New Media Workshop

Pieter’s and Miu Chow’s delicious page are closiest to what I am doing. 

And for the subcriptions, I have subscripted to the feeds on climatechange and globalwarming from Flickr and Technorati.

First, two leads are chosen from the students’ delicious feeds, Sarah Liao’s presentation and Trading Solution for Pollution.

In Liao’s speech, it says, “The declining trend of local emissions over the last 16 years is evident from the concentrations of air pollutants measured at our monitoring stations and reported on our website everyday (Figure 1).”

Probably I could now go and check the greenhouse gases emitted for the past ten years from the website.

And in the other, the whole lengthy piece simply talks about the air pollution control, without a single word about global warming and greenhouse gases that has been focused on in the past, need not mention in the near future.

It could be a good example to show out lack of attentions towards this globally acknowledged problem.

From Technorati, two articles are found useful, first contributed by Fred Pearce and the other the editorial board, both from the magazine NewScientistEnvironment.

Fred says that “David Wasdell, an independent analyst of climate change who acted as an accredited reviewer of the report, says the preliminary version produced by scientists in April 2006 contained many references to the potential for climate to change faster than expected because of “positive feedbacks” in the climate system. Most of these references were absent from the final version.”

This is actually quite an important issue because it suggets “climate to change faster than expected”. Perhpas I would find something interesting after going through the whole article, or at least why does he suggest so, especially the fact that how he comes into such a conclusion, is that information he has in the past few decades that proves so? Or what?

In the second, it suggests that the “positive feedbacks” that could accelerate climate change, such as methane bubbling up as permafrost melts turns out not happening. Again, it might well affect the climatic pattern of Hong Kong in the past decade. Was urban heat island effect a major reason to HK’s abnormal termperature in the past decade, other than the global trend? If “positive feedbacks” did not exist in the way we used to think of, what the reality is?