ENVS 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Tetraethyllead, Tetrachloroethylene, Physical Law
13 Dec 2016
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ENVS Chapter 1 Notes: Intro, cities, and sustainability
Hydraulic Fracturing:
● Process of injecting water, sand and chemicals into rock formations with pressure,
releasing natural gas trapped in shale rock strata.
Sustainability:
● Long-term maintenance/stewardship of the planet, along intersecting environmental,
economic, political, cultural, societal dimensions.
● Sustainability is inherently an issue of humans and the environment
Setting the Stage:
● Population is an exponential growth
● All basic, global needs (energy, food, water, shelter, etc) have environmental impacts.
● Arguing about how we manage those impacts is nothing new (tetraethyl lead, smog,
mercury, perchloroethylene, cigarettes, etc)
Physics and Free Will:
● Environment operates on physical and chemical principles that are fixed, unbreakable
“laws”:
○ Affords a degree of predictability
● We live on a water planet:
○ >90% of the extra heat in the atmosphere from GHGs goes to warm the ocean
○ The atmosphere responds to the surface ocean
○ It takes time to heat up the ocean
○ The impacts come after the causes by 50 years or more
● Global climate depends on three factors:
○ How much energy we get from the sun (physical law)
○ How much of that energy is reflected back to space by aerosols, ice, etc
(physical law)
Change won’t always be obvious:
● Abrupt changes, tipping points… a point of no return is crossed resulting in large,
inevitable change:
○ The “canoe on the Niagara River” type events
○ Disappearance of summertime ice
Two “natural laws”:
● Natural Laws of the second kind (Physical laws):
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Envs chapter 1 notes: intro, cities, and sustainability. Process of injecting water, sand and chemicals into rock formations with pressure, releasing natural gas trapped in shale rock strata. Long-term maintenance/stewardship of the planet, along intersecting environmental, economic, political, cultural, societal dimensions. Sustainability is inherently an issue of humans and the environment. All basic, global needs (energy, food, water, shelter, etc) have environmental impacts. Arguing about how we manage those impacts is nothing new (tetraethyl lead, smog, mercury, perchloroethylene, cigarettes, etc) Environment operates on physical and chemical principles that are fixed, unbreakable. >90% of the extra heat in the atmosphere from ghgs goes to warm the ocean. The atmosphere responds to the surface ocean. The impacts come after the causes by 50 years or more. It takes time to heat up the ocean. How much energy we get from the sun (physical law) How much of that energy is reflected back to space by aerosols, ice, etc (physical law)
