The visuals about Earth's Albedo and Global Warming, and specifically the section called "Sea Ice" was incredible to see. That visual made the point more clear than anything I have seen. The vertical axis is down right scary!
This information makes me want to take my students on a field trip to the Arctic Ocean and have a sit-in.
Some of the people in these videos sound like the effects of climate change may be bad in the future. This seems apparent that the effects are awful right now and much worse to come in a short time frame. Obviously, when our ice goes from almost 7 million square km to around 3.5 million in 27 years, we have an accelerating situation. I wonder if the ocean conveyor system is already out of whack and we simply have not been able to measure it yet.
The winter ice doesn't seem to be as drastically reduced, so does that imply that more ice is freezing anew each year and actually concentrating more salt into the falling dense water creating the deep ocean currents moving south from the arctic to feel more pressure?
I already bought a hybrid car and upgraded the energy rating on my house. Now what do I do?
Extend:
I think I will look to incorporate the idea of positive feedback loops into my class so the students can develop an understanding of the process and just how potent something like this can be. The idea of a system building up momentum seems to be pretty close. I'll pay attention for opportunities to plug this in to different areas. Diabetes is one such system which I could discuss now. The spikes in your blood sugar making it difficult to metabolize sugar making you blood sugar much harder to regulate. I'll task my students with keeping alert for similar situations as well.
Evaluate:
These resources are very relevant to the discussions we have about what is happening in today's environment about weather, ocean systems, world systems, and body systems. We owe our students the opportunity to look at the current events in their climate and give them the opportunity to watch how this all plays out in their life times.
3 Colleagues:
Sandi referred to the Climate Change Controversy, which was a very interesting read, from InformationIsBeautiful.net. What an interesting web site. It is really cool how the author puts together the visualizations for different topics. I enjoyed the visualization for 2012 very much. Good stuff!
Dave Sather's resource about the size of various microscopic goodies is totally cool. Cell Size is a great tool that I will be sharing with my students tomorrow.
Janet has some nice extended resources on her 8 response going a bit more into the cryosphere topic. The National Snow and Ice Center has some very interesting information and it is a good bookmark to have on my Delicious page for the students to refer to.
Hey,
ReplyDeleteYou posed a question above "Now what do I do?" I believe you answered your question further down by giving your students the opportunity to explore current events and watch changes happening. Teaching what science is and how science evaluates and predicts problems in real life is one of the most important things we can do as teachers.
I think that you should indeed take a field trip to the Arctic Ocean for a sit-in.
-Eric
Eric Explores Alaska
Just think of your cost-saving measures (hybrid car and efficient home) as doing your part toward saving the whole planet, not just a few bucks : ).
ReplyDeleteThe visuals about Albedo and warming were fascinating.... and I agree that we each need to ask "Now what do [can] I do?"
ReplyDeleteDavid,
ReplyDeleteYour question about the changes from summer ice minimum to the seemingly stable winter maximum are very interesting and may indeed lead to more cooling.
I'll be looking into that some more. You might consider this site: www.whoi.edu. They have a lot of good research on the conveyor. I wrote a little bit about it in my Mod V commentary.