Summary of lecture on 30th January

On 30th January, 3 distinguished lectures were invited to give us a speech so that we can further understand the effects of global warming and energy problems after watching the movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. And we have also seen that governments and scientists are trying to face the global warming scientifically.

Professor Andrew C. Palmer, who comes from Centre for offshore research & Engineering, Department of Civil Engineering, showed us his idea of technology and politics of carbon dioxide capture and storage. He concluded what actions should be taken for both government and individuals if climate change is happen, for example switch to alternative energy sources from coal to gas, nuclear, solar or biomass fuels, save the energy during our daily lives etc. His proposal of capture and store carbon dioxide is really interesting and attractive. He proposed that CO2 can be stored into depleted oil or gas field rather than dumped it into atmosphere, or liquid CO2 can be stored on the bottom of ocean by putting it into a membrane in order to prevent the biological effect, because CO2 could make ocean more acid. Professor finally concluded that carbon capture and storage is technically feasible, but whether it actually can happen depends on political will and the corporation between organizations and countries.

Dr Benjamin K. Sovacool, coming from Science & Technology Studies, tried to prove his point that economic, educational, legal, administrative and technical elements formed a seamless system, and STS is used to analyze how society and technology influent each other. He presented two cases, renewable power and electric vehicles, and analyzed the technical, economic, political and cultural challenges for new technologies. He finally summarized that, no technological system is truly self sustaining, and also showed us how powerful the STS method is when applying it to evaluate new technologies. The presentation is amazing because we become so realize that, to successfully applying a new technology, we need to consider much more beyond technical problem only.

The associate professor from Division of Environmental Science and Engineering, Dr Rajasekhar Bala, gave us a presentation about Assessment and Mitigation of Climate Change. He stated the potential consequences of enhanced global warming and options to deal with climate change, at last he also mentioned the duties of both government and our personal.

It is a long term issue to fight for global warming and we need to find suitable techniques to solve it; it is not a simple issue also to balance the global warming solutions and economic development. We need the cooperation between countries, as well as the understanding and support from the public.