Last week, I attended a lecture at the University of Toronto with my friend who is a first year student at the U of T, and studies environmental science. The lecture was about weather and climate. The professor, who is called Corinnel Schiller, is an energetic woman. She spoke loudly and clearly in the lecture. She used many good examples from our daily life to support each point during her lecture. In addition, Schiller had an excellent PowerPoint presentation; the content was well organized and visually appealing, which was helpful for us to understand the lecture.
At the beginning of the lecture, Schiller showed many chemical reactions in Polar Stratosphere Clouds, such as O3+NO→O2+NO2; O3+CL→O2+CLO; NO2+O→O2+NO; CLO+O→O2+CL; etc. After that, she explained some pictures about Ozone in different seasons. Then she gave us several suggestions on what needs to be done by us. Firstly, the chlorine in the stratosphere must be decreased. Secondly, because we cannot remove the chlorine, we must be careful about what chlorine compounds we use. Thirdly, the Montreal Protocol, which was signed in 1987, should be expanded. This protocol was a convention to reduce the production of CFCS, which had been shown to be responsible for damage to the Ozone layer. In 1995, the scientists (one American, one Canadian, one French) who had contributed to this protocol won the Nobel Chemistry Prize.
This lecture lasted less than one hour. Even thought some parts of the lecture I could not understand well, I think attending this lecture was a very useful experience for me because when I attended this lecture, I gained a lot of knowledge about weather and climate. For example, after attending this lecture, I now know that the Ozone hole is getting bigger currently due to human behavior, so we should take more positive measures to save the Ozone layer. I really enjoyed this lecture. Moreover, I noticed that the lecture style in Canada is similar to the style in my country. In both styles, the professor leads the lecture and talks a lot in the lecture; students take notes and answer some questions.
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It sounds like you understood a few things from the lecture quite clearly (although I guess that there may have been more content that you couldn't fit into your notes).
I suppose we could gather our blog posts about the environmental science - type lectures we have all been visiting (you could look at Alex's blog for another example), and show them to Melvin as evidence for the other side of his project. It does seem like in Canada, when you go to school, you learn about the environment from teachers who are concerned about it, and who are trying to teach their students to be especially concerned, and even activist. Thus, even though Canada has a resource economy, it may be preparing to be mopre seriously environmentalist in policies in the future.
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