EARTHSS 60B Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Depth Sounding, Pathos, Thermohaline Circulation
27 Apr 2018
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Department
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Professor
Lecture 1
1.09.18
Rhetoric- art of persuasion (changing people’s attitude and behaviors)
● Tools for rhetoric
○Logos- logic, reasoning
■ Based off of facts, statistics, graphs, etc.
■ Ex. the greenhouse effect (scientific explanation)
○Ethos- ethics, character, experience
■ Based on a person’s credibility based on their trustworthiness, honesty,
and ethics
■ Ethos in scientific writing- invoke experts to give credibility to your work
○Pathos- passion, emotion, feelings
■ Appeal to a person’s feelings
■ Relies on coherent delivery
■ Appeal to a person’s values
○Kairos- timeliness, urgency
■ Being at the right place at the right time
● Why rhetorical technique
○ Change minds of others and motivate them to act
○ Understand what persuades you most in an argument. What is your opinion
based on?
○ Construct stronger rebuttals
○ Identify false arguments
Essay #1 an inconvenient truth
Identify examples of rhetoric
Al Gore
Ethos -
● mark twain quote during speech
● Continuously mentions how he ran for president to shine some light on the climate issue,
talks about his involvement with the white house
● Shows videos of him running for office, making speeches, signing documents, at the
white house when bush got elected
● Videos of him growing up on a farm and working on it from the time he was a kid
○ Explains how over time the land has changed very quickly
Logos
● Story about scientist (one with the weather balloons in the pacific) shows old videos of
him conducting research and the data tables and charts they found
○ Shows that chart in his talk
● Uses diagrams and animations along with data from several years
● Uses actual photos of glaciers that are receding every year with red lines to indicate the
year
○ Shows videos of glaciers calving
○ Shows numerous cases before and after pics to show that it is happening
everywhere and it is a pattern
● Explains ice cores and how they get their data
○ The clean air act→ can see it in the ice
○ How isotopes can give us exact temp at that time
○ 650,000 yrs of CO2 and temperature
● Uses chart to show that when CO2 goes up so does temperature because heat is
getting trapped
○ The clip of him going up in the lift to show how far off the graph the projected
CO2 levels are
● Shows relationship to warming oceans and natural disasters
○ Growing numbers of hurricanes
○ First hurricane in the atlantic??
● Permafrost affects
○ Drunk trees, buildings and houses collapsing, trucks sinking in to the ground
○ Roadways are accessible less than 75 days a year in the tundra
● Albedo affects on ice sheets
○ Polar bears have loss of habitat, drowning polar bears
○ Why should we care?
■ ocean conveyor belt shut off due to the melting of land ice into the ocean,
affecting the saltiness and causing it to not sink, therefore not move
● Out of 948 scientific journals about global warming, 0% deny that it is caused by human
impact
Pathos -
● use of comedy skit to explain global warming, the intended audience would be people
who don’t understand the science side but rather need an easier explanation
● “If we allow that to happen it is deeply unethical” - when talking about rising co2 in the
next 50yrs
● Story about his son getting hit by a car- “turned my world upside down and shook it until
everything fell out”
○ “That what we take for granted might not be there for our children”
○ Starts questioning his reasoning for being on this earth
● Images and videos of hurricane katrina
○ People lying in medical beds
○ Houses on fire
○ People trapped in their homes waving for help
○ “The water is up to my neck I don’t think I can hold on any longer”
○ Husband kissing his hurt wife
