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Artificial Intelligence could save lives by warning where a hurricane will hit land much sooner than traditional forecasting systems, researchers say.

A new AI tool from Google DeepMind predicted where September's hurricane Lee would make landfall in Canada three days ahead of existing methods.

Weather forecasts have become much more accurate over the decades.

But AI's speed and ability to analyse past events to make predictions make it a game-changer, say scientists.

An accurate weather forecast is useful to tell you what to wear when you go out in the morning but - much more importantly - can forewarn us of extreme weather like storms, floods and heatwaves, giving communities crucial time to prepare.

However, traditional weather forecasts take vast amounts of computing power.

They involve creating estimates of hundreds of factors including air pressure, temperature, wind speeds and humidity at different levels of the atmosphere around the globe.

A new AI tool called GraphCast created by Google DeepMind outperforms the European Medium Range Weather Forecasting model - one the best in the world - on more than 90% of those factors, according to a peer-reviewed paper published by DeepMind in the journal Science.

GraphCast produces its forecasts in less than a minute, using a fraction of the computing power of traditional forecasting methods because it takes a very different approach.

Weather forecasts prepare us for a rainy day out, but they also warn of potentially deadly weather events

Traditional weather forecasting involves taking measurements of what is happening in the atmosphere right now.

The best models take in hundreds of millions of readings from around the world every day.

These come from a huge range of sources including weather stations, satellites, balloons sent up in the atmosphere, buoys in the ocean - even readings taken by sensors on the noses of commercial jet planes.

"We then use our model to select which are going to be the most important," explains Matthew Chantry, of the European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMRWF) who says about 10 million of the measurements will be used for one of its forecasts.

This ocean of data is fed into a supercomputer to be processed by programmes which can do quadrillions (a thousand trillion) of calculations every second. These use complex equations to simulate what happens in the Earth's atmosphere to predict how the weather will change and evolve over time.

This method has been extraordinarily successful. As the models have improved and the computers have got more powerful over the decades, weather forecasts have got significantly more accurate.

But these numerical weather prediction (NWP) models, as they are known, take vast amounts of computer resources, using some of the biggest supercomputers in the world and typically take hours to produce their forecasts.

A new approach

AI shortcuts much of this effort. It does not try to model how the world works.

Instead, GraphCast uses machine learning to digest vast quantities of historical data - including the output of the ECMRWF model - to learn how weather patterns evolve.

It uses this knowledge to predict how the weather now is likely to change in the future.

And it is proving very effective.

"The main advantage of this AI approach is that it's extremely accurate," said Remy Lam of Google DeepMind, who helped create the weather tool.

"It learns from decades of data and is able to be more accurate than the industry gold standard," he says.

And, because it does not try to solve complex equations, it can make its forecasts very quickly and using much less computing power.

GraphCast's forecasts are not as detailed as those produced by the ECMRWF but it is better at predicting severe events like extreme temperatures and at tracking the path of big storms.

Hurricane Lee - an early prediction of landfall

It accurately predicted where Hurricane Lee, a storm that hit the Atlantic coast of the US and Canada in September, would make landfall, for example.

Deep Mind's AI tool predicted its path nine days ahead, the ECMRWF only managed six days ahead.

But the success of GraphCast does not mean we can shut down the supercomputers and rely on AI instead.

Even Remy Lam from Google DeepMind says that will not happen.

'Huge leaps forward'

"We are standing on the shoulders of giants to build those models", he says.

Rather than replacing traditional weather forecasts AI models will complement them, he believes.

"AI models are trained from data and that data is generated by traditional approaches, so we still need the traditional approach to gather data to train the model," says Mr Lam.

GraphCast is open source which means Google DeepMind is sharing the details of the design so anyone can use the technology.

Many technology companies and weather and climate organisations around the world are designing their own AI weather prediction tools.

The Met Office, the UK's national weather service, is working with the Turing Institute, the country's data science centre to explore the potential for AI to improve weather forecasting, for example.

"Weather forecasts derived from artificial intelligence and machine learning are taking huge leaps forward," acknowledges Prof Simon Vosper, the Met Office's Director of Science.

But he warns climate change will limit the predictive power of AI based tools.

"We are seeing new climate-related weather extremes, such as last year's 40C temperatures in the UK that would haven't been realised in former times", says Prof Vosper.

