The echoes of the 30th Jan Lecture

On the evening of 30th Jan, a talk was given by three professors regarding the hot issue “Global Warming”. Each of them addressed on one aspect of the issue, with the first lecturer Mr. Palmer shared the methodology of “the capture and storage of carbon dioxide”; the second lecturer Mr. Benjamin talked about the importance and mechanism of different problem-solving algorisms; and at the end, Mr. Bala shared his analysis on how are we, the very ordinary people, able to do, to contribute towards alleviation to the rapidly worsening Global Warming.

Mr. Palmer, with very strong accent, started the lecture. His sparkling and creative idea of “trapping” the most contributing Greenhouse gases, Carbon dioxide, is believed to be a very effective and feasible way to alleviate the Global Warming. Furthermore the methodology of trapping and storing the gas has been sufficiently developed to be adopted into industrial use. Although this method is costly, most of the audiences, the EG1471 students, were very convinced that this method will help a lot in slowing down Global Warming to a large extent.

However, after the second lecturer, Mr. Benjamin introduced the algorism of Social Science Systems Approach; the idea of Mr. Palmer’s turned unpractical, and is not likely to be adopted by current policy makers. Mr. Benjamin used one detailed example of Renewable Power to illustrate the practical use of the approach: academically applicable idea might as well fail due to bad social science complements, say Market Failure or Information Failure. As a conclusion to his lecture, the Science and Technology Study methods provide a useful lens to evaluate new technology. Hence, theoretically applicable methodology might still fail. For instance, under the current background of global economic recession, Mr. Palmer’s idea is not likely to be well-received by the major world powers like the US.

Lastly, Mr. Bala did a summary on recent climate change, with facts given by IPCC, the potential consequences and possible effect of a warmer earth, trying to warn the audiences the importance and threat of Global Warming. Although his presentation was down systematically and passionately, the content was very similar but more condensed to Al Gore’s famous “A Inconvenient Truth”, making it a bit tedious and boring at the end of the whole lecture.
In conclusion, the two-hour lecture was beneficial to the audiences as engineering students. The introduction of different problem-solving approaches given by Mr. Benjamin was impressive though the sequence of the three presentations were not structured nicely. Instead, I felt Mr. Bala should have started the lecture as introduction to Global Warming and followed Mr. Palmer, to share his idea of Trapping and Storing carbon dioxide; and lastly, shared by Mr. Benjamin’s analysis on different scientific approaches.