Personal Blogs

A device for measuring lines etc. Preferably a see-through one, but at this point I’ll take anything.

I have completed the first three tasks of Book One, and I’m most of the way through Chapter Three. I need to speed up a bit, but time is fleeting, my friends. Anyway – we’re looking at past GMSTs (Global Mean Surface Temperatures). Ice cores, lake cores, and such like. And plotting temperatures on graphs, and reading graphs. For which a ruler would come in useful…

I’ve been a bit disorganised the last couple of days; I left my folder and books at work yesterday, so couldn’t do any studying last night. I did, however, tidy my study. Tidy study = err.. tidy study. So that was a win.

Tonight I’ve added my first week’s precipitation gauge results to the communal wiki table on the OU module website – I was the third person to do so *proud* and so far, conducted the experiment earliest. Early bird.

I also completed activity 3.1, which was gathering data from a table online, and plotting it on a graph. I then had to decide whether or not the overall trend for increasing GMST was, in fact, continuing through to 2010 and beyond. There’s not enough data yet. The random variations were similar to the past few years, and it’s holding steady for now. Apparently it’s expected to increase though.

I’m going to do a bit of reading about global warming, and wait until we’re a little further on in the book; then I’m planning a bit of a discussion with myself as to what I think. At the moment I think global warming is happening; but why? Probably a bit of natural warming, and a bit of us.

I want to save the planet though, and chucking less carbon into the air is definitely a good place to start.

I’m feeling like I’m still waiting for the course to properly get going, to be honest. But I am enjoying it so far. And I’m looking forward to meeting my tutor and some more of the students on February 10th at a tutorial in Coventry. Coventry! Oh, the horrors…