Climate Change

The book I read to research this post was Climate Change A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin which is a very good book that I bought from kindle. Climate change consists of various cycles on the Earth one of which is the ice ages of the last 25 million years. In these ice sheets form in America, Asia and Europe and cover once temperate regions. There is also global warming where the Earth a cycle of warming up and cooling. these are dictated by convection flow between the various regions. It is estimated that currently 2-3 % of the worlds GDP would cover existing damage repair but this rises to over 20 % if tackled in the middle of the century. One thing is of course dependence of fossil fuels which cause global warming and the greenhouse effect with increasing the carbon dioxide increasing the tempertaure. There is also CFC’s that deplete ozone and increase the solar radiation getting through the atmosphere. There is also the depletion of the ice caps caused by warming that raises sealevels flooding land. With a rising population less and less resources is being spread more and more people. People in poor countries want the latest standards of living which can further make pollution worse. This book is around 200 pages so is a decent loength. It is interesting and I do recommend it.

Evolution Of Growing Electricity Markets

The book I read to research this post was Evolution Of Growing Electricity Markets by Various Authors which is an excellent book that I read at http://safaribooksonline.com. This book is about the various electricity generating boards around the world roughly since the 90’s. Two major developments in that time have been the emphasis on global warming and deregulation in many countries where often the boards have been privatized and competition from competing companies has been encouraged. With the former many countries like Britain have decided they are going to focus more on atomic power which doesn’t cause global warming but does have risks which could be far worse. In the wake of the Fukishama power station in Japan being badly damaged by an earthquake and tsunami many countries like Germany and Belgium have decided they will faze out nuclear power for electricity production. In the case of Germany many of the older ones have been closed and they are planning on closing all by 2022. In Japan only 2 out of 50 nuclear reactors are still being used. In the wake of the  nuclear leak they had a problem in that they didn’t have enough electricity generated in the Tokyo to satisfy demand. In other regions there was plenty of power but it had to be converted between 60 HZ and 50 HZ which is a complicated process and there were only a limited number of sub-stations able to do this. Many had to go without electricity. Japan still faces a dilemma that if they don’t replace the nuclear power station with some other form of electricity generation soon it will have an adverse effect on the economy. They have plans to buy electricity from the United States but laying supply lines could take time. Australia has a bit of a similar dilemma in that they can link up the various states with in their country to guarantee supply in times of high energy use. Australia only has a sparse and fairly small population and laying a supply from one state to another is very expensive given the amounts of electricity involved. This is a really interesting book which is around 880 pages so is quite substantial. I thoroughly enjoyed reading and definitely would recommend it. The book takes the subject on a country by country basis and is absolutely loaded with information. It is a must read.

 

Global Warming

The book I read to research this post was Global Warming A Very Short Introduction by Mark Maslin which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. This book is around 150 pages but is a good introduction to the subject. 800 million people go to bed hungry every night and as well as the challenge of Global Warming this is interlocked with Global Poverty. The Chinese are bringing a new power station online every 4 days and almost all developing countries are rapidly becoming industrialized. With this industrialization they are using coal and oil technologies which may represent a nightmare scenario of Global Warming going from bad to worse. If there was no carbon dioxide in the atmosphere the Earth’s temperature would be at least 35 degrees centigrade less so it does a valuable job.However if there is too much carbon dioxide it threatens to start a pattern of the Earth continually warming up and nobodies how far it’s liable to go. There is ocean currents in the Gulf Stream which ensure Europe has relatively mild weather and these currents could change course causing Europe to have more extreme weather. There are huge amounts of carbon dioxide locked up in the oceans but this is readily transferable to the atmosphere. At one time scientists thought the oceans would absorb any excess carbon dioxide and thought that would solve the problem. There are huge amounts of methane frozen on the seabed of deep oceans that can be released as the oceans warm up causing tsunamis & increasing global warming still further. At the moment the countries on the Pacific Rim are quite prepared for tsunamis but if methane is released almost anywhere with an ocean is at risk.