Its a busy day so I don't have much time to post, but I thought I'd get a few thoughts up. First off Thanxmas went well. It was great seeing Kevin and Brandon, my brothers and having the whole family home at my parent's place agan. We played lots of games, ate until sick, and basically caught up on the last year. The whole vacation was spent eating and rolling dice until the wee hours of the morning of which I'm still feeling the rampant tiredness.
I have my prelim oral exam on wensday. This is going to be it. The day I find out if I am going to continue my graduate work or if I'm going to be going home with a masters. I'm not totally ready for it so posting the next day or so will be short.
Two things I did want to remark on are films I saw.
1. What killed the electric car.
This was an excelent film. It dosen't get overly preachy and dosen't fall into the trap these sort of films often do of stating some wild conspiarcy then spending the rest of the film doing little to support it. The film does give a lot of good info about the electric car and some very very odd practices GM undertook in their actions to promote and sell the car. I highly recomend it.
2. An Inconvient Truth.
Al Gore is a bore. This is more and a convient rhyme. Listening to him lecture for an hour put me to sleep, then I woke up, then I passed out again. I'm sure all those sleepless nights had something to do with it, but his droning voice sure didn't help. The content of the film was somewhat cliped to show his point. This is seen most readily in the opening 10 minutes of the film ( a part I was awake for). Al puts up a jagged line chart on his presentation, which shows the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Its obviously on the rise. So far the presentation is looking promising. He then puts up two charts one showing the level of CO2 and the other showing temperature. This chart goes back 600,000 years and was produced from analysis of ice core samples. The science looks good (what little they show of it) and there is a good corelation between the temperature fluxuations and the CO2 level. Both seem to have big raises and drops about every 50K years. Now he shows the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere and wow its off the chart. He then shows projected CO2 levels if things continue as they are for the next decade and it just sky rockets.
Now this is all well and good but what is he not showing us?
Maybe you guessed it, the current temperature!
He puts up a new slide showing the temperature for the last 100 years or so and we do have the highest temperature now in all that time, but how does that relate to the 600K years natural raises and falls in temperature???
This is where the presentation fell apart for me. If you are going to make a big deal about the CO2 levels and are trying to make a concrete corelation between the CO2 level and the temperature, you need to show that this massive jump in CO2 had an equally massive jump in temperature. Well he can't because it hasn't.
Is Global warming true?
Yes, we've gone up a few degrees in the last century. The earth is getting warmer.
Is this out of wack with the natural Rises and Falls the earth goes through? Not at all. In order to show this it would take many years of data from a number of sources or a real corelation between some sort of human cause of polution and the rise in temperature.
In short the film is more style than substance and more of a propogande peice than a true representation of the issue.
I have my prelim oral exam on wensday. This is going to be it. The day I find out if I am going to continue my graduate work or if I'm going to be going home with a masters. I'm not totally ready for it so posting the next day or so will be short.
Two things I did want to remark on are films I saw.
1. What killed the electric car.
This was an excelent film. It dosen't get overly preachy and dosen't fall into the trap these sort of films often do of stating some wild conspiarcy then spending the rest of the film doing little to support it. The film does give a lot of good info about the electric car and some very very odd practices GM undertook in their actions to promote and sell the car. I highly recomend it.
2. An Inconvient Truth.
Al Gore is a bore. This is more and a convient rhyme. Listening to him lecture for an hour put me to sleep, then I woke up, then I passed out again. I'm sure all those sleepless nights had something to do with it, but his droning voice sure didn't help. The content of the film was somewhat cliped to show his point. This is seen most readily in the opening 10 minutes of the film ( a part I was awake for). Al puts up a jagged line chart on his presentation, which shows the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Its obviously on the rise. So far the presentation is looking promising. He then puts up two charts one showing the level of CO2 and the other showing temperature. This chart goes back 600,000 years and was produced from analysis of ice core samples. The science looks good (what little they show of it) and there is a good corelation between the temperature fluxuations and the CO2 level. Both seem to have big raises and drops about every 50K years. Now he shows the current level of CO2 in the atmosphere and wow its off the chart. He then shows projected CO2 levels if things continue as they are for the next decade and it just sky rockets.
Now this is all well and good but what is he not showing us?
Maybe you guessed it, the current temperature!
He puts up a new slide showing the temperature for the last 100 years or so and we do have the highest temperature now in all that time, but how does that relate to the 600K years natural raises and falls in temperature???
This is where the presentation fell apart for me. If you are going to make a big deal about the CO2 levels and are trying to make a concrete corelation between the CO2 level and the temperature, you need to show that this massive jump in CO2 had an equally massive jump in temperature. Well he can't because it hasn't.
Is Global warming true?
Yes, we've gone up a few degrees in the last century. The earth is getting warmer.
Is this out of wack with the natural Rises and Falls the earth goes through? Not at all. In order to show this it would take many years of data from a number of sources or a real corelation between some sort of human cause of polution and the rise in temperature.
In short the film is more style than substance and more of a propogande peice than a true representation of the issue.
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