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Why our students need to learn more about the world | Ada McKim | TEDxMoncton

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What to look for when reading a current event

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What to look for when reading a current event

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Thousands of students across Europe protest to demand action on Climate Change!

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On Feb. 15, thousands of students across Europe walked out of schools in a coordinated protest to demand action on climate change. These demonstrations were inspired by an unlikely role model: Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old activist, who has been cutting class weekly since September to stage sit-ins at the Swedish Parliament and demand government action to address climate change.

In December 2018, Greta was invited to give a speech at the United Nations Climate Change COP24 Conference. Watch it below, and then answer the following questions:

* What stands out to you about Greta?

* Which lines in her speech did you find the most impactful and why?

* Do you think youth activists, like Greta, can make a difference in the world? Why or why not?
Now, read the article, "Becoming Greta: 'Invisible Girl' to Global Climate Activist, With Bumps Along the Way," and answer the following questions:
1. The author begins the article by writing, "It's complicated being Greta." What evidence does she give in the following paragraphs to support that statement? Why is being Greta so complicated?

2. What cause is Greta advocating and how is she promoting it?

3. What are some of Greta's most notable character traits? How do these traits make her an effective leader? According to her, how do they also make being a leader hard?

4. Why did Greta become an activist for climate change?

5. Greta has suffered from depression throughout her adolescence. What has helped her through it?
Finally, tell us more about what you think:
6. What kind of impact has her activism had on her family and the world?

7. How has Greta's public role changed her life? Give three examples.

What do you think about Greta and her fight to stop climate change?

What issues or causes are you most passionate about? If you were to organize a campaign to bring attention to one of them, what might that look like? What changes would you be willing to make in your personal life to support your cause? How could you spread awareness about the issue to your family, your community and the world? What actions might you take to bring about change?

What impact do you think your efforts could have on your own life? On the world?

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Learning With: 'Becoming Greta: "Invisible Girl" to Global Climate Activist, With Bumps Along the Way'

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On Feb. 15, thousands of students across Europe walked out of schools in a coordinated protest to demand action on climate change. These demonstrations were inspired by an unlikely role model: Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old activist, who has been cutting class weekly since September to stage sit-ins at the Swedish Parliament and demand government action to address climate change.

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Severe Winter Weather Responsible For At Least 5 Deaths | TODAY

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Computer modeling shows that the marine clouds could disappear if CO2 emissions continue to rise.

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At high enough atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO ₂) concentrations, Earth could reach a tipping point where marine stratus clouds become unstable and disappear, triggering a spike in global warming, according to a new modeling study.

This event -- which could raise surface temperatures by about 8 Kelvin (14 degrees Fahrenheit) globally -- may occur at CO ₂ concentrations above 1,200 parts per million (ppm), according to the study, which will be published by Nature Geoscience on February 25. For reference, the current concentration is around 410 ppm and rising. If the world continues burning fossil fuels at the current rate, Earth's CO ₂ level could rise above 1,200 ppm in the next century.

"I think and hope that technological changes will slow carbon emissions so that we do not actually reach such high CO ₂ concentrations. But our results show that there are dangerous climate change thresholds that we had been unaware of," says Caltech's Tapio Schneider, Theodore Y. Wu Professor of Environmental Science and Engineering and senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which Caltech manages for NASA. Schneider, the lead author of the study, notes that the 1,200-ppm threshold is a rough estimate rather than a firm number.

The study could help solve a longstanding mystery in paleoclimatology. Geological records indicate that during the Eocene (around 50 million years ago), the Arctic was frost free and home to crocodiles. However, according to existing climate models, CO ₂ levels would need to rise above 4,000 ppm to heat the planet enough for the Arctic to be that warm. This is more than twice as high as the likely CO ₂ concentration during this time period. However, a warming spike caused by the loss of stratus cloud decks could explain the appearance of the Eocene's hothouse climate.

Stratus cloud decks cover about 20 percent of subtropical oceans and are prevalent in the eastern portions of those oceans -- for example, off the coasts of California or Peru. The clouds cool and shade the earth as they reflect the sunlight that hits them back into space. That makes them important for regulating Earth's surface temperature. The problem is that the turbulent air motions that sustain these clouds are too small to be resolvable in global climate models.

To circumvent the inability to resolve the clouds at a global scale, Schneider and his co-authors, Colleen Kaul and Kyle Pressel of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, created a small-scale model of a representative atmospheric section above a subtropical ocean, simulating the clouds and their turbulent motions over this ocean patch on supercomputers. They observed instability of the cloud decks followed by a spike in warming when CO ₂ levels exceeded 1,200 ppm. The researchers also found that once the cloud decks vanished, they did not reappear until CO ₂ levels dropped to levels substantially below where the instability first occurred.

"This research points to a blind spot in climate modeling," says Schneider, who is currently leading a consortium called the Climate Modeling Alliance (CliMA) in an effort to build a new climate model. CliMA will use data assimilation and machine-learning tools to fuse Earth observations and high-resolution simulations into a model that represents clouds and otherimportant small-scale featuresbetter than existing models. One use of the new model will be to determine more precisely the CO ₂ level at which the instability of the cloud decks occurs.

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climate; global warming; environmental issues; environmental awareness; environmental policies; ocean policy; resource shortage; stem education

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High CO2 levels can destabilize marine layer clouds: Loss of low-level clouds can lead to a spike in global warming, new study shows

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At high enough atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO 2) concentrations, Earth could reach a tipping point where marine stratus clouds become unstable and disappear, triggering a spike in global warming, according to a new modeling study.