The Tiny Swiss Company That Thinks It Can Help Stop Climate Change

The New York Times published an article on Feb 12, 2019 on the same topic as above by Jon Gertner where it states that the two European entrepreneurs want to remove carbon from the air at prices cheap enough to matter. Over a period, many scientists around the globe have warned on this very concerning term ‘Climate Change’. It is a change in the statistical distribution of weather pattern, which remains for a longer period around decades of years, in a certain area. Affecting or gradually changing the pattern of life, flora and fauna of that area, and leading towards the destruction of Mother Nature. The reason behind this are some biotic processes, variation in the solar radiation received by earth, volcanic eruptions and one of the major causes is the human interruption or activities.

The research made by various scientists put a light on causes of climate change, in late 19^th century scientists started arguing that human emission of greenhouse gases can be the cause behind climate change, at that time many other theories were there like solar radiation and volcanic eruption. But in 1960’s research results started indicating that the heating effect of carbon dioxide is the major cause. In 1970’s scientific research widely accepted the heating effect of carbon dioxide, in 1990’s with the development of computer systems and other advanced techniques, it was confirmed that greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide etc., are the causes behind climate change. After industrial revolution there is 40% increase in these gases, these gases are also produced from automobiles and other sources.

Through this article, I came to know the fact that carbon dioxide (CO₂) can be removed from the air for commercial purposes which safeguards the future of humanity. They have built ‘direct air capture’ machines which collects CO₂  and once trapped it would be siphoned into large tanks and trucked to a local Coca-Cola bottler where it would become the fizz in a soft drink. The captured carbon dioxide from the air is also passed via pipeline to an enormous greenhouse nearby, where it was plumping up tomatoes, eggplants and so on which significantly is very ecofriendly. This process requires huge investment and energy, so they are trying to gain a commercial base to sell their CO₂ to agricultural or beverage companies. The company’s main goal for air capture isn’t to turn it into a product but to pull huge amount of CO₂ out of the atmosphere and bury it.

By these researches people are getting aware of the reasons behind the changing scenarios of climate change and can take measures to have a sustainable place to lead life in future, and conserve Mother Nature.

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Week 3 response

In Algorithms of Oppression, Safiya Umoja Noble point outs the idea that search engines like Google doesn’t offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Noble  doubts that some of the developers are willing to promote sexist and racist attitudes openly at work using some searching algorithms and architecture. One of the example i see on the reading shows that when you type “professor”, it mostly shows males but not females, it shows that data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.In my opinion, I think that people shouldn’t use colors or sexes to identify curtain people or groups, most of the searching sites show certain results not only because of the searching algorithms, it’s also because people are searching them too. People should start to accept others for what’s on the inside and not the outside. we the people need to understand that we are all equal no matter the race or genders.

After reading the excerpt from Safiya Noble – Algorithms of Oppression I came to a deeper understanding of the “numerical” influences of social grouping and its powerful impact of the things we see, believe and most importantly follow. On a general scale, the digital decision-making society call fair and as far from race and/or sex driven is and will always be created by men and women who are in fact the same thing they are attempting to not create. So to believe that they can create this vacuum of ideal prediction without any pre-judgements is false. These codes, and the underlying ethics of technology comes from minds that are asked to predict the future. The only way you can make a proper hypothesis, is by studying the past and present to make an educated guess of what the future will be. If this is in fact true, you cannot just blur the information of all the “others” of civilization no matter the time period.

In the excerpt there was a part that stated, “At the very least, we must ask when we find these kinds of results, Is this the best information? For Whom?”. This short line contended all that algorithms represents. To ask a program, to make sure you take in consideration all people from near and far before making your decision is impossible. So ultimately, these outcomes made will not only be for a specific group but it was also made by a specific group adding to the inaccuracy it has for all types of individuals within the huge spectrum of men and women which itself has blurred lines of identifications.

In the show Star trek, they were debating if Data, a andriod, can be seen as a person with the same rights as a human, At the beginning of the argument, I beleived that andriods dont have any rights but the person defending Data changed my mind. He convinced me that Data can have right becuase he is intellegents, self-aware, and has a concussion. He proved to me that all these traits can be seen in Data as well as another statement said by him. He stated, ” Humans give birth to other humans that also have rights”. Why can andriods that are also created by humans also have the same rights. These are two great points made in the show, but I still beleive that even though AIs are great and all, they have the power to take over humasn because they are able to think many steps ahead of us as well as are able to learn faster than us humans. On the other hand, the excerpt from the book tells us that the internet isnt a safe place becuass of how it was designed and programmed with algorithims that promote, “sexist and racist attitudes openly at work and beyond.”

-Tanvir Youhana