Climate Change Information for 3BGEO & Science

I've come across a great resource which would be perfect for use within unit 3B Geography.  It's a booklet called The Science of Climate Change: Questions and Answers.  Its written by the Australian Academy of Science, which also means that lots of the statistics and impacts are focussed on Australia too.

Its very readable, whilst also being informative and discusses the answers to 7 key climate change questions:

1. What is Climate Change?
2. How has the Earth's climate changed in the distant past?
3. How has the Earth's climate changed in the recent past?
4. Are human activities causing climate change?
5. How do we expect climate to evolve in the future?
6. What are the consequences of Climate Change?
7. How do we deal with the uncertainty in the science?

Its really perfect for the 1st few lessons of 3b Gegraphy on climate change and would be useful in science too.  Lucy

Last Chance to See

Have you been watching 'Last Chance to See' on ABC.  A great program to complement any lessons you are doing on biodivesity and the treats to it.  Its with Stephen Fry, travelling the world to find engangered species and explore their habitats and the threats to them.  LAst week he was in South East Asia and saw amongst other things - komodo dragons, mangroves, spiny coated ant eaters and proboscis monkeys.  Monocultural palm oil plantations were a big threat to the natural environments that support these animals and plants.  

Source http://pin.primate.wisc.edu/factsheets/image/226

Scaly Anteater by Bjorn Olesen

http://animals-in-the-news.blogspot.com/2009/07/dierenrechtenorganisaties-luiden.html

 

Next week they are off to New Zealand.  Its on Sunday at 7.30 pm.  You can also catch past episodes on iview. 

Podcasts - so many things I want to listen too, so little time.

If you want to find out more about sustainability issues it doesn't all have to be hard work. I've taken to susbscribing to podcasts from radio programs that I like, putting them on my Ipod and then listening to them as I drive. Just go onto the webpage, click susbscribe and new episodes will be downloaded to your itunes everyweek, when you open itunes and have the internet on. I find them really interesting, they get you thinking and you could easily find you use them in your lessons to get discussions going.

Here are a few of my favourite sustainability related ones:

Costing the Earth This is a program from the BBC radio 4 (my favourite radio station which I miss alot!). This is what its about... ' Man's effect on the environment, questioning accepted truths, challenging those in charge and reporting on progress towards improving the world. Presenters, Tom Heap and Dr Alice Roberts, travel the UK and the world in search of solutions to the challenges facing the natural world and the people and wildlife that live in it.'

Future Tense This is from ABC radio National. Its not specifically about sustainability but its is about future thinking and so often covers sustainability for lots of different perspectives eg.

• Future Governance - In a world where issues like climate change, population and migration are challenging the way we organise our societies. How should we address some of these issues? And what affect will they have on the future of governance? or
• Resilience Science - Many scientists around the world believe that we need to focus on ways of making our urban and natural environments more resilient. So what is the idea of resilience science? And how can it help deal with future environmental challenges?

Or try these podcasts from Oxford University which Richard just found, you can't susbscribe but can down load any you find interesting, just right click and 'save link as'. Its dangerous though you might find you want ot download most of them and will have no time in your life for much else!!!! I just downloaded one by Howard stern on the economics of climate change but there are so many other relevant ones it would be hard to list but start by searching the social sciences division.

Happy Listening!

Let us know if there are any other good ones you know of.

How can happiness help the environment?

I've always been interested in the Psycology of Happiness, what it is that makes us happy and gives us a sense of wellbeing. Living in present, noticing the little things, nurturing our relationships and being part of a community, seeing the positive and doing a bit of exercise to keep all this going or help get rid of your frustrations if you're not seeing the positive!

I'd thought about how these are the important things rather than the material possessions that you have and have gradually changed my life around a bit to make it easier to do more of these things. My mum has been out staying for the past 3 weeks and I'd been talking to her quite a bit about it too and then I came across this video, again in the great green razor newsletter from the Greenpages.

Nic Marks at TED talking about The Happy Planet.

Did you know that that Costa Rica has the same levels of wellbeing as western Countries but achieves this with 1/4 of the ecological footprint? I didn't.

• They have a life expectancy of 78.5yrs, higher than the US,
• 99% of their electricity is from renewable sources,
  
• They plan to be carbon neutral by 2021,
  
• They abolished the army in 1949 and have invested in social programs of health and education instead,
  
• and well they have a 'latin vibe' which values family and community and having fun.
  

Other latin American countries are going the same way. So our challenge is to get all countries heading this way. We need to measure progress in terms of wellbeing not economic growth, looked at like this we don't have to give anything up just to make less environmental impact, we might gain. Marks argues that it may be a way to turn around the climate sceptics, who are possibley afraid that to admit it is happenign will mean they have to reduce their lifestyle, if we look at quality of life in terms of wellbeing then they wouldn't have to.

