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.

An Inconvenient Truth

After watching the documentary, I really realize that we, the human beings, are facing a very inconvenient and urgent truth --- global warming. I think it’s a serious issue and a tough problem that we need to deal with right now. Global warming basically means the increase of the Earth’s surface temperature. There are many consequences and influences of global warming such as the disappearances of rainforests, the broken of biodiversity, and the decreases in agricultural productivity. Noticing the importance of the issue, most national governments have signed and ratified the Kyoto Protocol in order to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gas which is the main cause of global warming.

As the most rapidly developing country, China has to burn great deal of fossil fuel in order to get energy for electricity and industry use. Since the greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide mainly come from the burning of fossil fuel, there are huge amount of greenhouse gas emissions in China.

What is China’s policies and response to global warming? As a responsible country, a lot of measures and actions are taken in China. First of all, we try to increase the efficiency of energy use by encouraging and facilitating the development of advanced science and technology. Secondly, we vigorously develop the low-carbon energy and renewable energy and improve the structure of energy use. Furthermore, we carry out forest planting, protect biodiversity, and try our best to preserve and maintain ecological balance. Moreover, we try to control the increase of population, to establish relevant criterions and laws, and to make people be aware of the importance and serious consequences of global warming.

At the end of the documentary, Mr. Al Gore said that it is the time for us to “wake up” now and we shouldn’t leave the issue to the future generations. He is right, actions should be taken right now before it is too late, not only for ourselves but also for future generations.