Socities psychology

The video “The Story of Stuff” gives a lot of information on what goes through the process of making a consumer item like an ipod for example. It gives informative details on how it starts from the Earth, to the factories where it is made, to the consumer’s shopping building, then to their home, and finally to the disposal of that item that they have bought. It’s a through process that takes much of the Earth’s natural resources and results in something that just creates more garbage. What Allen D. Kanner and Mary E. Gomes describe in their essay, “The All-Consuming Self” is how we, as Americans, are one of the top world consumers and have actually admitted to not stopping our world consumption. They say that the companies have found ways that trick our mind into buying their product. They create images that attract the viewer and, according to Kanner and Gomes, “…advertisers need to create a false image of the ideal consumer, one which people will wish to emulate.”

Companies have found ways to sell their product without changing much. All they do differently is convince the viewer that they are watching someone who has made a better life for themselves, that is really just a false life, just by buying that companies product. The commercials make the viewer think that they need this product and that if they don’t get it, they will never be successful. It has become more than some marketing trick and is now a way of life. According to both Kanner and Gomes, “According to Business Week, the average American is exposed to about three thousand ads a day.” Three thousand ads a day they say is what we view daily and what companies shove into our faces to buy their product. It’s become something more than just selling a product but now has actually become a way of life because of how much advertising has changed us as a society.

Kanner, Allen D., and Mary E. Gomes. The All-Consuming Self.

A Background In A Photo

The world is changing and we aren’t caring enough on what is happening. This photo by amazing photographer Ryan Southen is from his collection called “Southen’s Photostream” shows just the amount of how much we really care about our planet. In the photo, clearly shown is a gym with people working out. In the background of the photo is a whole city with lights and smoke coming from air conditioners and other places in the area. It’s showing us how detached to we are from our world. We care too much on how we look and how we are around other people that we completely forget the impact we are causing on the planet at the same time. It’s a shocking, but true realization that needs to be noticed.

Leon Kolankiewicz said in the video “Immigration Numbers Rise – Environmental Suffers” that “the impact of the American growth was much greater because of our much higher levels of precapica consumption and technology.” He was saying that we, Americans, consume more resources than the rest of the whole world. We strive to use what resources we have to look our best and it’s what we use that is what we should be conserving, natural resources. As shown in the picture, we’d rather use lights, air conditioning, plastic bikes and metal dumbbells to gain a better look than just run outside, enjoy the fresh air, and not use any resources. It’s our addition to the Earth that is the main problem.

While I do believe in living a good life and having a nice look, it’s the Earth who needs the better look now. We are ruining our planet’s surface with unnecessary building. A company competes with other companies by creating stores or places that other stores down the street do the same thing. It’s an unnecessary waste of materials taken from this Earth. The only way to stop all this waste on places like extra gyms, food markets, malls, and stores is to place a ban on stores that sell the same thing in another store in the same city. The way to make sure this works is to keep the older store, get rid of the new one and make a park out of the empty space, saving another part of mother earth. It’s how I believe cities should be made.

(In the video quote, Leon spoke a work that I couldn't figure out how to spell. Precapica was what I thought he said.)

Photo:
Urban Lifestyle:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/southen/2184781085/in/photostream/
Immigration Numbers Rise – Environmental Suffers:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XW-NtQr89u4&fmt=18

In Class Blog

What some people see that most scientists don’t is that it’s not our actions that are the cause for global warming, but instead immigration and the amount of people living on this planet. Leon Kolonkiewicz, a wildlife biologist and environmental planner, has been studying the ways human population is having an effect on the planet’s ecosystem and environment. He says in the video “Immigration Numbers Rise – Environmental Suffers” that “if you look at the oil imports, I can safely say that we wouldn’t even need any oil from the turbulent middle east if it weren’t for the 100 million people we’ve added since 1970.” Leon also suggests that it’s the population growth that is causing the increases in the amounts of carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases emissions. He is similar to Mark Maslin in that his information on carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions by stating how it’s our fault, it’s our problem, and it’s our actions that have caused global warming. While I do believe Mark Maslin’s idea of slowing down carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases emissions, I believe more in what Leon is saying. It is the increase in population that has caused this world to become overpopulated and low on resources. I do suggest that we control the amount of growth population by limiting families to two children so that families do not overpopulate the world. It can be enforced by keeping yearly track of families and legalizing abortions to people who break that rule. It’s an effective way that would make sure the population growth is controlled.

