Creative global warming?

Question

what is a creative way tio teach my class about global warming?

Answer 1

You didn't say the age of your class. This link should help:

http://42explore.com/globewrm.htm

Answer 2

Check out this link.  It's a global warming site for kids, from EPA.

http://www.epa.gov/globalwarming/kids/

Here are a couple more similar ones from other organizations:

http://globalwarmingkids.net/

http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming...

Answer 3

Greenhouse effect kills everything????    PUHLEASE DON'T CONTAMINATE YOUR KIDS WITH THIS NONSENSE!!!!!!

If left up to these bafoons, they would kill all the plant life that feeds off of CO2 and create a problem that didn't exist in the first place....

Do this experiment with your kids....

Take two sealed aquariums....  Have both with the exact same plants and have one with oxygen bled at a rate of two cubic feet per day and the other with CO2 with a rate of two cubic feet per day and see which plants thrive....  Would you do that for them?

Answer 4

To teach them that it is a natural process of the earth which has been changing climates and temperatures for millions of years and not that it is caused by man and we can fix it immediately if we just give Al Gore millions of dollars to pay for his huge houses and his several suv's and private plane.

That would be a great start!

Answer 5

One thing they'll understand and may have heard of is the change in ocean levels as the polar caps melt.  You'll hear of people trying to calculate this which is really kind of silly.  There is a difference in the volume of ice compared to water but also a difference in the volume of fresh water compared to salt water.  That makes it a less than straightforward calculation.  On the other hand, the polar caps have melted before with the natural glacial cycles, although usually not completely.  The big difference is before it's taken thousands of years, while it looks like it will take less than 200 this time.  Anyway the rise has been around 60 meters each time, and there's an abundance of maps showing it at different epochs.  They should be able to relate this to current population centers and so forth.  I also put a link to an article about Mary Anning.  She was a very poor British child who found the first skeleton of an Icthyosaur in Britain.  She also found Plesiosaurs and Mosasaurs.  As a young woman she was acknowledged as Britain's foremost paleontologist, even though she had no formal education.  With the help of her mother she supported her family in this way.  Near the end of her life she unearthed the first skeleton of a pterodactyl, the flying dinosaur, only newly discovered at that time.  It is a wonderful story for children.

The other part is less cheery, but more important.  Early in the earth's history all the land masses were one giant continent.  Life had made it onto land and thrived there for the first 300 million years or so after gaining a foothold.  Large animals similar to dinosaurs had evolved.  Then suddenly, in only a few thousand years, almost all life vanished, and the main form of life was once again the single celled green plant, algae.  There have been other mass extinctions, like the one 60 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs, but none that came close to this.  Until recently no one had a theory that came near explaining this unique event from a natural cause.  Since the development of computer weather and climate modeling it's been possible to develop a plausible explanation that most people accept at least until a better one comes along.

Since the "greenhouse effect" was the only known natural process that could alter both the land and oceans enough to kill everything it was chosen as a possible cause.  The  only known source that could provide enough greenhouse gas and ash was volcanoes, lots and lots of volcanoes.  The computer models allowed the scientists to estimate how much greenhouse gases, volcanic ash, soot, etc would be needed to reach the temperature needed for "the great dying", and do it in such a short time (less than 10,000 years).  This estimate allowed them to estimate how many volcanoes were needed.  The answer was thousands of volcanoes, several thousand square miles of them erupting continuously for about 8,000 years.  Interestingly enough, there was a huge area in Western Siberia that was volcanically active precisely then and for that amount of time.  That still would only raise the temperature about 1/2 of what was needed to explain the extinctions.  Then petroleum engineers contributed something new.  The bottoms of the oceans are littered with methane crystals called clathrates.  These form when the methane from volcanic vents combines with water at very cold temperature and high pressure.  They are being considered as a fuel source if they could be mined.  The temperature rise from the volcanoes was enough to raise the ocean temperatures to a point where the crystals began to melt.  They would have rapidly turned to methane, a strong greenhouse gas.  It would only have required about another 1000 years to melt them, and the temperature would have doubled from the level caused by the volcanoes.  The first phase (the volcanoes) would have killed a lot of life, then the second phase (the clathrates) would have done the rest.  This scenario fit the climate models and the fossil record exactly.

Study points

> They may hear people say one volcano creates more greenhouse gases than all people.  That's plumb silly.

>In just over 100 years humans have released enough CO2, methane, water vapor, soot, and other greenhouse materials to raise the temperature about 1/2 of what it took thousands of volcanoes thousands of years to accomplish.

>We have far more industrial activity today than most of those 100 years.

>A good illustration would be to collect or grow some algae.  If you're not near a stream or lake, just put some water in a jar and leave it on the windowsill a few weeks.  They can see what the dominant for of life looked like at the end of the Permian extinction.

>If you have access to an old time light meter like photographers used to use, you can bounce a beam of light off a mirror and measure it, then do it with 1,2,3 panes of glass in between to show how the greenhouse affect creates global warming.  A small hole in a windowshade on a sunny day works best.

Answer 6

teach them both sides of the story.. if its natural or mad made, after that let them discuss it as a class and decide which side they are on then give your opinion

Answer 7

Teach them that there is nothing definitive about it.  Much of it is speculative based on bad science and assumptions.  If you want to be objective, teach both sides of the issue.  That some believe it's a man-made crisis, and others believe it's natually occuring phenomena within the cycle of the planet.  School is for education, not indocrination.

Answer 8

Make sure your kids are told that its a hugely complex subject and they shouldn't be too easily swayed either way, but also tell them that most scientific organisations are now pushing for action against global warming.

This guy is a good inspiration of how you can make climate change sound interesting (he's extremely knowlegable about it, yet can make people sit through 90 minutes of videos about it with ease). - http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=mF_anaVcCX...

They'll engage more with it (if they're young) if they see the possible dangers arising from it.