Tuesday 23 February 2016

Weekly news

Global sea levels rising faster due to global warming

Sea levels are rising several times faster than in the past 2,800 years and are accelerating because of man-made global warming, according to new studies.
An international team of scientists dug into two dozen locations across the globe to chart gently rising and falling seas over centuries and millennia. Until the 1880s and the world's industrialisation, the fastest rise in sea levels was about 3cm to 4cm a century, plus or minus a bit.
During that time the global sea level really did not get much higher or lower than 7.62cm above or below the 2,000-year average. But in the 20th century the world's seas rose 14cm.
Since 1993 the rate has soared to 30cm and two different studies, published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said that by 2100 the world's oceans would rise between 28 and 131cm, depending on how much heat-trapping gas Earth's industries and vehicles expel.

"There's no question that the 20th century is the fastest," said Bob Kopp, Rutgers earth and planetary sciences professor and the lead author of the study that looked back at sea levels over the past three millennia.
"It's because of the temperature increase in the 20th century, which has been driven by fossil fuel use."
If seas continue to rise as projected, another 45cm of sea-level rise will cause lots of problems and expense, especially with surge during storms, said study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
The link to temperature is basic science, the study's authors say. Warm water expands. Cold water contracts. The scientists pointed to specific past eras when temperatures and sea rose and fell together.
Both studies project increases of about 57 to 131cm if greenhouse gas pollution continues at the current rate. If countries fulfill the treaty agreed last year in Paris and limit further warming to another two degrees Fahrenheit, the rise in sea levels would be in the 28cm to 56cm range.

23 Feb 2016 06:39 GMT

Wednesday 3 February 2016

Coruse work report

In media we have been creating our very own media text in order to convey our understanding of the media word and how they construct a media text. We were instructed to create a thriller directed mainly at a young adult or teenage audience. Our work was set into sections preproduction and production.
In my preproduction I produced a script of a section of my film called Teacher's Pet. It is about a teacher that purposefully uses psychology and mind tricks to manipulate his student and drive to commit suicide. I felt this would appeal to the a teenage audience because the movie involves teenagers in school which is something teenagers can relate to. I watched several thrillers in order to get examples such as Gone Girl (2014) by David Fincher and Short term 12 (2013) by Destin Daniel Cretton.
Gone girl is a popular thriller which gave me ideas about what the conventions of thrillers are and what makes a thriller, a thriller which is it has to be about ordinary people in extraordinary situations. Then I adopted that into my film because its about school kids with a really evil teacher. Thrillers often have a lot of dark undertones and murder, which my film has due to its themes of murder and manipulation. Short term 12 wasn't a thriller but it showed me how to appeal to a teenage young adult audience. Firstly the movie must be relatable so I made it about teenagers in school.  I scripted the several scenes from my film using the script format of a movie which I got from reading Gone Girls screen play.
For my production I worked individually to create a poster and DVD cover for my movie Teacher's Pet using photo shop. I heard this was the best way to do it however I had no skills using the program and struggled immensely to grasp the difficult to understands operation of separating things from the layers to make a new layer, in fact I knew nothing about photo shop however I tackled the issue by requesting assistance from a team of photo shop experts in my vicinity. They helped me comprehend and figure out how to use photo shop for myself with lessons on creating new layers and not locking them and how I can decipher a even the most heinous of problems  by clicking the step backward button and eventually with a lot of practice and patience I understood photo shop.