ESS First Term

• 20th of April 1986, Chernobyl plant in Ukraine exploded. The incident raised questions about the general safety of nuclear power.
• 11th of March 2011, Fukushima power plant was hit by a tsunami wave. Following the incident, all 48 Japanese plants were shut down. The move away from nuclear power was replicated around the world.

Literature, Media, Technology, International Agreements, Environmental Disasters

• Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made a strong case against pesticides and DDT.
• James Lovelock’s Gaia proposed that the Earth was a living organism with homeostasis and that human activity was disturbing it.

• An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore 2006 made global warming accessible and well known.
• Greenpeace: Save the whales, anti nuclear testing protests

• Economic growth and resource exploitation with consensus among representative groups
• Taxes, fees, arrangements, compensation

The Green Revolution between 1940 and 1960 were a time when developments in farming led to increased agricultural productivity and allowed for the population of the earth to persist.

• Pro-growth
• Research
• Optimism

• Self-restraint
• No faith in tech
• Education
• biorights

• Innovation and the ability to use untapped reserves
• Desalination
• Iceberg transport
• Wastewater purification
• Won’t change habits

• Encourage conservation
• Highlight misuse and overuse
• Change habits

Different EVSs view the different components of the biosphere differently based on cultural, aesthetic and bequest significance

Is a community of independent organisms and the physical environment they inhabit.

• Sustainable material cycles
• Social systems that contribute to a culture of sufficiency
• Ecological land usage

Overpopulation, financial motives, overgrazing, overculvitation

• Many issues have global impact.ecosystems are affcted by global processes.
• Sometimes local solutions may also be fit (point-source pollution)

• Primary is active on emission
• Secondary is arising from primary undergoing physical or chemical change

Is the build up of non biodegradable chemicals in the body

Is the process whereby the concentration of a chemical increases at each trophic level

• Changing human activity to prevent pollution will be the most effective
• Reduction of pollution through legislation or technology
• Clean up or restoration of damaged systems is costly and not effective (replantation)

• Environment: reduce, reuse, recycle,
• Renewable energy sources
• Protected wildlife
• Society:
• Education and awareness
• Politial action
• Social stablity
• Economy:
• Reduced pollution
• Energy efficient
• Economics of sufficiency not greed

• Is the uninterrupted availability of energy sources at an affordable price\Long term: timely investments
• Short term: adaptation to changes in demand-supply

• Availability
• Population size
• Tech
• Culture
• politics

• Political stability
• Protests
• Sudden rises in cost
• Exhaustion or disruption of supply

Describes how the atmosphere behaves over relatively long periods of time

Describes the conditions in the atmosphere for a short period of time

• Ocean systems:
• Salinity and temperature
• Currents move and store heat

Pressure points

• Trace gases: COz and CH4
• Nitorgen 78
• Oxygen 20
• Argon 1

• Living with the consequences od climate change
• Protect cities from strom surges
• Protect crops form drought’coastal management’monitor and control tropical diseases

• Reducing or stabilizing GHG emissions
• Cap and trade systems, carbon tax, energy efficient products, geoengineering CCS, UN-REDD fertilizing oceans, but past emissions will continue to have an effect for decades to come

The Kyoto Protocol is an international treaty which extends the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits State Parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that (a) global warming is occurring and (b) it is extremely likely that human-made CO2

Taxes, scarcity, extraction will be hard

Belief that people can always find a way out of any difficulties.

Every person has the responsibility to look after the planet.

They serve as the formal meeting of the UNFCCC Parties(Conference of the Parties, COP) to assess progress in dealing with climate change, and beginning in the mid-1990s, to negotiate the Kyoto Protocol to establish legally binding obligations for developed countries to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.