January 30, 2008 - Ellie and I went to the gym after work today. For me it was day 2, for her, day 1. Day 2 is the hardest day of anything, because you are deciding if this is something you want to keep doing. Day 1 is fun, scary, new, exciting, all rolled into one. Day 2 you are past those feelings, and probably just feel a little sore from the previous day, but you are making a crucial decision. Am I going to keep going to the gym or not? I force myself to go because I know that once I get on a roll it will be much better for me than not going. Today I lifted some more weights and ran on the treadmill again. This time I ran about 2.6 kilometers and burned 200 calories on the treadmill. It's so discouraging to see how slowly I burn calories on the treadmill, knowing how fast I can eat that many calories. Heck, a Chipotle burrito has about 1100 calories in it, and I can eat that in about 5 minutes. It would take me about 80 minutes on the treadmill to burn that many calories off. Speaking of calories, it's time to continue the lesson on 'global warming'. Calories are defined as the amount of energy it takes to raise 1 mililiter of water 1 degree Celsius. For humans, when we talk about a burrito being 1100 calories, it is actually 1100 kilocalories, but the kilo is always left off. Regarding the ability to raise the temperature of our planet, the quantity of energy available is technically finite. If humans could figure out a way to incinerate the entire planet, and convert all of the matter into energy, there would be some dramatic temperature rise while the planet was blazing. However, it's a pretty big planet, and we haven't got that much control over it, so we dig some holes in coal here, pump some oil there, and burn the planet down a little bit at a time. This still does release trapped energy and convert it from matter, producing the byproduct heat. The real question is whether that energy release is enough to actually raise the planet beyond its normal environmental conditions. It is important to stop here and think about where the measurements are being made in relation to where the energy is being converted to heat. Certainly the greatest amount of heat release will be in densely populated areas, because there are more humans with cars and stoves and air conditioners (yup, they produce heat, not cold), factories, light bulbs, etc. But it is in these cities where we measure air temperatures. It is possible for local effects to occur that are abnormal to the surrounding areas, meaning that a city might be warmer because of its heat release, but the forest right next to it doesn't see the temperature rise because it isn't particularly generating a lot of heat energy. We must really question whether the data that is being collected reflects a true representation of the global temperature, or if it merely reflects a large number of local effects. Regardless, there are other considerations to be made. More to come in lesson 4.