Pandora's Promise

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1992193/

In the spring term of AP Environmental Science class, energy is a big part of our discussion. The movie, Pandora's Promise, delivered a comprehensive understanding and study of the newest yet most unpredictable of all energy sources, the nuclear energy. The movie discusses the development and the future of nuclear energy as well as introducing the possible downfalls that people have fear in this new type of power.

Pandora’s Promise opens by presenting thousands of environmentalists marching through the streets holding their signs protesting against the usage of Nuclear Energy. “There’s no compromise in the defense of mother Earth.” is the motto of their action. Which raises the question of safety issues surrounded nuclear energy.

This documentary featured several pro-nuclear scientists and activities, who demonstrate their view on the topic and the reason why they believe nuclear power is the solution to the world's energy crisis. Many of those people have once been an antinuclearist before, however, new developments and information changed their minds, “whenever you change your mind drastically, you start to wonder what you were thinking”. This film, even though titled as 'Pandora's Promise', focused on shifting the common misconception of the safety of nuclear energy and making more and more people become the supporters of this new, powerful, and mysterious energy source.

The common misconception of nuclear power often relates to the fact that nuclear power is such a dominating factor in military warfare. People's fears come from the atomic bombs which have completely wiped out a city during world war two, as well as some nuclear leakage, happened throughout the history of nuclear power that ruined a city for decades. People see nuclear power as a “window into an Armageddon”. The word "Nuclear" was made to be feared by people. One activist in the film explains how his childhood is related to the fear of nuclear and how this could block blind people from seeing the benefit of nuclear energy.

The public generally chose to ignore the good and positive things and pay a lot of attention to issues and negative results. When few of the nuclear energy sites have failures, it swings the public opinion completely. For example, the airplane, what people do not realize is the fact that only couple planes have crushed per year yet there are thousands of millions of airplanes flying every single day. Also, the advertisement from the antinuclearism also contributes to creating a fearful image for nuclear energy in people's mind.

The movie progresses to discuss the world's energy crisis and the topic of energy as a whole. The movie claims that energy equals life quality, and by the year of 2100, the world's energy need will be triple the need we have right now. This explained the need for a new powerful energy source that can meet those demands in order for us to continue human practices.

Coal is the most common resources of energy. The movie exhibits the safety issues of this type of energy source, "fossil fuel combustion leads to over 3,000,000 deaths each year through air pollution”. The movie proposed the solution to the world's energy crisis: Nuclear energy. Nuclear power, behind wind power, is the second safest way of producing energy. The common misconception of nuclear radiation often leads to cancer is that human is exposed to radiation all the time. One kind of radiation is called background radiation and people are all exposed to it all the time and nothing bad would follow up from that. The difficulty is that the public opinion is very hard to swing, once they have a conception of radiation, they rarely do any more research before settling down in their minds.

Nuclear waste is the last topic in this film. There are 70,000 tons of accumulated nuclear waste being stored in dry casks in parking lots and storage lots. The waste can be used in the future as a recycled source of energy; despite the common belief,  nuclear power is actually a renewable resource. The problem of getting support for the nuclear energy project is the public misconception of nuclear energy and mass production of nuclear power does mean that people are privy to nuclear weaponry, which in many people's point of view is a huge threat to their lives.

In general, the movie discusses the origin of nuclear energy and the problem it faces right now is not technological issues but rather the human factor. Public opinion is the string that is pulling the energy production backward. The misconception of the dangerous nature of nuclear power restrained our progress to more potential energy.

This movie confirmed many of my conception regarding nuclear power and also correct some misconception of my own. I always believe that with proper method, technology, and funding, nuclear energy is the best way to be the main source of energy. Sustainable development will not be happening if our society still heavily depend on fossil fuel related energy. Nuclear power is green and productive, it is also controllable despite the contradicting beliefs. With the increasing demand for energy all over the world, previous energy generating methods are getting outdated, they can no longer meet the world's demand. Therefore nuclear power is one of the solutions to the world's energy crisis, however, it still needs to be taken care of very precisely. Any incident can possibly lead to detrimental results.

James Norton

On April 7th, Mr. James Norton. came to Proctor and talked about Ganges River and its impact with relation to climate change. On the opening, he said, "If there is magic in this world it is contained in water. “ At first I was full of doubt regarding that statement, but his presentation completely changed my point of view, water is indeed magical. 