Hurricane Otis became a category five storm in just 24 hours

The way extreme weather systems evolve may also be changing.

Hurricane Otis rapidly intensified from a tropical storm into the strongest category 5 hurricane over just 24 hours in October before making devastating landfall on the coast of southern Mexico.

Climate scientists warn rising ocean temperatures are likely to make this process of rapid intensification of storms more common.

"So it is fair to question whether AI-based systems are able to pick up new extremes if these systems have only been 'trained' on previous weather conditions," suggests Prof Vosper.

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AI could predict hurricane landfall sooner - report

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A Google DeepMind tool predicted where one would hit three days ahead of existing methods.

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A useful site on economics, business and social issues

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A useful site on economics, business and social issues

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https://freakonomics.com/podcast/gas-stations/

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Rebelion vs. strike

to rebel against sth vs. to protest against

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Starbucks faces walkout at hundreds of US stores

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The action comes amid a bitter labour fight between at the coffee giant.

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The Glass Ceiling vs. The Glass Cliff

The glass cliff is a closely related term, but refers to a phenomenon wherein women tend to be promoted to positions of power during times of crises, when failure is more likely. This could occur in fields as diverse as finance, politics, technology, and academia.

While the more common glass ceiling presents a barrier to reaching the highest executive levels within their respective organizations, the glass cliff addresses the tendency to place women who have broken through it into precarious positions, making it likely their performance will falter, as if they are at risk of falling off a cliff.

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidential election in 2008, which was the height of the Great Recession, she might have been seen as the victim of the glass cliff. The term was coined by professors Michelle K. Ryan and Alexander Haslam of the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, in 2004. Ryan and Haslam documented this phenomenon extensively in a study of Great Britain’s FTSE 100 companies.9

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The Glass Ceiling vs. The Glass Cliff

The glass cliff is a closely related term, but refers to a phenomenon wherein women tend to be promoted to positions of power during times of crises, when failure is more likely. This could occur in fields as diverse as finance, politics, technology, and academia.

While the more common glass ceiling presents a barrier to reaching the highest executive levels within their respective organizations, the glass cliff addresses the tendency to place women who have broken through it into precarious positions, making it likely their performance will falter, as if they are at risk of falling off a cliff.

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidential election in 2008, which was the height of the Great Recession, she might have been seen as the victim of the glass cliff. The term was coined by professors Michelle K. Ryan and Alexander Haslam of the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, in 2004. Ryan and Haslam documented this phenomenon extensively in a study of Great Britain’s FTSE 100 companies.9

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What Is the Glass Ceiling?

The term glass ceiling refers to a metaphorical invisible barrier that prevents certain individuals from being promoted to managerial- and executive-level positions within an organization or industry. The phrase is commonly used to describe the difficulties faced by women and minorities when trying to move to higher roles in a male-dominated corporate hierarchy. The barriers are most often unwritten, meaning that these individuals are more likely to be restricted from advancing through accepted norms and implicit biases rather than defined corporate policies.

Key Takeaways

Understanding the Glass Ceiling

Marilyn Loden first coined the phrase "glass ceiling" while speaking as a panelist at the 1978 Women's Exposition in New York. As a fill-in for her employer's only female executive, Loden was invited to discuss how women were to blame for the barriers preventing them from advancing in their careers. Instead, she spoke about deeper, ignored issues that historically kept women from occupying positions of authority: the glass ceiling.

This concept was later popularized in a 1986 Wall Street Journal article discussing the corporate hierarchy and how invisible barriers seemed to prevent women from advancing in their careers past a certain level. In 2015, the publication reported (quoting Gay Bryant, former editor of Working Woman magazine) that the concept goes back to the 1970s and may have originated with two women at Hewlett-Packard. The concept expanded in more contemporary times to include minorities in addition to women.

The equality gap varies between countries and may be driven by cultural stances against women and minority groups from participating in the workforce. Companies in the United States have responded to the equality gap by focusing on measures to increase diversity. This includes hiring personnel specifically tasked with ensuring that women and minorities see improved representation in management-level positions. By focusing on policies that reduce or eliminate the glass ceiling, companies can ensure that the most qualified candidates hold decision-making positions.

In 2021, women accounted for 56.8% of the labor force in the U.S. But when it came to chief executive positions, women held only 29.1% of these roles, and 85.7% of chief executives identified as white, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

History of the Glass Ceiling

The U.S. Department of Labor launched the Glass Ceiling Commission in 1991 in response to the growing concern over barriers preventing women and minorities from advancing. It was charged with identifying the barriers that exist and policies that companies adopted or could undertake to increase diversity at managerial and executive levels.

