PROFESSOR BRYAN KARNEY: Welcome to week one of Our Energetic Earth.

This is a MOO
C that we're going to use to explore this amazing planet andsome of its remarkab
le energy transformations and systems.And we welcome you.
We're hoping that you're going to come along for the ride and explore thesefasci
nating systems.
In fact, I hope when you think back that you can think or some of theexperiences
that you've had with energetic systems--a time that you've gone out, and you've
perhaps enjoyed whitewaterrapids on a river.
Or perhaps you've enjoyed the sound or the experience of waves at a beach.Or per
haps you've been in a thunderstorm or even amore violent event.
The Earth is full of the textures and the varieties of energytransformation syst
ems.
And that's what this course is all about.
And what we're going to do in each week is we're going to start each weekwith a
brief introductory overview that I'm going to give you of whatwe're going to be
doing for the week.
And then we're going to reflect at the end of each week on some of thesignifican
ce and some of the observations.
And that will be a kind of a pattern for us for the next few weeks.This first we
ek, what we're going to think about is the biggest conceptsthat relate to energy
for the planet as a whole.
Those really big concepts are really remarkable.
It's taken humans a great deal of time and effort to come togrips with these thi
ngs.
But they're very much worth the effort and worth the trouble.One of the first id
eas that we have is that really fascinatingconcept of a budget.
I don't know if you've ever planned a major event in your life, if you'veplanned
a wedding or a major family event where you've wanted to do abunch of special t
hings but you've realized that you couldn't spend asmuch money as you might want
to.
You've had to have a budget to make things work, a sort of upper bound onthe amo
unt of money that you could spend.
The Earth has a budget as well.
The Earth has an upper bound in the amount of energy that it uses.And that upper
bound is set primarily by the energy input that weget from the sun.
And the first thing we're going to trace in the first week is what isthat energy
input and how it varies.
One of the things that's fascinating is, much like money, energy on theEarth is
not distributed particularly uniformly.
Energy is, in fact, distributed quite non-uniformly.
And we have areas of the Earth which are very rich in the amount of energythat t

hey receive and other areas of the Earth which are much poorer in theamount of e
nergy that they get from the sun.
It turns out that there's a fair bit a transfer that takes place between theener
gies that receive a lot and the energies or the parts of the Earththat receive l
ess energy.
And we want to look at those transformations and see how thisenergy conveyor wor
ks between different parts of the system.
So we're going to look at that budget and look at the way it's allocated anddist
ributed and look at the way it relates to the Earth.
And it turns out that one of the very fascinating and central ideas is ageometri
c argument.
The Earth has a spherical shape, which means that there are certain parts ofthe
Earth's surface which are oriented to be perpendicular to the sun andcertain par
ts of the Earth which are oriented that in a sense slant away orbend away from t
he directions of the sun's rays.
This, of course, gives us the idea of the polar regions andthe equatorial region
s.
And those are marked by this decisive difference in their energy inputs andin th
e energy budgets that they have to live under.
So we get that first idea of the geometric influence.
And it turns out that that geometric influence is very strongly biasedtowards di
fferent times of year.
And that's because the Earth is oriented not perpendicular to theplane of its or
bit around the sun but in fact slanted away from that, whichgives a very decided
bias to either the northern hemisphere or thesouthern hemisphere.
So one of the first things we've learned is that there is a singleexplanation, r
eally, for why the Earth is cold when we move towards the polesand why, in fact,
we experience seasons.
And the origin of both of those things arises from this concept of a budgetand t
he concept of a fixed input of energy perpendicular, but then bendingaway from t
his geometric component.
One of the background questions which we're not going to answer at the verybegin
ning-- but of course you should be thinking about--is what is energy, anyway?
What is this mysterious thing that we use to explain so many differentprocesses
and so many different variations?
One of the key things you probably already know about energy is energy istransfo
rmed in a simple device like a pendulum, which swings up and turnsits motion int
o potential energy, and then swings down and turns it intokinetic energy.
We have a conversion process of two different kinds of energy.
If you watch a pendulum for some time, though, you'll see that it willgradually
decay.
It will no longer have a complete conversion of potential energy intoenergy of m

otion, but in fact it will gradually dissipate.

And the bottom level of this energy transformation is thermal energy.And that tu
rns out to be quite general.
In fact, almost all forms of energy are interchangeable, to a very largeextent,
except for thermal energy.
It's the sort of the bottom foundation.
We can get energy into thermal form.
But it takes a lot more cleverness even to get any of it out.
And it turns out there's very good arguments that we can'tget all of it out.
Some of it is irrecoverable in that form.
And these ideas go together for one of our other key concepts that we'regoing to
get right at the beginning of this course, which is the idea ofenergy cascade,
of energy coming in at a top level in a fairly availableform, and then through a
sequence of transformations coming out at thebottom level having experienced th
is process of decay.
And in order to illustrate this, I thought I'd put on my screen behind mehere a
picture a cascade of water.
This is a waterfall where the water comes in the top level with a maximumof pote
ntial energy.
And it cascades through a sequence of steps.
It comes out at the bottom level with much the same basic properties that ithad
at the top except it's lost that gravitational potential energy.And that's going
to give us that secondary process, which is the ideathat even within these tran
sformations where energy isconserved, energy also decays.