrepancy between manual and automatic results, which are 0.3 and .25, accordinally.

Now due to the change in power from 75 to 80, the manual measurement showed the distance result as .35m and the automatic is .28m.

 

Being involved in the experiment resulted in a good challenge for me , which showed how the distance, power and the degrees of the turn can be measured. I learnt the formulas and enjoyed the outcome.