The Lecture About Global Warming And Technology

The lecture was mainly about global warming and technology. From different points of view, the three lecturers talked about their thoughts and ideas on global warming or science and technology. The first speaker, Prof Andrew Palmer, focused on climate change. He first talked about how did greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide change the climate then he carried on to talk about the policies and technologies to capture and store carbon dioxide. The second speaker, Dr. Sovacool, talked about using STS ( Science & Technology Studies ) method to look at energy and technological problems. At first, he briefly introduce the STS methods to us. And then, he used two examples which are renewable energy and electric vehicles to show us that STS methods provide a useful lens to evaluate new technologies. The last speaker, Dr. Bala talked about the global concerns of global warming, he mentioned the evidences of global warming and greenhouse effects. He also talked about the consequences and effects of global warming. At last, he told us what we can do about global warming and provided some measures and suggestions to reduce the threat of global warming and climate change.

Rather than talking about global warming which the first and last speaker mainly focused on, the second speaker, Dr. Sovacool talked about something different. He mentioned technology can be viewed as part of a social system. He also evaluated technology with politics, economy, and social science approaches. I found it quite interesting since I could hardly think of politics, economy or social science when we talked about technology. I always regarded technology as applications of sciences. In my opinion, science was about why certain things happened and technology was about how they had happened and what could we make use of. Though sometimes I could relate technology to economy, it is still very new and interesting to me to consider technology as a part of social science rather than hard science.

In the speeches of Prof. Palmer and Dr. Bala, they both mentioned the carbon dioxide capture from the atmosphere and Prof. Palmer furthermore talked about the storage of liquid carbon dioxide under the sea. I think, it requires very advanced technology and will encounter many problems when actually implement this method, for example, it’s not that easy to send carbon dioxide deep down under the sea without leak and to make them stable in terms of liquid. Yet, it’s still a quite clever idea to solve global warming.