Reflection on the first week.

Having completed the first week's material in two days, I thought I could do some reflecting here. The new things that I've learnt are:

• The albedo effect - this is effectively a measure of the percentage of incoming energy that is reflected back from the earth's surface- the earth's albedo is about 30%
• the five "spheres" are
  • atmosphere- the hundreds of km of air above the surface - The international space station is still inside the "atmosphere"! - it is at 330-410 km above the earth's surface. I'm guessing from reading the article, that the most "reflection" back to the earth happens near the top of the troposphere (roughly 12km up)
  • hydrosphere- all the water in liquid form (and water vapour)
  • biosphere - all the life - interesting fact - there was also a biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona and the trees buckled under their own weight due to lack of wind in the biosphere 2 - space exploration here we come!
  • cryosphere- all the ice
  • lithosphere- the rocky crust
• There are some feedback loops - mainly the water loop (positive feedback with 3 elements), the ice melting (positive feedback with 2 elements, and the radiation outward - a negative feedback loop with 2 elements

Start of a new era

So I joined the free course at Futurelearn.com on Climate Change. Climate change is the major crisis of our time and we must try as hard as possible to minimise its impact. This is sort of a "hello world" post and I will continue to blog about my experiences as I embark on my first online course.