ENG333 – Major Assignment 5B

amiller8

Greenhouse Gases and What NC State can do to Help

Background

Carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide are some of the most common forms of greenhouse gases, although there are a number of trace gases such as CFCs that are still very dangerous even in small amounts.  When the greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere, they absorb light and energy from the Sun as well as from what is reflected off of the Earth from the Sun.  This extra absorbed energy is then released back to the Earth, causing more energy and heat to be kept on Earth instead of released into space.  This has caused a slow and steady incline to the planet’s average temperature, which we call Global Warming.

A majority of Earth’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from energy production, with powerplants that use fossil fuels to produce heat that is converted into electricity, as well as producing carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide.  Transportation also produces a significant amount of greenhouse gases, mostly through road traffic from cars and trucks. Vehicles use a similar process of using the fossil fuels in gasoline to produce kinetic movement.

Research Funding Proposal

I suggest that we do an experiment to determine if there is a way to reduce the campus’s greenhouse gas emissions by efficiently reducing the number of buses we have on the roads.

We can test potential new bus routes across campus to determine if there are better routes that can allow us to have less buses on the road while still allowing students to reach their destinations in a timely manner.

The factors that would be tested for these new routes would include merging existing routes that cover the same area, taking secondary streets to avoid busy intersections, and avoiding out-of-the-way bus stops that receive few students at certain times of the day.
Each of these routes would be tested at different times of the day to take external variables into consideration, such as differing traffic patterns and variations in student schedules.

 

Our researchers would be collecting statistical information, such as the amount of time it takes for the buses to complete these routes, as well as the amount of fuel that the buses use, as to accurately calculate the amount of greenhouse gases that are produced during each route.
We would also interview random students and faculty members who take the buses for their opinions on the new routes.  We obviously want efficiency for our buses, but we also want the passengers of the buses to be happy, too.

 

This experiment would have to take place over several weeks, if not a few months, in order to repeat the tests for all of our potential routes, in order to get sufficient data to draw conclusions from for every route.

Importance & Impact

Greenhouse gases have serious impacts on the Earth through their effects on Global Warming.  This ranges from the melting icecaps raising the Earth’s ocean levels to killing temperature-sensitive organisms that are integral to certain environments and their food chains.  There are also effects caused by just excess Greenhouse gases in general.  Coral reefs are sensitive to the excess carbon dioxide that is being absorbed into the ocean from the atmosphere, and thus, significant portions of the population of coral and the thousands of aquatic species that rely on them have died because of greenhouse gases.

Reducing our emissions of greenhouse gases in any way, regardless of how difficult it is, can help. NC State University should be at the forefront of leading people to more environmentally friendly lives, and I feel like this experiment can put a good foot forward towards doing that.

Sources
  • Cushman, Robert M., and Sonja B. Jones. “The Relative Importance of Sources of Greenhouse-Gas Emissions: Comparison of Global Through Subnational Perspectives.” Environmental Management, vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp. 360–372., doi:10.1007/s00267-001-0018-4.
  • Lacis, A. A., et al. “Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature.” Science, vol. 330, no. 6002, 15 Oct. 2010, pp. 356–359., doi:10.1126/science.1190653.
  • Marcotullio, Peter John, et al. “The Geography of Global Urban Greenhouse Gas Emissions: an Exploratory Analysis.” Climatic Change, vol. 121, no. 4, 20 Oct. 2013, pp. 621–634., doi:10.1007/s10584-013-0977-z.

ENG333 – Major Assignment 5A

amiller8

Part 1 – What I learned from the reading

  1. The Science People See on Social Media (Pew Research Center)
    1. Most science-related Facebook pages focus their content on one or two subject areas.  Topics like health and medicine were the most common, with other subjects like Animal sciences and Astronomy/Physics being frequented as well.
    2. Multiplatform pages tend to be hosted by larger groups/companies, allowing them to rely heavily on their own content sources.  A few of the smaller Facebook-primary pages served as aggregators which mostly share content published by other organizations that the pages themselves did not produce.
    3. There were mainly three different types of content produced by the 30 studied Facebook pages, with each of them usually focusing on one of them.  These three were news on new scientific discoveries and developments, already known scientific information that could be applied and used by the audience, and promotional material for media programs on other platforms.
    4. The posts on these pages that were about funding for scientific research tended to get more interactions for users, however this data is likely to be slightly biased as there were significant decreases in scientific funding being discussed at the time when this data was being collected.
    5. Posts that mention “Calls to Action” (such as posts that directly say “Share this if you ___”) and posts that were mostly if not only visual were very popular.  (I personally believe that these would have been the most common if not for the biased data mentioned in [4])
  2. Communicating Science Online (AAAS)
    1. About two thirds of American adults use at least one form of social media, and approximately 75% of adults worldwide who use the internet use social media.
    2. From 2006 to 2014, the amount of people who used the internet to find information about scientific new increased from about 20% to over 47%, which was a notable increases in comparison to other sources.
    3. Different platforms that you post your scientific findings online can have different effects on who will read it and how they will read it.  A normal website is good for distributing detailed information but is difficult to interact with your viewers with.  A blog is more informal, but will allow you to better communicate with people.  Social media makes it easy to interact with a wide range of the public in near-real-time communication.
    4. Even individual social media platforms can impact how you reach the public.  Facebook is good for branding, Twitter is good for conversational purposes, YouTube is the best for explaining information through videos, etc.
    5. It is important for scientists to form relationships and build networks on their social media because this can help them better communicate their information to larger audiences.

Part 2 – Following an influencer

  • What is the name of the organization?
    • NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration on Facebook
  • How many followers do they have?
    • 25,932,412 people
  • When was this account created?
    • April 9, 2009
  • Who runs the social media for this account? (Check their website)
    • John Yembrick is NASA’s social media manager.
  • Using “The Science People See on Social Media” Article (p.3), what types of social media posts are they sharing? Which ones do you notice are getting more engagement (likes, comments, shares)?
    • A majority of the current posts seem to be on New Discoveries and Explanations of Concepts, although there are a few promotions for their livestreams and other social media platforms.
    • Most of these posts are getting around one thousand likes, but a few can get as high as five thousand, but there does not seem to be a significant pattern in certain categories getting only higher counts.
  • What are some things that are innovative about their account?
    • They seem to be using Facebook’s new livestreaming feature frequently.
  • What could they be doing better, based on the readings from this week?
    • What they are doing seems to be working based on the information from our readings.  Lots of images and videos are present, and most of the posts recommend sharing the posts they make to others.