May 25 2010
Since we have several APES folks involved in senior exit projects in environmental science areas, I thought I would feature their reflections. Kyle’s experiences with the wind power industry: http://pdsblogs.org/kylesb/ Syd’s experiences with the solar power industry: http://pdsblogs.org/sydsb/ Jessica’s experiences with a behavioral ecologist (birds) at Davidson College: http://pdsblogs.org/jessicasb/ Enjoy!
Apr 16 2010
Last year, a student send me a 12-minute bit from 60 minutes on coal power. The piece is centered on an interview with Jim Rogers of Charlotte’s own Duke Energy. Watch this, then read on: *IF the embedded video will not play, try this link: Powered by Coal (60 minutes) So…what do we do in [...]
Apr 14 2010
_______________________________________________________ Today in class we discussed wind power– what it is, how it works, the future of windpower, and the environmental and economical trade offs of generating energy from the earth’s natural wind production as a result of unequal heating of the globe. Wind power in the past: Wind power has been around for ages. It [...]
Oct 08 2009
We started class by discussing earth’s atmosphere; we learned that it has five layers, but we are only going to focus on four: (1) the troposphere, (2) the stratosphere, (3) the mesosphere, and (4) the thermosphere. As the layers increase in altitude, the temperature decreases and the amount of ozone (O3) increases (O3 collects in the stratosphere). [...]
