There have been discussions at CCC about doing more outreach work in schools and educational organisations and although I don't work in education I work at the local University where we run Teacher Training courses and they asked me to speak about the work of CCC during one of their training sessions on teaching 'Citizenship' where the subject chosen by the trainee teachers was 'Climate Change' - more proof that this is going to be the issue of 2006. I talked a bit about the causes of Climate Change adding facts about 'positive feedbacks' and 'methane hydrates' stored under the sea which don't seem to be widely known, but generally I told them about the work CCC had done organising D3 and gave them the website address and encouraged them to get active. Having done this I am thinking it would be really good to have a link on the main web-site to resources for teachers wanting to present classes around this issue. I am not a teacher myself so it would be really good if there was a teacher out there who could organise this. Thanks.
D3 presentation
Excellent! I think Jonathan has done a Powerpoint presentation which you could find useful. I will put it up under the Resources section as soon as I get hold of it. Also, I, along with Phil, is working on a presentation about D3 that will be more focussed on the campaign. We will put it up as soon as it's ready.
Cathy's documents and contacting the teachers
Cathy has also produced two good briefing documents that have very good graphics (which are currently in ccc-outreach yahoo group file area and need relocating onto this site).
Cathy, we have the emails from the teachers that were at the Oxford meeting. If I emailed their addresses to you, would you like to contact them and find out what they are up to, post Oxford?
Government funding for Climate Change Outreach
The govt is finally getting its act together to fund climate change outreach. The Climate Challenge Communications Fund will be launched on the 26th of January when an application form and further details of the fund criteria will be available from the Climate
Challenge web site at www.climatechallenge.gov.uk.
Applications have to be in by end March! and the money won't be available till 2007. And it's only £6 m over 3 years. And its aims are specifically "not to change behaviour but to engender attitudinal change" !!!! Where's their sense of urgency? See link to pdf at bottom of page for the latest news (last April - so probably worse now) on the real urgency. We in Britain have to reduce emissions by 90% before 2030 at least. If we think that 2 degrees is safe warming - which we don't know - and if we think it's not all going to happen much faster than the models predict - which it always does. see
http://www.climate-crisis.net/downloads/THE_CUTTING_EDGE_CLIMATE_SCIENCE...
But this is an opportunity. Let's pool ideas and get cracking before the expert fund appliers, big NGOs and other money swallowers get their claws on it.
BTW still looking for people who combine expertise with Key Stage 2 kids and a knowledge of Climate Change for ongoing Climate Change Shows project going into Primary Schools, ideally in the S London area. Please put the word about. and visit http://www.save-our-world.org.uk/html/localproj.html for details.
Please feel free to email me on dl@duncanlaw.co.uk
Duncan Law
Teaching resources
While devising our Climate Change Shows with Save our World for Primary Schools I prepared a teacher's pack and a list of resources. It is by no means exhaustive but I will try and post them under 'teaching resources' on the resources page.
I think it would be good to begin a 'critical bibliography' where people can read crits of books articles web-resources and decide whether to use them or not. Should this be a separate chunk of the forum???
Duncan Law
A resource about a resource
Duncan, I agree this is a very important process, and in particular we need to build up data not just on opinions of article etc., but what audiences (thinking particularly of adult audiences) seem to find poignant when it is tried.
E.g. you’ve argued the public wouldn’t relate to my reference to the 100,000 yr long PETM warming event, you preferred to highlight the end-Permian catastrophe. James Lovelock on Monday twice referred to a past 100,000 year long event, but he doesn’t say when! An author on Realclimate.org said the PETM was the key model. But are some audiences moved by the point that the world’s next 100,000 years are at stake?
Michael McCarthy in the same issue of The Independent said “global dimming†“is thought to be holding the global temperature down by several degreesâ€. I’d like to know who does think this, as it would have rather profound implications! I didn’t see any counter-claims among yesterday’s Independent letters responses.
So: I’m saying we really need “a resource about a resourceâ€, collecting different authorities’ views on key claims, as well as different audiences’ reactions to them. I can't immediately think of how to do that in the format of this forum so as to remain easy to use after a large weight of input.
collecting resources
Duncan, Jim, I agree. I have reorganised teaching resources so that we can have a page for each resource if we want one. Cathy, might reorganise it again. Hope this is useful.
global dimming and PETM
I think the 100,000 years comes from the PETM (although there will be a peak well before that - only about 7% of the carbon now emitted will stay in the atmosphere that long) - the end Permian event was so long ago that it is harder to identify precise time-scales. It is also derived from scientists' understanding of how the chemical process 're-absorbs' excess CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans over the geological timescale (silicate weathering, ocean chemistry). This means that one would assume that the time-scale that applied to the PETM will probably have apply and in future apply to all events involving massive carbon releases. Here is a good article David Archer: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer.ms.fate_co2.pdf
Now for global dimming:
Lovelock says that non-soot aerosols keep global temperatures down by several degrees. I don't think this is the scientific consensus. As people on RealClimate say, there is no scientific consensus on this. Indirect effects of aerosols are one of the greatest uncertainties. James Hansen, Director of NASA GISS estimates that their total cooling effects including indirect forcings are about 1.3 Watt per square metre (from 1750-2000). But then you need to offset 0.25 Watt per square metre from soot released by the same processes which release the cooling aerosols. By comparison, the warming effect of the 30% increase in CO2 is 1.5 Watt per square metre. But - the radiative forcing is much easier to assess than what exactly it means for climate sensitivity. Because people don't know how much non-soot aerosols cool the planet, they also don't know how much CO2 is going to warm it. See, for example, here: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v435/n7046/abs/nature03671.html
So, in short, nobody knows if the Independent article is right on this - except that it is certainly wrong in suggesting any certainty.
As for doing our own resource, I think it would be wonderful if anybody from the RealClimate team could be persuaded to double-check it. That way we could be sure that it contained nothing wrong. Of course, all those scientists are rather busy people, but who knows...
And what messages move different people: I don't know. If we worked in public health, we would be demanding good qualitative research. Focus grous, detailed individual interviews, with follow up before and after people have seen a particular video, heard a particular talk, etc. This way we would know which language used, which images, which facts encourage people to take notice and act, and which make people switch off (and I bet different groups will respond differently to the same message). Don't know if anybody has done this type of qualitative research into people's perception of climate change and response to messages (heaps of quantitative data, but that's not always the most useful). If they haven't, then maybe somebody should! One possible use for some of the Defra money for raising awareness???
Almuth
the c-change trust
Hello there - first post on this forum for me. I am the co-founder of a new and different climate change charity called the c-change trust:
http://www.thec-changetrust.org
I am currently looking for available teaching resources/ lesson plans on climate change.
Why?
We are compiling a cd rom for distribution in schools near to the woodlands where we plant the carbon offset trees for - and sometimes with the community.
We already have carbon calculators to based lessons around. We would like to see what is already out there
Anybody's help would be appreciated,
Richard Whistance
admin AT thec-changetrust.org