Energy City

There is a flash game called energy city. In the game you have to produce energy for a city for ten years, but it's harder than it seems because you have to keep up with air pollution, budget, and and your environmental standing. The are also shareholders that give you task and if you fail them then there's a punishment. All together the game is fairly realistic, but all I have to say is the voice when you win is kinda creepy.

http://content3.jason.org/resource_content/content/digitallab/8250/misc_content/public/popup.html

The Energy Crisis

The Energy Crisis

The energy crisis is a very serious issue that sometimes gets shoved under the stacks of all the other problems the world faces. An energy crisis is when the population of a specific area uses more energy than the can produce there for making an energy crisis. A energy crisis can also be made by an area trying to find self sustainable ways of generating power so they don’t have to rely on foreign imports of oil, gas, coal, etc. A country might start to try to find independent solutions to foreign imports because of lack of control. The foreign country has control over the quantity and the prices of the things they import. Another possible reason for an energy crisis might actually be green energy. Have you have seen a solar panel field, ever wondered why they needed so many panels well they need so many panels because solar panels don’t actually make that much energy, and to make them worthwhile you need a lot of them. Some solar panels actually track the sun to produce maximum energy, but the tracking also takes energy to move the panels, and solar panels aren’t a constant source of energy because if their is a cloudy day/ rainy day the solar panels are pretty much worthless. How solar panels work-

“Simply put, a solar panel works by allowing photons, or particles of light, to knock electrons free from atoms, generating a flow of electricity. Solar panels actually comprise many, smaller units called photovoltaic cells. (Photovoltaic simply means they convert sunlight into electricity.) Many cells linked together make up a solar panel. - See more at: http://www.livescience.com/41995-how-do-solar-panels-work.html#sthash.DUjXs7Ts.dpuf”

Windmills aren’t much different you have to have huge fields of windmills to produce energy, but in my opinion windmills are worse the solar panels because with solar panels you can pretty much place them anywhere but with windmills the have to be tall and in a place that is pretty windy to produce power. The thing that windmills have going for them is that they can produce power night or day, rain or shine. Windmills generate power by having slanted blades that when the wind rushes by forces the blades to rotate spinning a generator to produce electricity.

Citations

http://www.global-economic-symposium.org/knowledgebase/the-global-environment/the-energy-crisis-and-climate-change/proposals/the-energy-crisis-and-climate-change

http://www.conserve-energy-future.com/causes-and-solutions-to-the-global-energy-crisis.php

http://www.livescience.com/41995-how-do-solar-panels-work.html

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/solar-panels-now-make-more-electricity-they-use

Agriculture Inovations

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1vhuN8BpNnl_cK_hq5Ax136zbCSmT-ANIsD-2f8BkhU4/edit?usp=sharing 

Pandimic

 There's a game called Pandemic 2 I recently played it and thought it was actually really realistic. The only thing was that If an island shut down its ports then their was no physical way to infect that island which I thought wasn’t that realistic because most Islands would have to depend on foreign imports for something, but the overall realistically was cool because your disease had a visibility bar which means certain mutations caused your disease to become easier to spot. The cure for your disease can also backfire making your disease immune to all cures.

http://pandemic3.com/pandemic3.swf

Dust Bowls

I don't believe that we are headed for another dust bowl, and even if we are headed to another dust bowl then It won’t have anywhere near the effect as the first dust bowl had. During the first dust bowl most people lived in rural areas so the destruction of farms and the dust hit those areas really hard, but today in the modern times most people live in cities away from farm. The dust bowl started because of a year of intense drought and bad farming techniques that made the soil easier to be moved by the wind.

Sources

http://www.seeker.com/are-we-at-risk-for-another-dust-bowl-1765871492.html#news.discovery.com

Sinkholes

     If you are scared of a sinkhole under your house then use this blog to test and see if your house has a sinkhole. The list after this paragraph shows things that you can check for to see if you might have a sink hole.

• Fresh exposures on fence posts, foundations or trees that result when the ground sinks around them;
• Slumping, sagging or slanting fence posts, trees or other objects.
• Doors and windows that fail to close properly or exhibit changed behavior such as doors remaining open where they had previously closed of their own accord.
• Small ponds of rainfall forming where water has not collected before.
• Wilting of small, circular areas of vegetation. This happens because the moisture that normally supports vegetation in the area is draining into the sinkhole that is developing below the surface.
• Cloudy water is pumped from nearby wells where the water was previously clear.
• Cracks in walls, floors, pavement and the ground surface. This is most noticeable in a concrete block structure and is different from a few hairline cracks normally seen between blocks.

     I'm going to test the list above against my house. I don't have any fences and there isn't any trees that have visible roots that should be underground. All my doors and windows shut normally and I haven't seen any puddles around. I only have grass and its bermuda grass so it naturally dies in the winter and then comes back so there's not much I can go off there, and there aren't any wells near me. I don't have any cracks in the walls that weren't caused by me, so my house should be completely safe from sink holes.

Landslides

     Some ways of predicting a landslide are as follows

• The slope: the steeper the slope the more likely a landslide is.
• Water table: If the water table is really high then the risk for a landslide / mudslide is higher as well
• Surface water: If there if there is surface water on the slopes of a mountain it could mean the a landslide is imminent.
• Electrical wires: If the electrical wires are very tight then It means that the ground is shifting which means a landslide is imminent.

   I wanted to test the four things above on a mountain in North Carolina. I decided to test these out on Grandfather mountain. Grandfather mountain doesn't have many steep slopes. There isn't much surface water, and there aren't any pictures of the electrical lines to see how tight the line is. Grandfather mountain also has a preservation group protecting it, so as a whole I would declare Grandfather mountain safe.