A Recap of Bill Nye "The Science Guy" Lecture at UCA

   Tuesday night Hubby and I had a date night, not one common for us though. We went and of our own free will went and listened to a lecture at the UCA campus. I say that because this is the first time I have voluntarily gone to any type of educational event. But this one was an exception because it was Bill Nye, yes the science guy! I bought tickets forever ago and didn't even know what he was going to be doing, a small part of me did hope it would be experiments though, fast forward to Tuesday dinner time, we still didn't know the topic of his talk. Honestly we didn't care, Bill is someone we learned from during a lot of our schooling and he is a wonderful brilliant scientist, so just to get to see him in real life was enough to get us there.


   He started out his talk telling us about his parents. His dad had been a prisoner of war after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. His mom, being brilliant in math and science was recruited from college to work with the military decoding the Enigma codes. While his dad was a POW he had no electricity for close to four years. During this time, Bill shared, he became fascinated with the sky. He could tell you any of the constellations of stars and he became a sundial fanatic. This ended up rubbing off on Bill and he loves sundials too. At this point, I still wasn't quite sure the topic of the night, he soon got to it though.

   After sharing some fun details about his time helping out the scientist that sent rovers to Mars he showed us a sundial that he suggested be sent as well. Yes, there is a sundial on Mars because Bill Nye said something along the lines of 'Hey that could double as a sundial!' While talking about the sundials he explained that the shadow cast by the sun on any planet has a color tint that is caused by the atmosphere. On Mars, it is a bit orange and on Earth it is a bit blue. This is a very slight color but the shadow is not a stark gray or black. The atmosphere filters out the light and gives it a little tint. He then dove into his favorite topic of choice, climate change.

   The point of telling us about the colors, other then its neat, was to lead us to talking about the atmosphere. Which he pointed out is really not that thick and we are using it up. There are many videos and article of Bill Nye discussing climate change out there so I am just going to share with you a few points that I found interesting.

• The earth IS getting hotter. No that is not unusual, the issue is how fast it is getting warmer.
• For the first time in recorded history there is more than .03% CO2 in the atmosphere, it happened in our lifetime! There are now 400 parts per million now. 
• There are so many more people now that we produce more CO2. BUT we cut down more trees and cover green space, that reduces the ability to convert CO2.
• Our CO2 emissions can be reduced. And the answers aren't that difficult, we just have to decide its worth doing.
• Did you read that? WE have to DECIDE it's WORTH doing. Seriously us as a general people have to decide that protecting the environment, making life better for us as well is WORTH IT!
• Wind turbines and Solar Energy is enough to run the whole country, storing and transporting is the only issue.
• The technology is already there. It may need to be improved to work on a much larger scale, but it is there. Figuring it out and doing it could make you rich.
• This is more of my opinion and thoughts from a few things he said. The only way to get true change and make it work is for policies to change and 'taxes' be put in place to encourage greener living. But here's the thing the news, the government, politicians, they don't bring it up, they act like it is not here. They instead focus on things that they make go viral then disappear just days or weeks later. If for just a minute these people running for president or any other office would truly focus on something they can change with just a few new policies then they would do way more good than worrying about trivial things. 

   So what I took away was there is a solution out there that just has to put into hands that can make a difference and our atmosphere can if nothing else be helped by not getting any worse. We can change and fix this. We have to because in the next few generations life will get harder with less atmosphere and it having more CO2.

   I loved getting to hear Bill Nye speak, it really was great. He was pretty funny too. Even though it was him telling us about the atmosphere and global warming I am glad I got to hear it presented in such a way of how it can be fixed if we choose to do it and give it try.