Module VII

Essential Question:

How is Earth's climate connected to its geological, biological and cultural systems?

I, along with my husband and another Romig teacher, have spent two weeks each summer for the last three summers in Eastern Washington participating in the Academy Creating Teacher Scientists (ACTS), funded by the Department of Energy (DOE). Together with 7 teachers from Washington we have focused on sustainability, materials, and biofuels. We toured many "green" buildings and designed ones of our own, toured wind farms, used fuel cells and designed possible vehicles that could use them, and met with many many scientists who taught us what is going on at the cutting edge of science. This past summer we toured through tree and switch grass farms and learned about their future viability as biofuels, and we made our own biofuel out of used donut oil. Through this experience I have learned a great deal about how climate change works, and the ways we may be able to mitigate its' effects in the future.

Our ACTS group at a switch grass farm- B. Walker summer '09

Carbon dioxide in our atmosphere causes global warming through a simple mechanism. It traps the sun’s radiation inside our atmosphere instead of letting it reflect back into space. An easy way to see this is to compare the planets Mercury and Venus. Venus has an atmosphere thick with greenhouse gasses (mostly CO₂), whereas Mercury has a very thin atmosphere. Even though Venus is nearly twice as far from the Sun as Mercury, and receives only 25% of Mercury’s solar irradiance, Venus has a hotter surface (over 460 degrees Celsius compared to 420).

Carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing in our atmosphere due largely to the industrial revolution. Carbon that took millennia to be stored as coal, oil, and natural gas is being burned as fuel and released back into the atmosphere at an alarming rate. The Earth has natural ways to sequester carbon, including the aforementioned fossil fuels, calcium carbonate (formed on the ocean floor from skeletons and shells), and dissolving it in ocean water. All of these take a very long time, and they cannot keep up with the rate at which we are releasing the carbon. In the short term we can plant forests, as trees store large quantities of carbon in their trunks, but this is released when the trees are used for fuel or start to break down and rot.

A video on the teachers’ domain website called capturing carbon, tells the story of a scientist who is designing fake trees to take in carbon dioxide. The best part of the story is that he got the idea from his 12 year-old daughter’s science project. I think that students will find this video very empowering. Most of what we hear and teach on climate change deals with what humans are doing wrong, and it is great to learn about something positive that we are doing, especially someone their age came up with the idea!

Alaska is the canary in the coal mine of climate change. In the past few years we have seen channels open up in the previously iced in northwest passage, and on the north slope snow is later to arrive and earlier to leave. Flowers and berries have started to show up weeks before their normal arrival date, leaving migratory birds hungry right when they should be feeding their new chicks. We have had unprecedented insect outbreaks in our boreal forests, increased wild fires, reduced permafrost, receding glaciers, and dried up lakes, just to name a few of the changes. These changes have been documented both by indigenous and Western methods. There are many videos on the teachers domain website with native Alaskans sharing how their environment has changed, and data is being collected on permafrost depth, population density of different plant and animal species, and temperature changes.

A boat traveling through the previously iced in Northwest Passage

Having respected elders in to share their experiences with climate change, or watching videos of the same, can have a large impact on students, especially those of native Alaskan heritage. Students can also collect first hand research from family members on how Alaskan ecosystems have changed in their lifetimes. Students can also do research on the Internet to see how much temperatures have risen, and to discover other evidence of climate change. Something that is necessary for this to be useful is to teach students how to discover bias in website information and how to evaluate the information they find. I especially liked the two Information is beautiful websites that help bring all the climate change information into perspective – Climate Change Consensus, and Climate Change Contrast. The information found there will help both teachers and students wade through the conflicting and confusing data that both sides of the issue bring up.

In my class we spend a few months learning about Energy through the SEPUP Energy unit. Students learn the different methods of generating electricity and get to try out a few themselves including solar panels and a fuel cell model car (purchased separate from the kit). They get very creative when asked to come up with ways to save energy in their homes and to design new methods of using renewable energy. I think it is important when learning about climate change to focus on the cause and effect as well as the mediation. One of the things that was so successful about Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was that it included steps that every person can take to start to remedy the situation. Students need to feel empowered or they will give up and feel like they can’t do anything to make a difference so there is no use trying.