The commission found that qualified women and minorities were being denied the opportunity to compete for or win decision-making positions. It also found that the perceptions of both employees and employers often included stereotypes that held women and minorities in a negative light.

When Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008 and 2016, she repeatedly spoke of her goal of shattering the "highest, hardest glass ceiling" by becoming America's first female president. Vice President Kamala Harris shattered the second-highest glass ceiling in the U.S. when she became the first female and first Black and South Asian Vice President on Jan. 20, 2021. She was also the first woman and first Black and South Asian attorney general of California, as well as the first Black woman to be elected district attorney of San Francisco.

41

The Glass Ceiling vs. The Glass Cliff

The glass cliff is a closely related term, but refers to a phenomenon wherein women tend to be promoted to positions of power during times of crises, when failure is more likely. This could occur in fields as diverse as finance, politics, technology, and academia.

While the more common glass ceiling presents a barrier to reaching the highest executive levels within their respective organizations, the glass cliff addresses the tendency to place women who have broken through it into precarious positions, making it likely their performance will falter, as if they are at risk of falling off a cliff.

Had Hillary Clinton won the presidential election in 2008, which was the height of the Great Recession, she might have been seen as the victim of the glass cliff. The term was coined by professors Michelle K. Ryan and Alexander Haslam of the University of Exeter, United Kingdom, in 2004. Ryan and Haslam documented this phenomenon extensively in a study of Great Britain's FTSE 100 companies.

Example of the Glass Ceiling

There are numerous examples of instances where individuals encountered and have been able to shatter the glass ceiling. As noted above, Hillary Clinton became the first woman to secure the Democratic nomination when she ran for president during the 2016 election.

As noted above, Kamala Harris shattered the glass ceiling when she became the first woman to be elected as U.S. Vice President under President Joe Biden. She is also the first Black and South Asian person to be elected to the position as well. Harris was officially sworn in as Vice President on Jan. 20, 2021.

Janet Yellen became the first female Treasury secretary after being nominated by President Biden and sworn in on Jan. 26, 2021. This isn't the first glass ceiling Yellen has broken either. She also served as the first woman to head the Federal Reserve, a role she held during President Barack Obama's administration.

What Does the Phrase Glass Ceiling Mean?

The glass ceiling is a metaphor that refers to the barrier that marginalized people, such as women and minorities, encounter when seeking career advancements.

What Is an Example of the Glass Ceiling?

There are many examples where individuals have broken the glass ceiling. Kamala Harris shattered a glass ceiling when she became the first woman Vice President of the United States. She is also the first Black person and the first person of South Asian descent to be elected to the role of Vice President.

From the first U.S. presidential election in 1789 until the early 21st-century, no Black person served as president. It was not until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that all Black people could vote. However, in 2008, Barack Obama became the first African American to be elected President of the United States.

What Does It Mean to Break the Glass Ceiling?

Breaking the glass ceiling means overcoming the barriers set to prevent access to advancement. Breaking the glass ceiling also includes removing barriers for others experiencing the same struggles.

Where Did the Saying "Break the Glass Ceiling" Come From?

The term glass ceiling was coined by Marilyn Loden, a New York telephone company manager, during a 1978 Women's Exposition.

Does the Glass Ceiling Still Exist?

The glass ceiling still exists across various industries for different groups of people. Men still occupy most of the executive positions in corporations and other positions of power. Although there is more attention given to these barriers, they are still very much present in the workforce.

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The Glass Ceiling: Definition, History, Effects, and Examples

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The glass ceiling is an invisible systemic barrier that prevents women and minorities from rising to senior-level positions within an organization.

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to put your name down for - to sign up for

a spare pen - a pen you are not using

protagonists - key characters

the turn of the century - the end of one century and the beginning of another

to track the development of - to follow and observe the development

a common storyline

a cholera outbreak

permanently crippled - to not be able to walk

to strike up a friendship - to become friends

the basic outline

omniscient narrator - someone who tells a story acting as if they were always present and know everything

to be pitched at - to be addressed to (the type of intended audience)

youth-oriented

ideally suited for (teenagers)

Garden of Eden

to be steeped in secrecy - to be riddled with, to be full of

universal concepts - themes

dark crammed rooms of the manor house

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telltale - indicative, significant

telling (adj.) - more or less the same meaning

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A list of things to do to avoid misinformation

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A list of things to do to avoid misinformation

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to giggle, to faint - to lose consciousness, flight, to freak someone out (informal) - to make s.o. feel angry, excited, etc.; traumatic, sinister; to pose a threat; to trigger

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Listen to the extracts from different radio programmes talking about fear and phobias, and do the exercises to practise and improve your listening skills.