Suburbia

The suburban lifestyle has changed drastically from when they were first really introduced in the 1950’s. They first started appearing after World War II when all of the soldier’s came home from the war. As shown in the video “1950’s”, the American Dream for everyone was to settle down in a nice suburban lifestyle and have a good job with a nice family. It was the year where people were starting to adjust to a life after the war and move on. Brand new inventions emerged like the plastic bag, microwave, and barcodes. Starting in 1950 and lasting until 1964, there was a boom in the increase of babies countrywide. It was a time where people were having babies right after the war. It became the era called the “Baby Boom” era. It also shows at the end how while the white folks were living perfect lives, the blacks were being abused and tortured. It’s a great representation of how the 1950’s was the start of the change of the country.

The video “Radiant City: Suburban Landscape” describes the way people got things back in the early days and up until now. People who built the cities decided to place everyday needs like gas and food stores far apart from each other. This was a way for people to keep buying gas and traveling around their suburban lives. This is also a huge contributor to global warming. Forcing people to travel from one place to the next just makes them use gas more and more. This resulted in more emissions of carbon dioxide, resulting in more greenhouse gases which is not at all what people were expecting back in the 1950’s when they first thought of this idea.

The other video, “Gangs and White Flight” created a huge contribution to global warming. In the video, they talk about how whites were first adjusting to the addition of black residents. They didn’t like how they were moving in and going to their schools so some had decided to take action. White gangs were created in response to their new residents. A gang called the Spook Hunters attacked black residents. This resulted in violent crimes and blacks to create their own gangs in retaliation. Having black gangs scared most of the white residents in the suburban area, causing them to move farther away. This forced the white’s to build new houses, use more supplies and create a whole new settlement away from the blacks. Creating a new city just because they were scared of the blacks was a dumb idea for the whites. They wasted tons of resources to restart their community and this resulted in problems that we face today like global warming.

Work Cited:
Racism Divides the Working Class - Gangs and White Flight:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVHMJz0IYQM
Radiant City: Suburban Landscape:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCeWCVWZbdo&feature=fvw
1950's:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JhKhA2w4cXs&feature=related

In-Class Assignment / Nightly Blog Assignment

Dear Person,

I understand that you choose not to believe global warming exists and I respect that opinion. What you do not know is the consequences of global warming and how what you believe in is actually false. What your parents do as CEO’s for a major oil company is destroying our planet and needs to stop. The reason you should believe me is because of what you are not seeing and what is hurting the planet daily. Increasing temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are the most dangerous to come from global warming.

The increasing temperature affects the world the most. With increasing temperature, the polar ice caps would melt, causing global water increases, flooding coastal cities and destroying them tell they are completely underwater. The increase would also affect the amount of rain dry places like deserts receive yearly and the amount of rain that places in wetter areas receive. Now, you might be saying how stupid this all sounds and how it could never happen. Well, to your surprise, all of what I have said already has happened, multiple times. Scientists have known this information by studying past glacial patterns and the air trapped in bubbles in the glacier. With this data, scientists have predicted the weather going back hundreds of thousands of years and have been able to predict future weather patterns using this same data. By going only a few decades in the future, predictions put our Earth’s temperature far higher than it ever was before, which scientists have deemed the name, global warming.

Now that you know about the increasing temperatures, I believe it’s a good time to talk about carbon dioxide increases. With ever car that is turned on, machines that are being used, factories that emit smoke, and destruction of forests for bigger homes, we are creating a build up of global carbon dioxide emission. Each day we give out tons and tons of carbon dioxide, much more that we have ever given in the past few hundred years only due to our recent advancements in technology that give off carbon dioxide, like oil companies and their drills. The cause for all of those increasing temperatures I’ve told you about is because of carbon dioxide emissions we, as a group worldwide, put out. It’s the biggest cause of global warming and it needs to be stopped, starting with factories and companies run by people like your father.
Sure, you could be reading all of this and be like, “Why am I reading all of this?”. Well, it’s to make sure that you start believing that global warming does exist and is a serious problem. Unlike disbelievers who give bad reasons to their ideas, there is actual proof to global warming. Those disbelievers claim that scientists have altered data to make global warming seem worse than it really is. My question to those who claim that is “Why would they change something that would affect the whole world?” It doesn’t make sense why hundreds of scientists would purposely fake data to get a point across.