"Water gives life but it can also strip it away. “ This is the second quote coming from Mr.James, "It turns rock into sand, turns bone into dust.” As he said these things I started to imagine the image of rock being slowly crashing into the sand and a pile of bone vanishes into dust. It is such a powerful image that really exhibit the power of water. 

Mr. James said that we never have the right amount of water, it is either way too much to become fluid or we don’t have enough. He went on to give some examples of water-related issues in third world countries: Rather than going to school, a kid spends an hour or so walking back and forth between the nearest safe water drinking tap. for 860 million people around the world. 

Then he introduced Ganges River.Ganges River is the most iconic river in the world. There was a lore regarding the birth of this river, someone was looking to place the remains of his ancestors, and he found the Ganges River. 

Mr. James said he wants to know a lot about Ganges river, it starts out from mount Himalayas and all the way to India. Different from all the other gigantic river, Ganges river did not start with small streams but rather a pile of water rushing out between the mountains. He even set out a journey to find the origins of the Ganges river. 

The Himalayas collectively are the biggest chunk of ice except for the two poles, those ice and snow give birth to some of the most impactful rivers in the world and supports the most people in the world. 

He led a team that does the water test to all the source of water in the world. There are plenty Himalayas floods happening around the area, he went on to show some pictures of the flood and other water destructions. He follows the Ganges river to go downstream and witness the huge dam that is the first man-made obstacle of Ganges River. 

Ganges River also resembles an very important spiritual value to the Indians, including the resemblance of life and death. He went on to play a video of the spiritual practice people do around Ganges River. 

He pointed out that most people in Indian don’t see the pollution that is happening to Ganges River. And numerous Indian people explained to him that because the River is mother to them, their cloth and dirt won’t affect her since she will always be pure. However, there are also people that are trying hard to resolve this issue locally. 

There are a lot of diseases living in Ganges River that can easily spread to humans through food, clothing etc. It has affected 20 million people already. 

He then plays several video to exhibit the changes that is happening to India and Ganges River. And the result from water test shows pollution in everywhere, to Himalayas to the down stream. 

Ganges River is a river that has been revered by so many people for such a long time, even though it is being polluted and damaged by humans and non-human factors, it still supports so many people today. Fortunately, there are people working today to save the Ganges.

Lauren Culler

On April 6th, Dr. Lauren Culler came to Proctor and talked about climate change. Dr. Culler works at the Institute of Arctic Studies and Environmental Studies, which are both at Dartmouth College. She’s a scientist who researched at the arctics. 

        Dr. Culler is from Maryland and worked at a lab in universities. They looked at the effects of urbanization on stream ecosystems. She was interested in the human impacts on the environment. She worked in the department of entomology, which is the study of insects. She and her friend collected insects in wetlands to study biodiversity. After she got her master’s degree, she moved to Dartmouth and became an arctic scientist since then. 

        Dr. Culler went through some background information on the arctics with us, such as, “the arctic is all the way at the top of the Earth, and so because of that, it’s really cold. It’s part of the cryosphere, and it contains an incredible amount of ice.” She emphasized on how cold the arctic is and then moved on to Polar Amplification, Positive Feedback, and Self-reinforcing. It’s a concern about the arctic because these cycles are “causing really rapid loss of ice, sea ice in particular.” When the ice sheet on the Arctic ocean starts melting, the darker coloration absorbs more energy from the Sun and will cause more melts. This positive feedback and self-reinforcing cycles are the major causes of the significant decrease of sea ice. 

The dramatic loss of sea ice causes interdisciplinary problems. Arctic animals such as “polar bears, seals, and walruses, really rely on sea ice for their forging, for hunting. When the sea ice goes away, that could have pretty devastating impacts on animals that rely heavily on sea ice.” 

Global warming will affect the entire ecosystem. The increase of temperature will directly influence ectotherms. Ectotherms are animals who don’t have the ability to regular their body temperature and the increase or change in the environment will affect these organisms. The climate change also affects the species growth rate and has a greater impact on many species because in some places it’s not cold enough to kill pests or not hot enough for some species to survive. 

