Summary of each Lecturer presentation

Andrew C. Palmer, Dr Benjamin K. Sovacool and Rajasekhar Bala presented issues relating to global warming and steps taken to fight against global warming. In general, global warming is becoming more severe due to massive amount of carbon dioxide that is in the atmosphere.

Professor Andrew C. Palmer is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering, a Fellow of the Institution of Civil Engineers, and a Chartered Engineer. He discussed about carbon dioxide emission and how its emission quatity has grown over the years and in the past 20 years it has increased exponentially, to the extent that 200 tonnes of carbon dioxide is being dumped every second. Carbon dioxide emission has to be reduced to 500 parts per million and has to be kept at that level if not the consequences will be great.

One of the way to tackle this issue is by carbon dioxide capture and storage option. The gas will be captured from factories, industries, vehicles and then all the captured carbon dioxide will be pumped into the ocean. In the long run this can be troublesome as carbon dioxide will diffuse into the ocean and it will be too acidic resulting a in biological effect on marine life as well as ours. Therefore one of his colleagues have came up with an idea to store all the liquid carbon dioxide in a membrane called 'sausage'. Another way to deal with the problem was to scatter sulphate particles into the atmosphere, thereby reducing the amount of infra radiation from the Sun to Earth, this will help to keep the Earth surface temperature cooler. This is an efficient method but is very costly to implement unless there is involvement and participation by developed and developing countries.

The second speaker, Dr. Benjamin K. Sovacool from Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. His main point was using STS to solve energy and technological problems. Then he presented two case studies, the first one on Renewable Power and the second case on Electrical Vehicles. Using both the cases he gave us an analysised view of the two cases which showed us that technology can succeed but sometime it is the society which fails them. Other factors which act like barrier are economical cost, political, regulatory, cultural and society behaviour. He ended his presentation by concluding how STS methods provide a useful lens to evaluate new technologies. This method make people think about technology, the social science way.

The final speaker was, Associate Professor Rajasekhar Bala, Division of Environmental Science & Engineering. He addressed the factors for global warming, steps the government can take and have been doing and what we as an individual can do to help reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases emission. He informed us why global warming is taking place and provided evidence that global warming is taking place. Like the report by IPCC made in 2007, rise in global surface temperature, 13 warmest years since 1990, Artic temperature have risen twice as fast and land glaciers which are melting. The potential consequences of enhanced global warming are tremedously huge as lots of damage would be done and may take many years before the damage can be healed.

From the three presentation, what I found interesting was that global warming is not a battle that can be fought over easily. It is like a never ending war between us, humans, and global warming. Many people are working on this issue coming up with new ideas and way to reduce greenhouse gas emission, storage of greenhouse gas, to reduce the intensity of the infra radiation that is coming from the Sun to the Earth, working on renewable energy which is sustaniable and cost effective. There are many such lone 'warriors' or 'clans' around the world trying to do that to save the Earth. This can only happened and take place worldwide if governments of different countries, developed and developing get together, put aside economic gains and benefits for themselves or their country aside and attend to the bigger problem.