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.