Another claim that people who don’t think global warming exists is that it’s not our fault at all, but instead the sun’s fault. How does the sun affect the Earth other than giving us light, heat, and solar power? Sure, the sun gives off heat that builds up in the atmosphere but that’s because of our carbon dioxide emission that blocks the heat from leaving. Only recently, with increases of carbon dioxide emission has global warming and climate change gotten worse like a fruit that is left out for too long because it’s not attended to before it rots. Only we are to blame for our future demise.
People like Dr. Tim Ball who claims global warming doesn’t exist are to blame for all of the skeptic’s beliefs. Political people who have power that can change people’s opinions are a big problem. They try to counteract the truth with false facts that politicians like Al Gore have already proven true. It’s a hard thing to believe that people would think global warming is false but they are wrong and this is what you, as a skeptic, need to know or else it will definitely be people like you who are the cause for the end of the world through global warming.

Your Informative Friend,
--Eric Bobrow

Maslin, Mark. Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press Inc, 2004.

My View of Nature

My view of nature has only changed a little throughout my life. Only recently, with the increasing information on global warming and the damage it’s doing, has caused me to change how I live my life. It has, though, significantly, changed how I view nature. When reading the third chapter of Mark Maslin book and how people determine the future, I’ve realized that I believe, according to Maslin, in the myth of “Nature perverse/tolerant”.

I believe in that myth because I do believe that even though global warming could be the end to the Earth, I also believe in that we have the ability to change the future. There is no way for a “Nature benign” myth to be true when the proof is appearing every day in the world. I do think that the myth of “Nature ephemeral” is similar to what I believe in and that with the slightest change; the world could be placed into destruction. I must say that the myth of “Nature capricious” is wrong in that with today’s technology, we have the ability to predict the weather for weeks ahead, proving that nature is predictable, making this myth wrong.

We can make sure that global warming is at least slowed down until we find a solution to bring the Earth back to the way it was. Also continuing with the third chapter, I’ve discovered that I fit in the group of a Heirarchist of human nature. I believe in a world where everyone and thing is in an organized and civil manner, creating a peaceful and ordered world. Over time, though, I know that with the ever changing world, me fitting into the Heirarchist group would not change. As the world is becoming ever so different with climate change and increasing weather problems, a civil order seems like a good idea at times of crisis that the world may face in the future.

Masslin, Mark. Global Warming A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford
University Press Inc, 2004.

Reviewing the Websites

The first website contains a very scary and disturbing image if climate change cannot be stopped or even slowed down. I find it frightening that it’s our doing that what might soon cause what is going on in the image. The other website is much more detailed and informative than having just an image. I like how it gives people free information on tons of global warming issues and studies. It’s also very good at showing how much they care by the amount of stuff registered users are given and how much they give out even without registering to their website. Overall, I prefer the second website more than the first one because it’s much more detailed and gives me a better idea of what global warming is doing than just an image of a sunken Manhattan.

Scientific Explination for Global Warming

Climate Change is a very complex, continuous flow of changes in the Earth that in effect, cause global warming to occur. Only in the recent hundred years has global warming been more effective than ever, creating worldwide changes, and affecting everyone. The Earth gets its heat from the sun’s rays that bounce off the planet, warming up the Earth as they go. Only recently when factories began to emit gases that would make the atmosphere trap more of the sun’s rays, eventually heating up the ocean’s temperatures. According to Al Gore, if the ocean’s temperatures heat up, then the warm water surrounding the polar ice caps, Greenland and Antarctica, would eventually over a short period of time, melt. (An Inconvenient Truth) This, in result, would cause rising sea levels, sinking cities that border the coasts from New York City, NY to Calcutta, India, and causing worldwide damage.
Those gases that the factories released are deadly chemicals called carbon dioxide or CO2. Carbon dioxide is one of the main reasons that the climate is changing so fast. Charts given in Global Warming: A Very Short Introduction help give people the idea of just how much we as a community change the environment with our carbon dioxide emissions. (Mark Masslin) In just two-hundred years we have raised carbon dioxide concentration has increased from about 280 to 360 in our planet’s ice.
It’s not just in the polar ice caps that the heat increase is affecting. Increased weather patterns and unusual weather storms are occurring more and more often. Hurricane’s are becoming more and more deadly because they are created from the warm ocean and hot temperature the water is. Because the water is rising, the stronger the hurricane’s become, one of the worst actually back in 2005 in New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina. Going back to the carbon dioxide increases, over the past few years, the temperature of the world has been the hottest on record, indicating that it’s not just some natural phenomenon that Mother Nature is creating but something that our society has created. The hot temperature creates a problem for dry countries. With their always decreasing water supply, the increased heat evaporates whatever is remaining for those countries, causing sever drought and even death.
Most of these problems, though, could have been resolved years ago when Congress was given the option to tax people’s carbon emission. Al Gore called it the Carbon Tax and had tried to pass the tax back in the 1970s but failed get it to go through Congress. (An Inconvenient Truth) If people are taxed for how much carbon and greenhouse gases they use, then people assumed that the companies would stop creating so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. There are many scientific explanations for why the Earth’s climate changes so much, but the most significant reason has to be our lack of attention to the problem. It’s our fault that the planet’s temperature is heating up and we’re waiting until these past few years to actually try to solve the problem. “The United States alone is responsible for 30.3 percent of global warming.” (An Inconvenient Truth) Al Gore mentions in his documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. There is not enough time to stop global warming but still enough to slow it down to find a way to fix what has already been done to the planet.