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What are potential consequences when fake news goes viral? Do you think you could spot fake news or would you be fooled? Why or why not? 

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What are potential consequences when fake news goes viral? Do you think you could spot fake news or would you be fooled? Why or why not? 

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A lot of dissension has arisen in recent times around the topic of misinformation. Indeed, the freedom of speech has always been regarded as a cornerstone of democracy. However, some accounts of fake news and manipulative sources of information have triggered the need to curb harassment users. In that sense, literacy might be in the process of developing into the ability to navigate media that is chock full of click bait hoaxes. What is more, it is essential for young learners and adults alike to be able to draw a distinction between credible and misleading content in order to prevent being caught up or dazzled into the wrong consumer choice. The consequences can be devastating as not only their opinions but also their own safety can be at stake.

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dissension, a cornerstone of democracy, to curb harassment users, literacy, chock full of click bait hoaxes, inadvertently, to draw a distinction, to discern, credible

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tips for sorting out
a hot tip
alert
to read broadly
the tide has turned
to encourage
an onslaught of; (to get trolled)
rejecting alternative points of view; censorship
legitimate pushback (satire websites)
reputable news sources
grounded in truth
to do a disservice to the readers
downright false
greater awareness

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But as it turns out, the internet is also teeming with bogus information sites that masquerade as real news. And in the run-up to the 2016 election, many of these hoax news posts spread like wildfire. [Snopes, a fact-checking site, maintains a comprehensive and growing list of fake news outlets.]

President-elect Donald Trump's contempt for "the mainstream media," an industry he uniformly dismisses as a corrupt, lying "bunch of phony lowlifes," has further obscured the boundaries between fact and fiction. So, too, has his use of Twitter to widely disseminate unsubstantiated allegations and, on numerous occasions, downright falsehoods.

Even President Obama weighed in (while still president), assailing the rapid accumulation of fake news as a "dust cloud of nonsense."

"If we are not serious about facts, if we can't discriminate between serious arguments and propaganda, than we have problems," he said at a recent press conference.

Fake news, real profit, serious consequences

In fact, a recent BuzzFeed News analysis of election-related web articles published in the three months before Election Day found that the 20 most popular fake news stories generated significantly more engagement on Facebook (shares, reactions, comments) than did the top 20 real news stories from major news outlets like the Washington Post and New York Times.

And of course, the more engagement, the more ad revenue; a major financial incentive for unethical folks with overactive imaginations to whip up ever more outlandish, attention-grabbing conspiracy theories.

According to the analysis, the majority of the most popular and prolific purveyors of fake news -- websites like Ending the Fed and InfoWars -- are either full-on hoax sites or "hyperpartisan" right-wing platforms that creatively obscure the truth (a handful of left-wing sites were also in the mix).

Strangely, BuzzFeed also found more than 100 U.S. politics websites run out of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, usually authored by web-savvy, entrepreneurial young people -- including teenagers -- trying to make a fast buck by creatively duping American media consumers.

One recent notably viral fake news headline espoused an utterly baseless conspiracy theory that a Washington, D.C. family-friendly pizza place was actually a front for a child sex ring run by Hillary Clinton's campaign manager. Michael Flynn, Jr., son of retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn -- Trump's pick for national security adviser, and a Clinton-related conspiracy theorist himself -- further promoted the story, while serving on Trump's transition team, by sharing it with his thousands of Twitter followers. The younger Flynn has since been removed from the transition team due to his aggressive trolling habit.

But the bogus rumor, which became known as Pizzagate, had some serious ramifications when a man armed with an assault rifle entered the restaurant on Sunday, Dec. 4 and fired several shots in what he later told police was an attempt to "self-investigate" the claim (there were no reported injuries).

And no, you really can't make this stuff up.

To what degree the overall proliferation of fake news affected the election results remains unclear. But it almost certainly did have some impact, particularly on undecided voters.

