Presentation on Climate Change

I apologize for not posting for a while -- life got really busy. :)

I spent some time lately reading a presentation on climate change by Saul Griffith. It's a PDF of the slides and notes he uses to give a presentation explaining global warming and climate change in an easy to read format for people who don't know much about carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses and how they are affecting our climate.

I enjoyed it very much, although a little boring in places because I am already familiar with the subject, and he spends a fair amount of time going over the basics. If you already know a lot about climate change, you probably won't find it fascinating, although the sections on his own lifestyle and the plans he has for reducing his carbon dioxide emissions were very interesting.

I did have a few quibbles with it. There are some spelling and grammatical mistakes, which can sometimes be distracting. He doesn't explain new abbreviations. For example, he assumes that the reader will know that TW stands for terawatt. Most annoyingly, he placed the notes for each slide before the slide itself, so the complicated explanation comes before the simple chart and spare text. I would have preferred the reverse.

The language of energy and power is confusing and non-intuitive, but he does not address this at all until the very end, long after he introduces the terms and definitions. At least once, he changes the units of his discussion without warning or explanation. And if you do not have a solid background in the physics of electricity, you will probably find his discussion of work and energy and watts to be confusing at best.

But these are small issues when laid against the grand sweep of this presentation and the optimistic, yet mind-bogglingly difficult, path he lays out for us to get ourselves out of this hole we have dug for ourselves.

He does assume that energy users are plugged into the main energy system, the national electric grid, the natural gas distribution lines, etc. This is most definitely written for the developed world, and those thinking about these problems for the developed world. No mention is made of very poor people, in slums and villages around the developing world, who are dependent on wood and kerosene for heat and light and cooking. Obviously, they pose a problem unto themselves, for anyone trying to reduce carbon emissions, and I don't blame him for thinking them beyond the scope of this presentation, especially since the developed world and industries ought to and will clean emissions first. But I would have been interested to read what he had to say.

He spends a lot of the presentation going through his own calculations of his carbon footprint, and explaining how he will be reducing it. At the end, he says he used the same data he used to calculate his carbon footprint himself as input into 13 different online carbon footprint calculators and came up with 13 different answers, none of which equaled his calculation or his estimate, but when averaged were remarkably close to the US average. As he says, that is a big problem for the average person trying to calculate their carbon footprint.

Overall, I recommend reading this presentation, but be prepared for a review of the basics of carbon emissions, global warming, energy, and power.