An Inconvenient Truth. Dir. Al Gore. Paramount Vantage, 2006.

Masslin, Mark. GW: AVSI. Oxford, EN. OVP, 2004

The Climate of Man - 1 Summary

Over the years, the Alaskan village of Shishmaref, an Inupiat village, has been drastically changing due to constant changes in the environment caused by increasing temperatures that have actually forced the people to relocate their village, costing an estimated one hundred and eighty million dollars. President Jimmy Carter first took drastic measures to start a climate study after findings of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA’s Godard Institute for Space Studies. Members of the Charney panel tried to find mistakes in their climate studies so to say the Carbon Dioxide had no effect on the global temperature but were left with unsatisfying results. Since the time the Carney panel reported on their studies, many other reports and books were written, explaining the problems with the global temperature and how it’s hurting the Earth, when at this same time, carbon-dioxide emissions have increased to seven billion metric tons, a whopping two million more from the previous five million metric tons. The shocking results of the FORTRAN-generated figures have shown that to people’s unknowing knowledge, “the Arctic is melting.”

Kolbert, Elizabeth. The Climate of Man – 1. The New Yorker, NY. TNY, 2005.

Trenches in the ground formed by melted, underground ice, had formed trees that grew at odd angles, making people in the area call them “drunken trees”, due to their awkward shape. Permafrost in Alaska is soil that has a temperature below the freezing point for a minimum of two years and scientists in Alaska have found out that most permafrost dates back to when the last glacial cycle occurred. Roads in Alaska weren’t just for driving but instead mostly used for Alaskan oil, a main source of income for the state. Studies have shown that the farther one travels down in the ice, the warmer the temperatures of permafrost is. Recently, scientists that have studied permafrost temperatures have discovered that the temperature of permafrost in Alaska has dropped and now has its coldest spot now near the middle, instead of being at the top, which proves that as the permafrost temperature drops, the climate is getting hotter. This is a growing problem due to the face that permafrost has become a place for carbon to be held and stored so that it isn’t released, but with the increasing temperatures, the permafrost temperature starts to decrease, causing the carbon being stored to be released, along with carbon dioxide or methane which has been proven to cause more damage to the environment that regular carbon. A group of American geophysicists tried to do some experiments by locking their ship on a piece of deep ice and do some experiments while on the ice but were unable when the ice peace they were planning to lodge their ship on for years was too thin to even have the ship stick in place. In the Arctic, there has been recording two types of ice that has formed, seasonal ice, which has been known only to be seen in the winter since it melts due to the heat in the summer, and perennial ice which is visible and able to be studied throughout the year in the Arctic. Back in 1979, NASA’s satellite measured the amount of perennial sea ice that was present in the Arctic sea during that time, which was recorded to be about 1.7 billion acres. Since then, NASA has run some more satellite measures that discovered that over only a few decades, the amount of ice in the perennial sea has minimized by nearly two hundred an fifty million acres. Donald Perovich studies how the sun’s projected radiation is affecting the Earth’s sea ice by using a spectroradiometer which keeps monitoring the conditions on ice’s movement and measures the incident light by being faced toward the sun. When faced down to the planet, the spectroradiometer is able to measure the amount of reflected light that the Earth is producing which forms an amount scientists call an albedo. An albedo measures the amount of light on a surface; a white surface has an albedo of 1.0, while a black surface would have an albedo of 0. By scientists using this method of measurement, they have figured out that the Earth has an albedo of 0.3. Scientists have also discovered that since the sun heats up the water on the Earth, if more of the ocean and water is visible rather than ice, then more solar energy is needed into warming up the ocean which leads some of the scientists that have discovered this to be a main reason for the Arctic to be heating up so quickly. With the ice melting so quickly, it was discovered that with each ice sheet that broke apart from the Arctic and melted, there was an increase in the carbon dioxide levels. Scientists have placed models all over the world so to measure worldwide weather changes, out of the major ones in the world, each has predicted that by the year 2080, the Arctic covered by perennial sea-ice will have completely disappeared, leaving some places of the Arctic Ocean completely free of ice. The equilibrium of the Earth’s energy must always be the same, if not, it could change the temperature of the planet to cool down or warm up, but with this equilibrium, the amount of energy received from the sun is always the same. Without the effect of greenhouse gases, scientists predict that any form