A great video use it with our lesson Feeling Good in the Big Consumption module. We look at Bhutan and how it measures Gross National Happiness rather that GNP and students come up with policies to help achieve that in their country. Marks also talks about how government could encourage this at the end of his talk too. All in all just a great vid which might just help you feel good too! Vertainly put a smile on my face.

Graphs students can get excited about.

Yes really!!!

Have a look at Hans Rosling's Gapminder World. The link goes to a cgraph about CO2 emissions form 1820. It shows all the countries, how their level of emissions per person changed over time, diff colours for diff. continents and the size of the circle is overall emissions. You can click on each circle to see which country or select different countrires to look at their trajectory. Income per person is on the x axis.

• Where does Australia end up?
• What happens to China and India after about 1980?
• Which country led the way with emissions?
• Whats the correlation between wealth and emissions?
• When did the US become the biggest producer per person? Why did the figure fall in the 1930s?

Or watch the overall emissions on a map for a really stark vision of where the emissions are coming form.

You can project it at full screen, pause it at different points or back track by draggin, hover over circles to find out who it is. You can choose different cgraphs for all sorts of global measures. All UN statistics.

The picture above is just a screen grab, the interactive is so so so much better.

Blogs

I have been finding myself using blogs more and more for inspiration, to find out what teachers are doing, to get an idea of feelings on different topics etc. I get ideas from them and they invariably lead me on to other places and sites where I get more ideas. You've got to stop somewhere but when you are a bit short of insporation I find them really great. Its really why I decided to start to write one aswell, to try to give you a bit of inspiration or the lead to set you off on the path to discovering new things for you.

Here's the train of thoughts/pages that I went along when reasearching for some lessons on climate change, MEDC vs LEDC attitudes and Kyoto. I think I started by search for Climate change Developing Countries Adaptations. This is what I found:

From Power to Poverty is a blog by the UK Oxfam research manager covering lots of aspects of aidwork. He had written a post about how african nations were acting to adapt to climate change. I then searched for other posts of his about cliamte change, from the comments I linbked to another website debating the effects of being sustainable in the North on the South from the IIED. This then led me on to a documentary on Copenhagen from the point of view of developing nations, really interesting.

So much better than all the dry stuff I was getting from official websites which was making me fall asleep and not really telling me what the issues really were (well probably they were but I was bored by then so imaging how bored your studetns might be if they had to read this). I was thinking it would be great to be able to direct students to blogs about the topics they are studying. They can see what views real people have, look at different sides of the arguement and could even engage in it themselves by leaving comments on a blog.

They could start their own class blog if they wanted, give their opinions about what they are studying, post some of their work, see what other people had to say about it. For a blog with loads of ideas about how to use social media in you teaching check out http://daviderogers.blogspot.com/ he's really innovating with it in his lessons, using twitter, facebook, shaerd files etc.

So I hope this gives you some inspiration to go off searching for yourself. It certainly got me reinspired.

The Population Puzzle

I watched Dick Smith's population puzzle last night hoping that would address some issues of sustainability. Personally I found it quite a dissapointing program in terms of balance and really examining the complexity of the issues but its definitely one that could help spark debate, and indeed the debate after was better.

It all seemed a bit reductionist and very 'conservative'. Dick seemed to want to maintain things as they are. Well ok but even so things are not really ok as they are.

He argued that slower population growth would stop areas of land on city outskirts being concreted over and high rise developments. He argued that we did not want to become like Bangladesh. Well there is some way to go to get to that population, they certainly don't have a problem with lack of water but I would strongly argue that their poverty is not due to overpopulation but to their history. On top of that the environmental impact/carbon footprint of each individual person in Bangladesh is a tiny fraction of an Australian's.

Dick seems to want Australia to stay as it is so that we can continue to consume as we are. He did not talk about reducing our consumption, using less water and energy, living more densley in cities rather than continuously exanding in 1/4 acre blocks (they're an accident of history), sustainable agriculture and renewable energy. At my level of consumption I need about 2.3 planets, way too much but probably not as much as some. That's what we need to change. He certainly did not talk about changing his lifestyle. Yes population adds to the problem but if all the world consumed like Bangladeshis there would not be a climate change problem (although the poverty would lead to other envirnmental problems).
We consume too much and if we want to preserve the Australian (and world) environment it cannot continue. Population is one part of the problem but to only look at this totally ignores the enormous complexity of the issue. Increased population does not correlate directly with ruining the environment or decreasing quality of life. This assumes that what we have now is the right way, that this is the best quality of life we can have. Its not, it needs radical ethinking.

