Week 11

We had a busy week of class this week with our resource guides being due on Thursday of this week. I am researching how the impacts of climate change impact animal populations. It is an interesting topic to me and I am curious to studying the idea of how with a changing climate and environment, how this impacts habitat and the landscape of areas throughout the world, and thus how these changes impact wildlife populations how are closely dependent on these areas and wild places as habitat to survive. We also had Troy Knight join us for class once again and he talked about some very interesting information regarding climate change. I found it very interesting to learn about topics regarding climate change from an expert such as Troy. He talked a great deal about geoengineering and I had not learned a lot about this in the past so I was interested to hear what Troy had to say about it. Troy talked about how there are two main components of geoengineering: CO2 removal and solar radiation management.  In terms of solar radiation there were several ways that Troy listed regarding how solar radiation management can be done. They are: reflectors in space, which Troy said were very hard to do, very expensive, and if the wrong amount of reflectors are installed, are very hard and expensive to remove. Also other solar radiation management methods include: stratospheric aerosols, increased cloud albedo and surface albedo: grasslands, deserts, cities, and cropland. Troy also talked about how to store carbon potentially in land sinks: forests, bio-chair, and Bio-energy, as well as ocean sink: solubility pump, ocean alkalinity, and biological pump. Troy's discussion was a great informative lecture about many issues about climate change and specifically how to limit the harm that that the sun and increased carbon in the air is causing to our environment.