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Research question:
Is there a greater incidence of extreme weather events in Ireland and how is climate change effecting the ordinary life of Irish children?
Throughout this course, I have become much more aware of the causes of and impacts of climate change across the world. However, children are much more interested in and aware of events in their own lives.
I would ask children to recall weather events in Ireland over the last couple of years. We have become used to warnings, flooding, football games being cancelled, etc, but I think it would be of great benefit to document these over an academic year, as well as recording the temperature and rainfall each day.
Having purchased a weather recording kit, I predict that we should be able to prove the hypothesis that Ireland now experiences warmer, wetter weather, with very little frost or snow but more rain. This measurement of data and longer term analysis will be supplemented by a diary of extreme weather events in Ireland. Ireland is a small enough country that the entire country can be considered relatively local.
Having had two years of wet and stormy winters and springs, the average child is aware of the frustration that comes from cancelled sports games and lunch breaks indoors due to bad weather. Perhaps, if we record, document, analyse and report on this issue, children will not only have taken part in a scientific project, but ultimately gain a real understanding of the impacts of climate change on their lives.
Fair play to Claire, Odhrán and a few others above who persisted with the EO browser. I found it quite difficult to go from the data and images to making observations or conclusions. For me, it is probably just a step beyond what would be possible in the classroom in terms of maintaining children’s attention and interest.
I downloaded the satellite tracker app and am hoping to spot an overpass of one or some of the following satellites tonight.
Cosmos 1500: A Russian Satellite which is apparently measuring oceanographic data.
ISIS 1: A NASA satellite, which seems to be deactivated back in 1990. However, it seems to be a big unit, that was an ionspheric observatory for measuring energy, soft particles, a beacon transmitor and a cosmic noise recorder. I presume it was listening and looking for for sounds of life or radio signals from planets afar.
SL-16 R/B was launched by the USSR back in 1994, and is classified as Brightest. I can’t find out what the USSR used it for, but I’ll keep an eye out for it.
Intercosmos 25, again launched by the Russians in 1991. It only had a useful life of 6 months, and was part of an investigation into the streams of electorns and beams of plasma on the ionsphere and magnetosphere.
Titan 4B R/B , a NASA launch in 1998, again classified as Brightest on n2yo.com, has a Rocket Body. As far as I can see, this is effectively the body of a orbital launch vehicle that’s just spinning around in the sky forever.
After just a quick investigation into the skies above, it is alarming the amount of junk that is spinning around the earth forevermore. Another observation I’ve had is that the space race in the 60s wasn’t just some technological game of oneupsmanship between the two superpowers. Knowledge is power. The moon landings were a sideshow with the main aim being to control the skies above and observe the earth below.
I’m looking forward to spending a little time with this with my class next year, particularly when we are studying the geopolitics of the Cold War later in the year.
Edwina, I think you’re absolutely correct in saying that in school, we can start making small steps in order to raise children’s awareness. The footprint calculator would be interesting. However, I would imagine, given the vast thousands of litres of water needed just to produce a kg of beef, we are most likely under-estimating our true footprint.
In school this year, I tried to rearrange our various football games, in order that we could walk to games or share buses with another team, etc. If we’re burning 100 million barrels of oil per day, I know that 30 litres of diesel isn’t a huge difference, but if it’s done enough times by enough people, it is a start.
I must be honest, when I saw that Home was an hour and a half long, I despaired a little. However, instead of loading the dishwasher, I put it on beside the kitchen sink, and decided to watch the start of it whilst using the hot water generated by the sun through the panels on the roof of my garage. After 20 minutes, I’d all the dishes washed, with less impact on the environment but with my interest in the documentary consuming me.
It was an incredibly well produced piece of film-making. Like Greta’s speech from a number of years ago, there were elements of hopelessness and futility to the small efforts that we might make in school. As Greta said, will using less paper or turning off the lights really make any difference if policy-makers and government don’t change the rules? Progress and the pursuit of wealth is something that the vast vast majority of people will not voluntarily reverse in exchange for the ideology of halting climate change. It has to come from laws and government.
Back in 2019, I stayed a few weeks with my uncle in Southern Florida. Some things struck me during those few weeks; i) Air-conditioning in every home and building cooling the 35 degree air to a comfortable 20, ii) A city law whereby people are not allowed to hang clothes outside on a washing line, so despite the heat, all clothes are dried in tumble driers, iii) No solar panels on any private home.
However, as was pointed out in the final 10 minutes of the documentary, changes are being made. In complete contrast to my first visit to the Mojave desert in 2007, my drive through Nevada and California last year I was struck by the millions of solar panels generating electricity. There were wind turbines in many states. When the USA, who had abandoned the Paris agreement, is making these changes, it is a good sign.
The video clips in this section are incredible and thought-provoking. The various statements of facts about the Polar Ice Shelf, the number of people without clean water, the extinction of animals, etc might be enough to really engage children’s minds.
