CT Mayhem `07 - `08

Global Warming Podcast

October 10, 2007 at 1:30 pm | In Homelearning, Personal |

I spent a little while searching iTunes for podcasts I might be interested in listening to and I decided I wanted to listen to something that had to do with the environment.  I searched the program for podcasts that would fall under that category and considered listening to the following:

• Today’s Environment Show
• One Environment
• The Green Alternative
• Environment Report
• Environment Yale

I chose to listen to Environment Yale’s “Global Warming and Species Distribution.”  Professor Schmitz talks about how global warming affects the predator-prey relationships between different species.

I learned that animals are flexible creatures and they can adapt to their surroundings but the plant species can’t.  The temperature and amount of soil are affected, making the plants migrate to more appropriate places.  People are worried that these plants won’t be able to adapt quickly enough for the animals that feed on them.  The beneficiaries from these plants may go extinct along with the plants themselves.  Its impossible to tell if an entire species can become extinct but predictions about how species adjust to global warming have been made.

•  Bats will do fine because they can fly and the warmer climate will enable them to live more spread out throughout the United States.
• Mice species will not do great because they cannot migrate as easily.
• Larger mammals, hoofed mammals such as deer and antelope species will be able to migrate.

If animals lose they’re cultural role, agriculture may be negatively effected.  For example, spiders and grasshoppers develop at the same rate and around the same time so spiders can keep up with the grasshoppers as they’re prey but with climate change happening, the development rate might go out of sync.  If plants died in a highly populated moose area, all of the moose would die and so would the wolves preying on the moose.  You can come up with cost-effective ways to manage a forest that are not harmful to the economy.

I e-mailed Professor Schmitz, commenting on how much I loved his podcast.

“As a class assignment, we were all to choose a podcast that would teach us something and write a blog post about what we heard.  I decided to listen to your “Global Warming and Species Distribution” podcast from Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.  I have always been interested in the environment and that’s what drew me in to listen to it.

I thoroughly enjoyed your podcast.  It was very informative and I had never realized the impact global warming had on so many species.  It was good to hear that some people actually do care.  After listening to your podcast, I learned so many new things that I can now share with my classmates.”

  My iTunes didn’t want to play it for me so I had to go to Yale’s website to listen to the podcast.

Click on the picture to go to the Podcast Page.  If the picture link does not work, click here.