Summary on Jan 3oth

This lecture is mainly about the global warming and the emission of green-house gas. As we know, global warming is not a simply environmental problem. In fact, there are a number of people existed who are not believing what scientists are saying. Based on this background, three lecturers spread this topic in different parts, to analyze this problem through different angles.
The first lecturer, Prof. Andrew Palmer, from Civil engineering, showed us global warming is an indisputable problem and proposed several methods to deal with this problem. In his first part, he showed that green house gas is coming from the heat engine like car, and burning fossil fuels. His main concept is to fix the carbon dioxide gas into another form. It can be stored CO2 into certain containers made by high technology, and then remove them to a suitable location. Most possible spot is the bottom of Deep Ocean. Maybe outer space is possible too.
In the end, professor also left some questions for us to think, like whether the idea of storing CO2 is practical possible or not.
The second lecturer, Dr. Sowacool is from Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. As a social scientist, he mainly talked something about the relationship between public policy and global warming. He pointed out that sometimes our technology is able to solve global warming ideal, if some ideas like renewable energy and electric car can be used largely. However, the fact is opposite; the policies made by the government sometimes are aimed to protect some groups’ interest which may contribute a lot of waste gas into the atmosphere.

The last presenter, Rajasekhar Bala, showed us some serious effects of global warming and gave other methods to solve this crisis. For example, he stressed the clash between large population and the limited natural resources. If human want to reduce the effect of global warming, he has to control human population to reduce the need for natural resources and the pollution to the environment.

From this lecture, I have realized that technology is improving, but the policy and the consciousness of protection environment needs to be improved at the time.