September 5, 2017
Today for our class we had a guest speaker, Dr. Michael Edelstein. He has been teaching for a number of years and is an expert on Climate Change. Climate Change is something that is affecting us today and we as future teachers are going to need to know how to teach our future students about this topic. A key word I learned today when learning about climate change was sustainability which is how do we live our life so that other generations can live their lives the same way, in other words, how do we not destroy everything that we have on earth.
There are a lot of harmful chemicals in the environment that we do not even know about. One of these chemicals is found in our local water supply and is not commonly known to a lot of people, the chemical is PFOS. Harsh chemicals like this get into our water from us using different fossil fuels. In order to stop putting harsh chemicals into the environment, we should start using the sun as more of a resource. If we keep putting harsh chemicals into the environment eventually there will be nothing left on Earth, there will be no people. We live on a finite Earth, there is an end point.
Dr. Edelstein's presentation was based on a presentation done by Al Gore. Al Gore was Vice President of the United States and was later elected President only to not get the position because he did not have enough votes. He was the subject of two movies "The Inconvenient Truth" and "Inconvenient Sequel". He had three questions for Climate Change: Must we change? Can we change? and Will we change?.
When learning about Climate Change I learned that the Earth is an open system and things enter it and leave it when talking about matter it is a closed system, and when talking about energy it is an open system, this is because of the sun. The sun brings in energy and helps to make things work and run. I learned today that there are two different layers of the atmosphere the troposphere and the stratosphere. The troposphere is the layer where we live and the stratosphere is the layer above where we live when a harmful gas called Ozone gets passed the stratosphere and into the troposphere, it causes more UV light to be let in and this causes cancer and also lung problems.
Dr. Edelstein touched briefly on the Laws of Thermodynamics and how they relate to climate change. First Law of Thermodynamics- energy, and matter are not separable, matter is neither created nor destroyed, you can't create new matter you can only transform it from one form to another.
Second Law of Thermodynamics- the world moves from a state of order to a state of disorder
Dark colors absorb heat, light colors reflect heat this is also known as an albedo. This is directly related to a positive feedback loop which is an acceleration of an existing trait, the more that occurs the more that can occur. For example, a glacier melts and the albedo decreases which makes it warmer. It would get warmer because there is less light colors and more dark colors thus raising the temperature.
When the ocean heats up it is one of the greatest killers of coral reefs. It is bleaching the coral reefs which means that thousands of sea life are losing their habitats and are dying off.
Today for our class we had a guest speaker, Dr. Michael Edelstein. He has been teaching for a number of years and is an expert on Climate Change. Climate Change is something that is affecting us today and we as future teachers are going to need to know how to teach our future students about this topic. A key word I learned today when learning about climate change was sustainability which is how do we live our life so that other generations can live their lives the same way, in other words, how do we not destroy everything that we have on earth.
There are a lot of harmful chemicals in the environment that we do not even know about. One of these chemicals is found in our local water supply and is not commonly known to a lot of people, the chemical is PFOS. Harsh chemicals like this get into our water from us using different fossil fuels. In order to stop putting harsh chemicals into the environment, we should start using the sun as more of a resource. If we keep putting harsh chemicals into the environment eventually there will be nothing left on Earth, there will be no people. We live on a finite Earth, there is an end point.
Dr. Edelstein's presentation was based on a presentation done by Al Gore. Al Gore was Vice President of the United States and was later elected President only to not get the position because he did not have enough votes. He was the subject of two movies "The Inconvenient Truth" and "Inconvenient Sequel". He had three questions for Climate Change: Must we change? Can we change? and Will we change?.
Dr. Edelstein touched briefly on the Laws of Thermodynamics and how they relate to climate change. First Law of Thermodynamics- energy, and matter are not separable, matter is neither created nor destroyed, you can't create new matter you can only transform it from one form to another.
Second Law of Thermodynamics- the world moves from a state of order to a state of disorder
Dark colors absorb heat, light colors reflect heat this is also known as an albedo. This is directly related to a positive feedback loop which is an acceleration of an existing trait, the more that occurs the more that can occur. For example, a glacier melts and the albedo decreases which makes it warmer. It would get warmer because there is less light colors and more dark colors thus raising the temperature.
When the ocean heats up it is one of the greatest killers of coral reefs. It is bleaching the coral reefs which means that thousands of sea life are losing their habitats and are dying off.
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