After initially deflecting criticism that his company bore some level of responsibility for the dramatic spread of political misinformation, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a post (on Facebook, of course) less than a week after the election, stating: "We have already launched work enabling our community to flag hoaxes and fake news, and there is more we can do here."

Several days later, both Google and Facebook announced new efforts to prevent identifiable fake news sites from using their respective advertising networks to generate revenue.

Fake news is nothing new

Fake news has long had a presence in America's media landscape: Since the colonial period, various news outlets have played fast and loose with the truth for commercial or political gain. A particularly notorious era of journalistic misinformation emerged in the 1890s when competing newspapers owned by rival media titans William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer fought mercilessly for the attention of readers by liberally embellishing stories to sell more papers, a style that became known as yellow journalism.

But the sheer volume of information at our fingertips (and thumbs) today, and the ease with which we can inadvertently spread falsehoods with the simple click of a "share" button, puts us in uncharted territory.

Impressionable young minds

Young people are among the most vulnerable and impressionable consumers of this kind of misinformation, according to a recently released study by Stanford's History Education Group. Researchers collected nearly 8,000 responses from middle school, high school and college students -- aka "digital natives" -- around the country who were asked to evaluate online information presented in tweets, comments and articles.

"Overall, young people's ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak," the report states.

"Our 'digital natives' may be able to flit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels, they are easily duped."

The researchers were consistently "shocked" by the number of students who couldn't effectively evaluate the credibility of the information they were presented with.

More than 80 percent of middle schoolers in the study believed that "native ads" resembling articles were actually real news stories, even though they were labeled "sponsored content."

High school students were asked to evaluate a post from a popular image-sharing site featuring a picture of unusually formed daisies and titled "Fukushima Nuclear Flowers: Not much more to say, this is what happens when flowers get nuclear birth defects." Despite the complete lack of attribution or evidence, most students accepted the picture at face value.

Fukushima Nuclear Flowers

"They didn't ask where it came from. They didn't verify it. They simply accepted the picture as fact," Sam Wineburg, a history and education professor at Stanford University, and the lead author of the study, told NPR in a recent interview.

Many of the high school students in the study also couldn't tell the difference between real and fake news sources in their Facebook feed.

Meanwhile, most college students in the study didn't suspect any kind of bias in a tweet from a left-leaning activist group that cited a public opinion survey on gun ownership and background checks.

New polling shows the @NRA is out of touch with gun owners and their own members https://t.co/wm6weuaCbd #NRAfail pic.twitter.com/y4K4r5EcYX

- MoveOn.org (@MoveOn) November 18, 2015

It's incumbent on educators, the study authors note, to show students how to be more discerning about the information they consume. In other words, how to identify fact from fiction and not to be a sucker.

"But the only way we can deal with these kinds of issues are through educational programs and recognizing that the kinds of things that we worry about, the ability to determine what is reliable and not reliable, that is the new basic skill in our society," said Wineburg.

Along those lines, WNYC's On the Media made this nifty cheat sheet, which combined with an array of excellent, non-partisan political fact-check sites, provide the necessary tools to weed out the fake and focus on what's really going on.

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The Honest Truth about Fake News ... and How Not to Fall for It (with Lesson Plan) | KQED

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But as it turns out, the internet is also teeming with bogus information sites that masquerade as real news. And in the run-up to the 2016 election, many of these hoax news posts spread like wildfire. [Snopes, a fact-checking site, maintains a comprehensive and growing list of fake news outlets.]

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Cancel culture - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STHIYh5HIVM
Misinformation types - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7TJbaF8o9o
How to distinguish between fake and real news - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYc-hd1QSwA

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Listen to the radio interview about how false information spreads and do the exercises to practise and improve your listening skills.

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-985b9374-596e-4ae6-aa04-7fbcae4cb7ee

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How much warmer is your city? - BBC News

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Climate change: Find out how much the area around your city has already warmed and what may lie ahead

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Please find some useful phrases from this article and write them down. Can you paraphrase them in your own words?

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Please find some useful phrases from this article and write them down. Can you paraphrase them in your own words?

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https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46384067

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Climate change is set to cause major changes across the world: sea levels will rise, food production could fall and species may be driven to extinction.

The UN has warned that the world needs to limit climate change to below 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. But scientists say that keeping to the 1.5C target will require "rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes" in all aspects of society.

