Water in Crisis around the world, and check out UN SDGs

 There is a major issue that just a decade or two ago people were beginning to worry about, and now seems to be here at an accelerating pace - water shortages. 

With population growth and climate change, more regions of the world are suffering changes in rain and snow falls, extended droughts, and changes in agriculture. Water is in shortage in more locations around the world, and perhaps Americans will begin to realize this (although those living in the west and southwest are already living it) as rivers and watersheds in the US begin to dry up. 

Check out CNN's feature on the Colorado River, the most important river running through the southwest. In fact, just one week ago the federal government declared a water shortage for the Colorado River for the first time ever. Parts of the Mideast are becoming uninhabitable. The path much of the world, certainly coastlines, can and will need to take for fresh water is desalination (if you can develop a cost-effective, large-scale process for this, you will be among the billionaire crowd and will help hundreds of millions/billions of people in the process). This has already started in very limited locations, but here is a 2015 article outlining the thinking for the past decade. 

Having water, the most basic consumable humans and all life as we know it need to survive, is, of course, one of the great problems and issues the world faces, and is highlighted by the United Nations in its list of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These will be referred to on occasion, and we will have a 2nd quarter project built around whichever goal is most interesting/important to you! 

Former life: Particle detectors over the years

 A good Science News article about particle detectors, which allow us to figure out what we are all made of! There are hundreds of particles, most of which are combinations of the six quarks! We'll get into this a bit in classes!! Here is the CDF detector from Fermilab; I helped build, maintain and run this thing. I'm still impressed these most complicated machines and experiments even work! 

A Study Effectively Confirms Energy Imbalance of the Earth Due to Humans

 A Princeton study confirms the growing energy imbalance of the earth is due to humans, and not natural processes. By 'imbalance' we mean there is no longer an equilibrium between the energy entering the earth's atmosphere and the energy that is re-radiated back into space. The warming of the earth is the result of the imbalance - caused primarily by greenhouse gases trapping more of the energy that should be making it back into space. 

Satellite data over two decades, then fed into numerous independent computer models for climate, all confirm there is no set of natural processes that have occurred over this time period to account for the warming. Only by adding in human contributions does one even approach the observed imbalance. This is but one more of many studies that all reach this conclusion that global warming and the climate change that results is due to humans, as it has a less than 1% uncertainty in these results.