Midterm Exam study guide
Instructions
The midterm exam will take place on Monday, October 25.
Bring things to write with and a calculator. (Paul will bring a few calculators to class that you can use.) You may not use your phone or iPad as a calculator for the exam.
When I asked people in past classes to tell me how they prepared for exams, a common technique with those who did the best was studying with someone else.
${}^*$ Preparation quiz on Friday October 22. Study the items that look like this for the preparation quiz. (They will also be on the exam.)
Energy
- Operational definition of energy
- Gravitational energy = $mgh$ (in Joules)
- Chemical energy, can be heat (combustion) or electric energy (battery), usually given in units of Calories / gram (see combustion worksheet).
- Thermal energy (heat)
- Elastic energy, Energy of motion, electrical energy
- Energy and Power: $$\text{Power}=\frac{\text{Energy}}{\text{time}}$$ which also means... $$\text{Power}\times{time}=\text{Energy}$$
- Metric unit for energy (e.g. GravE=$mgh$) in Joules.
- Metric unit for power is Watt = 1 Joule / 1 second.
- How much power humans can typically exert.
- Which energy sources produce GHG emissions and which don't: nuclear, wind, solar, burning fossil fuels, hydro, burning biomass
Chemistry (Hobson Chapter 2) including
- Phases of matter (solid, liquid, gas).
- Reading chemical formulas and chemical equations.
- Elements in the same column of the periodical table have similar chemical properties,
- Atomic and molecular weights.
- Using chemical formulas to figure out weight ratios of chemicals involved.
- Chemical energy results from rearrangements of bonds in chemical reactions.
- Results of the combustion worksheet I may ask you on the exam about the prices you researched, but not on the quiz.
- From Hobson's Conceptual Exercises-Chapter 2 the exercises in "THE GREEK ATOM" and "ATOMS AND MOLECULES" would be helpful to quiz yourself.
Earth's atmosphere
- The composition of Earth's atmosphere.
- Which of these are Greenhouse Gases (GHGs) and which are not.
- The 'natural greenhouse effect'.
- Water and water vapor
- Water as a GHG
- meaning of 100% relative humidity, how water content in the atmosphere changes with temperature
- History of global warming research: How do we know what we know?
- Why human emissions of water vapor, which *is* a greenhouse gas, do not contribute to global warming as much as $CO_2$ emissions.
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Carbon-dioxide
- Sources of $CO_2$ emissions,
- Which energy sources emit $CO_2$ and which do not,
- Which are "fossil fuels" and how did they form?
- Some ways that $CO_2$ is taken out of the atmosphere,
- Historical levels of $CO_2$
- How we measure $CO_2$ currently / in the far distant past.
- Feedback cycles - a change gets magnified (or diminished).
- Know some examples of positive and negative feedback cycles
- Social feedback cycles.
- Impacts of climate heating on extreme weather events
- Hurricanes - What conditions are likely to make hurricanes form? Hazards of hurricanes... How has climate change affected them?
- High-tide (sunny day) flooding - How has climate change affected sea levels? What other factors affect tides? How you measure sunny day flooding when sea levels are changing all the time?
- Fire - Causes / conditions that make them more likely.
- Increased rainfall - Hot air can "hold" more water vapor than cold air
Climate change
- Some history (ice ages, Arrhenius).
- How plants use carbon dioxide.
- What kinds of different climates has Earth had in the past. Some reasons for those changes,
- Some consequences of continued warming,
- The difference between adaptation and mitigation. (Be able to name some examples of each.)
- The carbon cycle and the water cycle.
- Changes because of humans to the carbon cycle.
- Major sources and sinks (see the updated updated Project Drawdown notes) of atmospheric carbon.
- GWP (and GWP$_{100}) of different gases. Which are higher / lower?
- Radiative forcing as a way of comparing anything that causes our atmosphere to heat up or cool down.
Readings
- "Climate of Man" article - changes in the Arctic.
- Germany's Energiewende.
Conversion factors and equations:
- Be able to estimate the sizes of some common things (E.g. humans, mice, Goshen College building, distance from Goshen College to downtown Goshen) in meters, centimeters, or kilometers.
- Converting units: I will supply you with conversion factors between any non-metric units needed. For example, cm to inches, pounds to kg, kilometers to miles.
- However, you should know (memorize) the conversion factors between metric units, which depend on the metric prefixes: Since kilo- means 1,000, you should know that 1 kilometer =1000 meters and 1 kilogram = 1000 grams. Other metric prefixes:
- milli-=1/1,000=$10^{-3}$
- micro- =1/1,000,000=$10^{-6}$
- centi- = 1/100
- nano- = $10^{-9}$
- kilo- = 1,000=$10^3$
- mega- = 1,000,000=$10^6$
- giga- = 1 billion = $10^9$.
- I will give you any formulas you need. These will include at least:
- Gravitational energy = $mgh$
- Weight (in Newtons) = $mg$ (when $m$ is in kilograms).
- The gravitational constant $g=$9.8 m/sec^2