of solar energy that is bouncing off the Earth would actually not stay with the Earth, but instead be traveling away from the Earth. If the Earth didn’t have those greenhouse gases, then the planet’s temperature wouldn’t be changing constantly but instead be at zero degrees, but since the Earth has greenhouse gases, fifty-seven has been known to be the average global temperature. The temperature of the Earth all depends on greenhouse gases, if the amount of gases increases, then the temperature of the Earth would too. A research camp in Greenland named Swiss Camp is located on a piece of moving ice sheet that due to greenhouse gases, has shrunk most of the ice sheet it’s located on, causing most of the living quarters unable to live in, making the researchers and scientists sleep outside in tents. This unexpected decrease in ice was something the director of Swiss Camp, Konrad Steffen, predicted since he didn’t foresee Swiss camp being effected by global warming. Greenland is known to be the second largest ice sheet on the earth, having a piece of ice sheet two miles thick at the center, also having ice that fell hundreds of thousands of years before the recently fallen snow. Mostly, scientists only know what they do from Greenland since that’s where most of them studied by drilling holes into the ice, then they would figure out how old the piece of ice they’ve taken out was and use it to study with. With that piece of ice, they are able to know a lot more about the land like how they’ve figured out that the annual temperatures in recent years have increased by an average of twenty degrees in ten years. Global warming has not just effected Greenland and the Arctic but also floating glaciers like the Eemian or tee Holocene. Scientists use all kinds of tools in today’s word to learn things in the ice like drills that aren’t mechanical but instead, use heat as a way to bury its way down deep in the ice for them to study. With each piece of ice breaking off, forming glaciers, the increase in pieces has created a slow acceleration in each glacier, making them spread apart faster than scientists predicted it would. Scientists worry that if Greenland as an ice sheet were to start disintegrating, it would be impossible to stop it due to the amount of greenhouse gases already present in the atmosphere, causing it to continue to disappear, no matter what they try to do. In addition to that problem, the scientists also fear that if the warm water from the tropics were to mix in with the cold water from the north and south, it would make the water less salty, which, in result that would be unstoppable, could change the climate of the Earth entirely. Some researchers, like Steffen, hope that the atmosphere would help solve the problem of the climate change by dampening the rate of the temperature increase or even completely reverse it, which most scientists disagree on, saying it’s highly unlikely for that to happen. Out of all of the countries worried about climate change, Iceland fears the change the most since the country is covered ten percent by glaciers. The group that studies the changes in Iceland, the Icelandic Glaciological Society, has been created by a group of people wanting to help, studying the glaciers like it’s a family tradition, gathering data and working together to see what they could do to help the problem since the amount of glaciers from the nineteen-seventies and eighties grew but in the nineteen-nineties started to disappear and go away. To try to solve the problem of global warming and greenhouse gases, officials from the eight Arctic nations met in Alaska to agree on a plan that would help study and better understand the climate change happening around the world, costing an estimated two million dollars and consisting of three different, very detailed parts would be created and studied to figure out what the authorities should do. They discovered what people already knew already, that the Arctic temperatures were increasing and that something needed to be done, and fast because the temperatures of the glaciers will reach a temperature which will completely melt them, making global warming worse, and an unstoppable end. The first two parts of the new agreement was a giant technical document and a long, hundred and forty page summary of what was happening to the Earth while the third part of the new agreement was a policy document that would create simple ways to slow down global warming and ways to react to it.

Global Warming Introduction Summary

Global warming is an ongoing controversial debate where people claim it is destroying the Earth while authority groups like the IPCC say all those issues involving global warming are resolved, issues like rising temperatures, increasing sea levels, and carbon dioxide increase are all discussed in the first part of this book, including people's "extreme views" on the topic.

Masslin, Mark. GW: AVSI. Oxford, EN. OVP, 2004

The following second half of the book details the devastating effects global warming will cause in the next few upcoming years and how the human population might react to the increasing problems.

The last, and final parts of this book detail ways global warming might accelerate through deep-ocean circulation, burning of rain forests, methane reserves underwater being released, and how to find ways on focusing the main problems at hand.