Peer review of Shao Tu

Generally speaking, my partner has done quite a good job in summarizing as well as extension. These indicate a thorough understanding of the whole article and his further research.

The essay starts with a conclusion of the reading material and goes straight to the point. At the end of the first paragraph, the theme statement is put forward that ecosystem and biodiversity are our two weapons to fight against global warming, and we should change the way we perceive the nature.

Transition sentence is used at the beginning of the next two paragraphs, which explain the two points respectively in details. Concrete statistics are given out here, like '.74º rises in the temperature per 100 years', which is quite convincing. What impresses me most is his discussion on human beings 'selfishness', and the related education problems which are normally ignored by others. In addition, an irony is that nowadays, people even spend more money on weapons which may do long term unrestorable destruction on our environment!

The whole essay is structured well as the APA style is used, and some expressions are quite accurate. Still some improvement should be made in the reference part. Meanwhile, a title is quite needed to highlight author's opinion and capture readers' interest.

Summary

I really feel I gained a lot from the lectures about the climate change, especially from the second lecture. So, I am going to mainly summarize the second lecture.
It basically gives us an overview of the political and social approaches to the climate change problems, which is not that scary as the daunting statistics but teaches us something practical and doable by the individuals, like ourselves live in this world.
The first part of the lecture gives us an overview of the climate change conundrum, both in a historical and contemporary perspective. In the past or maybe just a few decades before, the leading emitters in the world are predominated by the western countries, that is, developed countries, such as the United States and countries in Europe. However, in today’s context, companying the soaring of the eastern countries, more and more countries especially those in Asia are gaining more weight in the affairs of carbon emissions and climate change. China has outran the United States to be the world’s largest carbon emitter; India will also soon catch up with its huge economy and fast industrializing pace. If other countries like Malaysia, Indonesia in Asia keep developing economy without properly taking care of the environmental issues, Asia would soon be dominating in carbon emission. Nonetheless, the carbon emission per capita in developed world is still considerably high than that in developing world.
Secondly, we need strong governmental or institutional approaches to tackle this problem. The government can invest in clean energy; transform the energy structure, increasing the clean energy portion; Tax the roads or vehicles to control the numbers of cars, or like Mexico City where rules that there is a particular day in a week on which you cannot drive your cars; government can also extend the responsibility of the producers on their products as European Union does.
Lastly, it comes to the individual responsibility. Although maybe one’s efforts seem quite minor in combating climate change, as long as we can do it together, it actually a very powerful force to fight the climate change. We can choose to eat less meat or eat meat that is home-grown, since meat is actually very carbon intensive and by eating home-grown food, we can decrease the carbon emission caused by the transportations in carrying those meat from far abroad.
To conclude, the climate change issue has been a problem we have to focus on and we can do much to help. If everyone can do a small part, we are absolutely able to achieve the goal of containing the climate change in an acceptable range.

LECTURE SUMMARY

In the lectures, the two professors stated respectively upon the present phenomena of global climate change and specific and practical method for ordinary individuals to contribute to the prevention of the warming process. The details and summaries are listed as follows.

Part I:

To begin with, professor Liong define what is actually called “climate change”, it is a concept that ought to be distinguished from the phrase “weather forecasting”, and moreover, predicting the weather change even in only one week is difficult. Therefore, what is supposed to be talked about is a long term average.

Furthermore, the climate change is also known as global warming, and such warming process is contributed by the green house gas in the atmosphere which behaves like an umbrella shading the earth and preventing the solar energy from radiating out to the space. With the layer getting thicker, the earth will get warmer. And it can be perfectly proved that the warming it forced by human activities instead of natural forces while making comparison between them. Trough the graphs, it can be obtained that the temperature variation has very close connection with the emission of carbon dioxide.

Then, Liong focused on IPCC-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the observations and predictions made by them. One system useful is the climate model which has two branches called GCM and RCM (RCM is able to represent the observed patterns more closely), standing for global and region separately. They can efficiently display and analysis the climate variation, but the fact which cannot be denied is that temperature anomaly projected by different GCMs is also varying, with the highest presenting a 5-degree increment which will severe consequence in a long term. Finally, another system named WRF-Weather Research and Forecast Model is introduced, indicating that a weather change in one region can have a very obvious influence in its neighborhood (take Singapore and Vietnam as an instance). And the impact studying is very important in this case.

Part II:

In this lecture, professor discussed mainly about institutional and political solutions confronting the climate change.

At first, the environmental problems are stated. The largest proportion of green house emission is taken by the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels and the process of deforestation, worse still, the emission is still increasing in most of the countries. And according the survey, the higher the individual income, the larger amount of the emission.

There are a lot of things that the institution can to contribute to the climate stabilization covering the range from energy supply, transportation system improvement, environmentally-friendly buildings, agriculture and forestry, then to the waste management.

Moreover, ordinary individuals can also participate to improve the living environment. As the climate stabilization includes sustainable electricity, food, homes and technology, it is then effective to apply renewable energy and promote energy efficiency. Furthermore, some sustainable technologies can also be supported by individual companies, such as making investment and purchasing new energy. Upon the daily issue on food, making it sustainable can help to deduce the energy consume by agriculture and extra gas emission from the fossil fuel and deforestation. It can simply be eased by changing our food habits. Then, cutting the energy consumption at home is contributive as well.

To sum up this part, the roots of these climate crises are in our individual behaviors, and inversely, it is through the corporation that we constitute that we can truly make a difference.

Above all, even though these two lectures are talking about different aspects of the environment and the climate, they are undoubtedly necessary and interdependent. To save our earth, we need not only the sense of crisis, but also the confidence and solutions to make improvements. This is what these two professors have brought to us, far beyond the knowledge itself.

Shao Tu's Summary of the last Friday lecture: Brief introduction to climate change &modeling

Given by professor Liong Shie-Yui and his climate team, i think the lecture, named after 'Brief Introduction to climate change', is quite exact, convincing, and inspiring.

At the beginning of the lecture, a scientific definition of climate was given out by Professor Liong, that it is an average of weather over a long time. More details were followed to illustrate the phenomenon of global warming and how it is related to human activity. Two side by side line charts were used here to prove that the global warming is really happening and it is closely related to our human beings.

After this, a method called SRES Scenarios was introduced to help give out a reasonable assumption of what the future climate would look like. Then a few slides were used to explain the IPCC, an organization from which all the data used came from. Furthermore, a quite impressing opinion was pointed out here that the increase in temperature and rising of sea level were expected even after achieving stabilization of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. This indicates that only reducing the emission is not enough, more serious problems were waiting for us.

Lastly, GCM and RCM were introduced as two powerful models to help us analyze the climate change. Still data together with graphs were used to illustrate these two models. Conclusions were drawn that the first hand coarse information from Global Climate Model(GCM) might be not adequate for hydrological models, therefore the downscaling approaches are needed to limit the uncertainties. Anyway, this conclusion itself may seem useless for most of us, but on the other hand it showed us how those scientific data came out and made them for convincing.

As a scientist, large amount of data and graphs were used throughout professor Liong Shie-Yun's lecture, those professional terms and definitions may make it confusing and hard to understand. But once you think it over, you can find its logicality and accuracy, so that you will learn something from it and get inspired by the power of science.

Welcome~~~

Hi!
Happy to meet you here! It is amazing we are from so different places far apart but still be able to meet in a small tutorial room in this country called Singapore, isn't it? Hopefully we are going to have a semester-long study together and possibly life-long friendship~
So, let's work together and have fun!