I’m still unsure how we can hope to make the huge changes to our omissions that can only be achieved by a lot of sacrafices. In Ireland, we still aspire to go on holidays abroad. We are wealthy enough to want to own two cars per family, we enjoy all the myriad little luxuries that mean we emit 90 times more than people from Ethiopia and some other poor countries. The wind turbines that are seen as a solution only have a lifetime of around 20 years. The batteries for the electric cars that are seen as the green solution to private travel depend on intensive mining for lithium and other minerals that are not without severe impact on the environment. With the world population now over 8 billion, it is indeed a monstrous challenge to legislate, educate and actually encourage people to take the options to change their behaviours.
I like Susan’s idea of making the series of lessons more practical. The reality is that my generation (born in the 80s) have had and continue to have very negative effects on the climate without really suffering from climate change to the extent that children born in this century will. We have enjoyed an era of cheap air travel, tourism, excessive burning of fossil fuels, etc without the moral or financial disincentive. The students of today will bear the emotional and financial cost of climate change. It is in their interests, and therefore our responsibility as educators, to guide them in the right direction.
I enjoyed Module 2 on Climate Change. Children are quite familiar with the concept of climate change, but I’ve found over the years that their understanding of the causes of climate change can be mixed. The Paxi video was absolutely excellent. It was very child-centred with the animations and language, but the information was very accurate. There were also multiple opportunities to expand and develop on what was there. For example, there was reference made to greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide being the most widely known. However, children could explore other gases that are in the atmosphere and how the ozone layer works, etc.
The Teal Tool from the WEMC is interesting. I particularly like the way you can focus in on specific regions in the world. After spending a bit of time looking at the projections until 2100, I was struck by the projections for Southern Europe. Whilst projected increases in most countries are about 2 Degrees, in Italy and Spain and some North African countries, temperatures are projected to increase by 4 Degrees. Over the past few years, there have been more extreme heatwaves in Mediterranean countries, and it is a proven fact that many areas of Southern Spain are becoming more prone to desertification.
I became friends with a retired fire chief a couple of years ago who lives on the shores of Lake Ontario. He told me how up until a few years ago, the lake shore would freeze during winter. However, this stopped happening, and no longer does. His holiday cottage very nearly got lost in wildfires a couple of years ago. Last summer, just 3 weeks after I left the city of Kelowna, wildfires caused devastation and huge losses of property. Unfortunately, the empirical evidence and projections are stark. Right across California, Oregon, Washington state and most of Canada, millions of trees burn every year, releasing vast amounts of carbon into the air. Having experienced the vast scale of wildfires in these territories at first hand over the past couple of years has really brought home to me the real and immediate danger many of people on our planet live with right now.
I believe a blended approach of real stories, evidence, data, projections and scientific reports are the best approach to teaching children about climate change. It is for that reason I’m really enjoying this course.
I think Seamus has made an excellent point about the degree to which there is misinformation and widespread denial of climate change from many sources. Anyone can come up with their own anecdotal, isolated piece of evidence to suggest that there is little climate change. It is in the study of large scale, data-driven evidence over a long period of time that we can see real evidence.
I found Dr Liston’s article on STEM interesting. STEM as an acronym is relatively new and there is, as Dr Liston rightfully pointed out, a lot of focus and buzz around the concept presently, that we should be using STEM in schools. However, it really isn’t a new concept at all. STEM is evident in farming, production and building for thousands of years. One need only look at ancient Rome or Athens, or indeed the manufacture of the first cannons used in the siege of Constantinople to see practical use of STEM throughout ancient and more recent history.
In the classrooms of the 1980s and 90s when I was in primary school, we used building blocks, we created things, we had a ‘nature table’ where we tried to grow crops and many other such things. This was STEM, but wasn’t called such. The challenge in the classroom has always been about making subjects more relevant by using real-world applications. This is the Engineering part, as Dr. Liston pointed out.
I have personally found that the JEP programme has been a fantastic multi-disciplinary vehicle for students in 6th Class to utilise theoretical Science, Maths and Business skills to then design, engineer, analyse and improve a product that they themselves then sell to a particular market. Even, for example, in deciding how to price their products, students have unbeknownst to themselves, delved into simultaneous equations, the concept of demand elasticity and a miriad of other concepts that, where I to have taught in theory alone, would not have been of any interest.
I’m fascinated by the idea of the weather station in school. I feel like as a long-term project, over possibly 8+ years, it could be a very interesting study. Of course, Irish people love complaining about the weather, that it never stopped raining for the whole winter, that we had no summer, etc. However, it would be of interest to actually record this. Long-term, the daily measurements of temperature and precipitation could be used to study whether Ireland is really experiencing climate change. There are kits available online for as little as €20, that would be perfectly adequate for children in school to use. I look forward to setting this up for the coming year.
I found the TEAL tool quite complicated. The emissions data, for example, takes no account of population size. I think it would be much more interesting if that was done on a per head of population basis, as opposed to a Gross figure. However, isolating the data and studying it certainly paints a stark picture in terms of the emissions of the richest countries in the world, compared to the developing countries. It is often the poorer countries that suffer most from climate catastrophes, yet it is the richer countries that cause the most emissions. I think letting children loose with TEAL is most likely to cause confusion and boredom, but the data, if interpreted by a teacher, could form part of the bigger picture, without doubt.