So how warm has the world got and what can we do about it?

The global average temperature for the first 10 months of 2018 was 0.98C above the levels of 1850-1900, according to five independently maintained global data sets.

(If you can't see this chart tap or click here)

The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years, with 2015-2018 making up the top four, the WMO says.

If this trend continues, temperatures may rise by 3-5C by 2100.

One degree may not sound like much, but, according to the IPCC, if countries fail to act, the world will face catastrophic change - sea levels will rise, ocean temperatures and acidity will increase and our ability to grow crops, such as rice, maize and wheat, would be in danger.

Almost 400 all-time high temperatures were set in the northern hemisphere during the summer of 2019.

Records were broken in 29 countries for the period between 1 May and 30 August. A third of the all-time high temperatures were in Germany, followed by France and the Netherlands.

These European records were set amid heatwaves across the continent that sent temperatures soaring in June and July.

Over the period shown on the map below (May to August 2019), the yellow dots show where a heat record was broken on a given date, pink indicates places that were the hottest they had ever been in the month shown, and dark red represents a place that was the hottest since records began.

More than 30 all-time records were broken in the US, according to the Berkeley Earth data. In Japan, where 11 people died as a result of the summer heatwave, 10 all-time temperature highs were set.

If we add up all the promises to cut emissions made by countries that are party to the Paris climate agreement, the world would still warm by more than 3C by the end of this century.

Over the past few years, climate scientists have shifted the definition of what they believe is the "safe" limit of climate change.

For decades, researchers argued the global temperature rise must be kept below 2C by the end of this century to avoid the worst impacts.

Countries signing up to the Paris agreement pledged to keep temperatures "well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C".

But scientists now agree that we actually need to keep temperature rises to below 1.5C.

The countries emitting the most greenhouse gases by quite a long way are China and the US. Together they account for more than 40% of the global total, according to 2017 data from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre and PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

US environmental policy has shifted under the Trump administration, which has pursued a pro-fossil fuels agenda.

President Donald Trump has begun the process of withdrawing the US from the Paris climate change agreement.

Mr Trump said the deal struck in 2015 would disadvantage US businesses and workers.

And it's the faster-growing cities that are most at risk, including megacities like Lagos in Nigeria and Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Some 84 of the world's 100 fastest-growing cities face "extreme" risks from rising temperatures and extreme weather brought on by climate change.

The extent of Arctic sea ice has dropped in recent years. It reached its lowest point on record in 2012.

The Arctic Ocean may be ice-free in the summer as soon as the 2050s, unless emissions are reduced, the committee has said.

The extent of Arctic sea ice in 2019 was tied with 2007 and 2016 as the second lowest on record. The maximum extent, reached in March 2019, was tied with 2007 as the seventh lowest in the 40-year satellite record.

While governments need to make big changes - individuals can play a role too.

Scientists say we all have to make major changes to our lifestyles, in order to avoid severely damaging climate change.

The IPCC says we need to: buy less meat, milk, cheese and butter; eat more locally sourced seasonal food - and throw less of it away; drive electric cars but walk or cycle short distances; take trains and buses instead of planes; use videoconferencing instead of business travel; use a washing line instead of a tumble dryer; insulate homes; demand low carbon in every consumer product.

Scientists say we ought to eat less meat because of the carbon emissions the meat industry produces, as well as other negative environmental impacts.

For example, beef cattle raised on deforested land produces 12 times more greenhouse gas emissions than those reared on natural pastures.

Crucially, the analysis shows that meat with the lowest environmental impact still creates more greenhouse gas emissions than growing vegetables and cereal crops in the least environmentally-friendly way.

By Nassos Stylianou, Clara Guibourg, Daniel Dunford, Lucy Rodgers, David Brown and Paul Rincon

Correction 24 February 2020: A previous version of this story said that "the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet is to modify your diet to include less meat". This has been amended to now refer to "one of the biggest," taking account of different individual lifestyles and circumstances. We have also replaced the in-line link with a research article on 'The global impacts of food production'.

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Climate change: Where we are in seven charts and what you can do to help

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We look at how hot the world has got and what can we can all do to tackle global warming.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy3gMVGwjuc

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Climate change – living on the water | DW Documentary

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What would you answer to this letter if you were Mr.Colbyn?

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What would you answer to this letter if you were Mr.Colbyn?