       Greenland is mostly an ice sheet and not a lot of people live there. Dr. Culler showed a couple of pictures of her and her colleagues with some of her students on hills looking out at the ice sheets. They dug down into the soil beneath vegetation to see how far they can dig. They can only dig so far before they’ll hit the permafrost, which is frozen soil, “and it’s like you hit it and you can’t go any further down. It’s been frozen for a really long time and it sort of limits the amount of biological activity going on in this area. ”

Insects are great tools for observing climate change because they’re easy to collect and experiment. Dr. Culler showed us a picture of her friend with a ridiculous amount of arctic mosquitos on his back. I was surprised when I learned that mosquitos in the arctic are the most abundant animal. I never would’ve thought that mosquitos could survive in such cold environment and reproduce in freezing water. They could collect about 2000 mosquitos in around 8 hours. Dr. Culler said that the mosquitos are thriving because they lay eggs in the water but they don’t have many predators. However, it is very unexpected when they found that as the globe got warmer, some ponds started disappearing. Her idea is that “Greenland is a very dry tundra, so the permafrost doesn’t have very much water in it and it doesn’t get a lot precipitation. What we think is happening is that we get these really warm… which causes evaporation. It also causes an increase in evapotranspiration so plants are using more water.” Because the surrounding plants are absorbing more water, the water in the pond leaks through the cracks at the bottom of the pond and leaves the pond more quickly, causing the drying of the pond. 

Global warming and climate change has so many effects on the entire world, but more significantly on the arctic. Just a few degrees warmer could cause a series of changes and lead to many consequences that harm the animals and insects. There are many concerns caused by the general idea of “global warming.” I learned a lot about the series of problems that climate change could have on the arctics. If global warming could have so much influence on the arctics, which is only a small part of the entire Earth, it is obvious that it’s causing countless problems for the entire environment and the ecosystem. Although I never underestimated the impact of climate change, I learned more about many seemingly insignificant problems caused by global warming that could accumulate and cause a disaster. 

Citation: 

Lauren E. Culler

Years of Living Dangerously

I watched season 1 episode 8 and 9 of the Years of Living Dangerously on April 1st. In this series, Matt Damon, Michael Hall, and Tomas Friedman investigate the impact of extreme heat on human health and mortality in several places. 

Matt Damon wanted to show people the significance of climate change, so he traveled to Bangladesh. He found out that in Bangladesh, climate change "is a matter of life and death." It was very different from where he came from because not a lot of people cared or even believed in climate change.

Many scientists in L.A. are concerned about heat waves because it could affect human health and even kill people. The health issues of what heat waves could lead to were misunderstood earlier, because heat deaths is similar to other health issues such as heart attacks and respiratory problems.

I think it's pretty sad that it usually takes someone's life to attract people's attention and realize the severity of an issue. The summer of L.A killed 170 people, including an athlete who died on the field. People started taking the issues of global warming seriously as more and more people die from heat from all over the world.

Matt Damon visited Dr. Atiq Rahman, a climate scientist. He wanted to understand why climate change has such a huge impact on Bangladesh. Since Bangladesh is located at a very low level, “a quarter of the land here is less than 7 feet above sea level." Moreover, Bangladesh already has many rain precipitation, sea level rising that's caused by global warming could inundate Bangladesh. According to Dr. Atiq Rahman, 17% of the land and population will be seriously affected and inundated by global warming. The only way out of this disaster is migration. According to a political science professor, Dr. Tasneem Siddiqi, 75% of the migrants had moved out of Bangladesh because of the rising trend of global warming. The living environment for people was terrible since it's overpopulated and crowded. Many incidents such as building collapses had killed thousands of workers. Moreover, with many lands and building covered by water, diseases come to the picture easily with insanitation. Infections and diseases added more bodies to the pile of the dead.

In the interview about climate change with President Obama, Obama claimed to reduce the use of fossil fuels gradually and establish policies to protect the environment, such as the Clean Air Act and Carbon taxation. The difficulty about fully dedicating to these policies is that Democrats are not in full support because they rely financially on heavy industries. Supporting these policies would decrease their profit, which I think is a ridiculous reason when we're talking about life and death involving billions of people in the future generation.

Global warming is an issue that doesn't show its severity immediately, but it's like the theory with putting a frog in warm water. Slowly and gradually, the water, or in our case, the Earth, warms up and get hotter and hotter, until we realize we're being cooked and it's too late to stop it. People don't see the danger because it's not obvious yet. But when it is, it's too late. Unfortunately, there are places in the world that are greatly influenced by climate change, and global warming is a deathly weapon to the people, such as those in Bangladesh. People are suffering from a series of consequences of global warming a lot more than we are. Even if a lot of us don't see the power of global warming, it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. To preserve this planet and continue species' survival, we all have to work together and take actions without hesitation.