Living in a high density city, with areas with a sense of community, where you can walk to work, walk to the shops, know your neighbours (as you don't just get straight into your car), have easily acdessible countryside (as its not covered in suburbs), have hostpitals, libraries, leisure centres etc all close by could well be a better quality of life than living in a suburb with not real centre where you have to drive to the city centre for work, drive to the shops etc. And it is certainly better for the environment .

I could go on and on.

As you can see a great film to start a debate. This is the website for the population puzzle . It has lots of stats and links to other sites. The opinions page is also good with different points of view, good for getting a class debate going. I like comments by Amanda Mackenzie of Australian Youth Climate Coalition. And this is the Q and A website where you can download the program and look at the transcript. I'm with Suvendrini Perera, and there are also good points about the regions and immigration in general. Also global connections, our global responsibility vs responsibility to our own citizens.

Lots to think about over the weekend, Lucy

EDIT - Well I thought a bit more about this over the weekend. What it really highlighted was that we need a plan. I personally think its impossible to say what a sustainable population is as it depends upon how sustainably they live - if they reduce consuption and change agricultural practices etc. it will be much higher than if not BUT if Australia's population will increase (as it will) it needs to planned for. Where will they live, how will they live, how will they be supported, what policies would encourage more sustainble living, what import, export, agricultural policies, planning and trasport policies do we need to make this sustainable? If there is no plan and we don't think about the Austrlia that we want then we can't work towards achieving it.

I think our lesson 'Our Future' in The Big CONsumption gets students considering this. They envisage the future that they want here and then plan a series of steps in different aspects of life to achieve that. Maybe they can help the government with this?? Its a very different approach to to just looking at what is and then projecting the numbers out and working out how to cater for that, which is I think the main point Dick Smith was trying to make.

Lucy

Coincidences & landscape

Wow, isn't it strange how things happen.
Yesterday in the car on the way back from Perth I was having a conversation with Dave (he'd just come back from a surveying job in Newman, yes we contrast a bit on sustainability here!), about how mining so radically alters the landscape. How we dig up and totally alter the surface of the earth. Concreting over the earth to create cities is also pretty major but I think for me mining seems even more shocking as we are changing natural erosive processes which have taken millions of years and the material taken out is not going back. We are manufacturing (and quickly) a new altered landscape.
Here's where the coincidence come in..... Today in my inbox i got a news letter from the Green Pages magazine and one of the articles was about photographer Edward Burtynsky. His picutres are about exactly this subject, how industry transforms nature and landscape. Here's what they are about in his own words:
Nature transformed through industry is a predominant theme in my work. I set course to intersect with a contemporary view of the great ages of man; from stone, to minerals, oil, transportation, silicon, and so on. To make these ideas visible I search for subjects that are rich in detail and scale yet open in their meaning. Recycling yards, mine tailings, quarries and refineries are all places that are outside of our normal experience, yet we partake of their output on a daily basis.

These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence; they search for a dialogue between attraction and repulsion, seduction and fear. We are drawn by desire - a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success. Our dependence on nature to provide the materials for our consumption and our concern for the health of our planet sets us into an uneasy contradiction. For me, these images function as reflecting pools of our times.

Edward Burtynsky

Here are a couple of examples of his pictures from Australia. They're taken from his website.


These pictures are of kalgoorlie and Lake Lefroy in Western Australia.

If you were doing a geography module on consumption these would be great pictures to use as 'Landscapes of Consumption' to compare with the end Shopping Mall 'Lanscape of Consumtption' that we would more often think of. They show quite shockingly the direct affect our consumer choices have on landscapes (i was going to say our landscapes but are they really ours to do this with, often they are other peoples' and always the plants and animals which would have lived here before this).

EDIT
Richard was just saying imagine how the water table and everything is affected all around, probably not just the mine itself but the ecosystems surrounding it for miles will also be changed by it.

Geography Modules

The Rogal Geographical Society has developed lots of full modules for geography teaching in secondary schools. Lots of these cover themes of sustainability...

• You are what you eat

• Changing Climates

• The Geography of my stuff

You can download resources separately or the whole module can be downloaded in a zip file. Loads of other subjects on there too. KS3 is for years 7, 8 & 9, KS4-5 is for yrs 10,11 & 12.

Geog away, Lucy

Surfing and Sea Level Rise

This resource allows your students to explore what impact sea level rise due to climate change would have on Sufing on the gold coast. It also makes good use of GIS with Google earth being used to model this. www.juicygeography.co.uk/sealevel.htm.