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Around the world renewable energy use is on the rise and these alternative energy sources could hold the key to combating climate change. What is renewable energy?

Renewable energy is generated from sources that naturally replenish themselves and never run out. The most common sources are solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and biomass. Over 80% of the total energy consumed by humans is derived from fossil fuels. However, renewables are the fastest-growing source of energy in the world

Renewable energy has many benefits. First, it can combat climate change because it creates no direct greenhouse gas emissions. The only emissions that they produce are indirect meaning those that result from manufacturing parts installation operation and maintenance but even those are minimal.

Second renewable energy can decrease pollution and therefore reduce threats to our health. Wind, solar and hydroelectric systems create no air pollution emissions and geothermal and biomass energy systems emissions are much lower than non-renewable energy sources.

Third renewable energy is a reliable source of power because renewable energy sources are well renewable they will never run out. Once built renewable facilities cost fairly little to operate and the fuel is often free. As a result, renewable energy prices tend to be stable over time.

While renewable energy has many advantages it is not without downsides. It is difficult for renewable energy sources to generate power on the same large scale as fossil fuels. Building wind farms and dams can disrupt the wildlife and migration patterns and lead to ecological destruction.

Both solar and wind energy are intermittent they only generate power while the sun is shining or while the wind is blowing. Batteries can store excess energy for later use however they are often costly.

While renewable energy presents some challenges it also offers an environmentally friendly alternative to the greenhouse gas emissions and pollution of fossil fuels and as advances in technology make renewable energy more accessible affordable and efficient an end to climate change could be within our reach.

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https://www.wordclouds.co.uk/

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https://dictionary.cambridge.org/plus/wordlist/48409087_vasko-english-

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Vasko English | Cambridge Dictionary +Plus word list

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Learn new words with free word lists and quizzes.

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Think about your ideal school. Would you be capable of creating a poster promoting it with a slogan?
Exercise 3 from the link - https://www.esleschool.com/future-schools/#h5pbookid=1460&section=top&chapter=h5p-interactive-book-chapter-3f1d5758-fb0a-4eb2-aad3-e5d324c6d162

https://www.esleschool.com/future- schools/#h5pbookid=1460&section=top&chapter=h5p-interactive-book-chapter-3f1d5758-fb0a-4eb2-aad3-e5d324c6d162

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Top 5 Benefits of Technology in the Classroom

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Technology has transformed life as we know it, and the classroom looks much different than it did 50—or even 10—years ago.

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Schools wishing to take propaganda, misinformation and fake news seriously as an educational or social issue face many challenges

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Schools wishing to take propaganda, misinformation and fake news seriously as an educational or social issue face many challenges

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What makes technology so important in education?

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What makes technology so important in education?

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I think the biggest challenges facing education today is to make sure that every child in Australia has an equal opportunity to develop their potential. How do we create people who can be in future workplaces?

The types of jobs that the big companies that they are looking for the more social skills, soft skills
the problem-solving skills. Who can manage change who can handle uncertainty who can think creatively. But most of all they’ll be human. They’ll be able to be creative and they come up with ideas that machines will never come up with.

The four C’s are collaborating, communication, critical thinking and creativity. The student of the future essentially is going to have to be really good at things that computers ain’t. These students who are graduating will be doing 17 jobs across five different fields. The student of the future will be very good at navigating the unknown. Technology now is vital it’s the way that students understand the world.

The role of technology in the future of education brings people together to solve complex problems both collaboratively and they need to be creative.

Joy and delight and curiosity are absolutely intrinsic to kids doing well at school. It’s love interpersonal
relationship, it’s that sense yeah I felt like I belonged in your class. Unless computers get pretty good pretty quickly I don’t see teachers going anywhere for a while.

Here it’s where we start the future it’s how we create the society that we’re all going to be living in. It’s not about bringing up ‘mini-mes’ it’s about actually bringing up individuals who realize who they are
you.

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soft skills - communication skills, more connected to your job; social skills are more general
to handle uncertainty - to manage cha
vital - something essential to life; essential
essentials - the bare necessities

intrinsic/extrinsic;  inner/outer;  innate (that you are born with) - generally INSIDE/OUTSIDE

tend to - to have a tendency to; I tend to be late for my meetings. - It is often the case that I am late for my meetings.

I’m mostly for it. - Generally speaking, in most cases I agree with it.

to be tempted to изкушавам се да