Have a look round Juicy Geography site, its a blog by geography teacher Noel Jenkins, sharing lots of free resources, he also writes Digital Geography . There are other great google earth resources, sustainability, geography resources like the wind farm location decision making exercise. This explains how students can use google earth to find a suitable windfarm location in their local area gives the criteria they can use to assess it. Students create their own placemarks and can then save them to a shared folder for peer assessment.

Happy Googling, Lucy

Geography and Oil Spills

This is going to be a week focussed on geography resources for lots of reasons really. Richard is off to Sydney for 3 days to look into setting up HotRock over in the Eastern States bringing our sustainability Education to even more Australians. Yey. So that travelling is a bit of geography. He's flying but offsetting his carbon, although we can't understand how Quantas can do this for only $12. It seems too cheap, do they plant trees somewhere with very cheap labour??? If you know how this can work let us know.

Then he's talking at the Georaphical Association of Western Australia conference on Sunday (back in Perth), so these reosurces and ideas are for you guys at his workshop.

They're also for me as I'm a geographer so I always get excited about geography stuff.

So first off in a fit of patriotism, let me direct you to the Geographical Association of the UK, which I was a member of before I came over to Oz. A pretty cool association with loads going on and a great website that I often make use of. www.geography.org.uk There's often topical and useful stuff. I like the Think Pieces for helping me with my curriculum development and planning and also the resources section.

A great page up at the moment gives loads of ideas about how to use the Gulf of Mexico oil spill in your teaching. This great quote from Barack Obama starts it off:

'We (Americans) consume more than 20 per cent of the world's oil, but have less than two per cent of the world's oil reserves. And that's part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean because we're running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.

For decades, we have known the days of cheap and easily accessible oil were numbered. For decades, we have talked and talked about the need to end America's century-long addiction to fossil fuels. And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires. The consequences of our inaction are now in plain sight.'

- President Barack Obama, 15 June 2010

The page then gives loads of inspirational teaching ideas. Our Peak Oil module also ties in perfectly with this subject, helping students explore why the days of cheap oil are over and how we can adapt to a world with out it

This topic combines sustainability and geography on so many levels. What do we use that contains oil? How are we connected to others around the world by oil? How can we change our communities to live without oil?

I liked this one where you can move the oil spill to anywhere in the World. www.ifitwasmyhome.com/ I put it over Dunsborough where I live and it covers the whole of the cape and up to Mandurah. Quite a powerful image if you're worried about oil exploration off the coast of the SW. Here's the map it creates...

4 degrees of Warming - Google Earth Climate Change Map

I was downloading forms so that I could apply for Skye's passport when I came across this google earth interactive map showing the possible effects around the world of 4 degrees of warming. There are facts and videos about the different effects, ranging from the hottest temperatures in Europe increasing by 8 degrees celcius, to increased risk of forest fire in southern Australia to 150m people a year more being flooded by 2075 due to sea level rise.

A great resource for Geographers to get students to do their own research into the effects of climate change. It could also be used in our module Global Warming, Global Warning. In particular in the 'What are the Consequences?' lesson.

Down load the KML file from the fco website using the link above. Enjoy the weekend, Lucy

The footprint of the 'Nano Puff"

No they haven't discovered the footprints of a very small dragon in the snowypeaks of Tibet but in our office in blustery southwest Australia a new creature has appeared, the nano puff wearing ecoworker. And they look pretty cool really, and cosy. Samudra the organic raw food cafe and yoga centre behind which we work has started stocking Patagonia products in its shop.

Great move I think. It fits in really well with their image. Patagonia is a brand delivering high quality goods for outdoor sports, including surfing and yoga, whose philosophy started out to protect wilderness areas in Patagonia and has developed into one multi million dollar business that is trying hard to act sustainably and develop products that will have a minimal impact on the environment, be manufactured in fair labour conditions and fulfil their high spec for quality and product innovation. And they tell you all about it too. Here's the footprint chronicle for the nano puff. It shows the journey, the different environmental impacts, discusses the good and the bad and goes into detail about each stage of the manufacturing process.

You can choose different products too and dig deeper and even join an online discussion about it. I think this website could be put to excellent use with our The Big CONsumption module, showing how a product impacts along its supply chain and as a case study of a company implementing sustainable practices. You could use the shirt case study to compare it to the standard t shirt manufacture in 'What's the Cost?'. Its great for geography as a study of interconnectedness. In Business studies you could use it as an example of how a company has incorporated ecoprincples into its brand and how this allows it to charge high prices ( its otherwise known as 'Patagucci' due to its relatively high prices) by increasing its cachet and so allows it to invest in improving its supply chain and manufacturing even further.

Follow the "Footprint Chronicles" to find out about the life cyle of lots of Patagonia products. Did you know they also offer to recyle all your old patagonia products for you too?