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An activist is anyone who sees the need for change and devotes their time to doing something about it. And, as successful teen activists prove, structural, social, or economic barriers don't have to stop you from pursuing your passion and creating positive change. If you are interested in making a difference for a cause you care about, you can do so by educating yourself about the issue, finding ways to get involved in-person and online, and possibly even pursuing a career in a field related to your cause.

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Is registering people to vote a form of activism?

Bridget Connolly has volunteered on political campaigns at the local and federal level for over 10 years, most notably for the 2008 Obama campaign in Nevada and Josh Harder's Congressional race in 2018. She has gone door-to-door to help register voters and get out the vote in both California and Nevada.

Yes! Registering people to vote helps remove barriers for people who have been marginalized by educational systems, culture, and misinformation about the importance of their vote. I've had so many experiences where every vote counts. If 500 people are registering people to vote in a specific county, and we each get 1 person, and somebody wins by 400 votes, that's a really big deal. I think it's a civic duty for people who understand how politics work and understand that voting is at the bedrock of all of that. The people who don't vote are essentially disenfranchised; they aren't playing a part in what's happening with their tax dollars and who is representing them at the local, state, and federal level. All levels. It takes a lot of work to stay informed, but that's how our system is set up. You're voting people into power, so it's a civic duty.

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This article was co-authored by Bridget Connolly and by wikiHow staff writer, Christopher M. Osborne, PhD. Bridget Connolly has volunteered on political campaigns at the local and federal level for over 10 years, most notably for the 2008 Obama campaign in Nevada and Josh Harder's Congressional race in 2018. She has gone door-to-door to help register voters and get out the vote in both California and Nevada. This article has been viewed 888,355 times.

Updated: November 19, 2023

If you feel passionately about an issue and want to become an activist, start by contacting local or online organizations with a similar mission. Ask them if you can volunteer your time or donate your money to contribute to the cause. Alternatively, you can also promote your cause on social media, share news articles, and circulate online petitions to raise awareness. Be sure to stay well-informed by keeping current with any news related to your cause! For tips on finding organizations that support your cause, read on!

Thanks to all authors for creating a page that has been read 888,355 times.

"I was doing a schoolwork about teen activism, and all of these thoughts and ideas helped me with what I could write about! I loved how you explained it, and it's a really well-written article. Congrats, you should be proud!" ..." more

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An activist is anyone who sees the need for change and devotes their time to doing something about it. And, as successful teen activists prove, structural, social, or economic barriers don't have to stop you from pursuing your passion and...

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Rachel Atcheson is the Humane League's Philadelphia director. I wanted to interview her to shine a light on her incredible work as an animal rights activist and, hopefully, encourage and inspire teens to take action on behalf of animals.

Why did you decide to become an animal rights advocate?

I decided to help animals because they are the most underrepresented group of beings in today's society. Some might think that animals get sufficient attention, but cats and dogs receive the bulk of it. When we hear of a hoarder with 100 cats and none of them sufficiently nourished, we empathize with those cats. But farm animals are suffering every day in factory farms and we rarely hear their stories. I decided to help farm animals because they need a louder voice.

How did you think you would be able to make a difference?

I didn't start out thinking I could make much of a difference. I began volunteering with a local animal protection group (the group I work for now, the Humane League), but I had no idea the ripple effect my activism would have in the world. With the help of many mentors, I've been able to hone my activism skills and influence many people to be more involved in activism.

Has your life changed since you started helping animals?

My life has changed dramatically. I have become more compassionate and more empathetic toward the plight of both human and non-human animals. I have taken on the role of an activist - and I think this is the most important change in my life, because now I understand that no matter how much a person wants to change the world, it's the hard work, the elbow grease, that really creates meaningful change.

What is the main problem animals face right now?

These issues of confinement and mutilation are common for farm animals everywhere. All factory farms treat animals as if they were commodities, property, and this is, I believe, the biggest problem facing farmed animals right now.

I'd love to tell you the story of one animal in particular. Buttercup is an egg-laying hen who has lived her entire life in a cage smaller than a piece of paper. She has never met her mother. Because of her close confinement with other chickens, Buttercup's beak was seared off with a hot blade soon after she was born so she wouldn't peck any other chickens in her cage. Ever since she was young, Buttercup has lived in this battery cage. She has never been outside, never felt the sun on her feathers or the grass beneath her feet. And she'll remain there for her whole life. Her feet might become mangled in the wire mesh she stands on. If she develops an infection, she will not receive veterinary attention.

On a typical egg-laying farm, there could be 500,000 chickens, so Buttercup is just one of many chickens who will never see the outside of that warehouse.

What does it take to become an effective activist?

Be positive, set a good example, read literature on effective activism and, most of all, practice. If you want to learn more about animal activism, consider getting involved with groups such as the Humane League, Mercy for Animals, or Compassion Over Killing. All of these groups are very effective in their work.

How can we make a difference in the lives of animals?

The number-one way you can make a difference in the lives of animals is to cut back on the amount of animals you eat; consider trying Meatless Monday. And if you already do not consume much meat, consider going vegetarian. Are you already a vegetarian? Cut back on the amount of eggs and dairy you consume. And finally, try veganism.

While it may seem daunting to do anything in this list, if you take it one step at a time, one meal at a time, you'll find it easy, exciting, and fulfilling. We have an opportunity to make a difference in the lives of animals three times a day - breakfast, lunch, and dinner - and with your help, we will see changes for farm animals.

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Rachel Atcheson is the Humane League’s Philadelphia director. I wanted to interview her to shine a light on her incredible work as an animal rights activist and, hopefully, encourage and inspire teens to take action on behalf of animals.&nbs

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Nine stories made by and about young people making a difference

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Nine stories made by and about young people making a difference

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Nine stories made by and about young people making a difference

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Teen producers find and tell stories of young people making a difference in their communities for this special PBS NewsHour Student Reporting Labs feature.

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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"Do you think this is the right color ribbon?" asked a petite brunette, her hair pulled back in a haphazard ponytail, her college sweatshirt engulfing her tiny frame. "And do you think these are the right length of sections I'm cutting? I don't want it to be all funky when we pin them on."

"Mmm ... I'm not sure," said the guy next to her, sucking on a lollipop, his football-player physique totally evident in his tight band T-shirt.

"Looks good to me," his roommate said without even glancing over at the ribbon or the girl.

Meet the college anti-war movement.

I just got back from a two-week campus speaking tour during which I had the privilege of hanging out in a women's center at a Catholic college, eating bad Mexican food with Mennonite feminists, and chatting with aspiring writers and activists at a college in which half the students are the first in their families to experience higher education. I heard the stories of transgender youth in Kansas City, jocks with food addictions in Jacksonville, and student organizers who are too overwhelmed to address all the world's problems in Connecticut.

When my plane finally landed with a resounding bump at LaGuardia, I felt totally inspired by the earnest enthusiasm that beamed out of almost every student I encountered -- and also terrified that the university system is sucking the life out of them. At the risk of biting the hand that feeds me (I am usually paid to speak, in part, by student organizations and women's centers), I have to attest that the institutionalization of activism on college campuses seems to be a key culprit in the absence of visible youth movements in this country.

The scene above illustrates just the kind of vibe you can find at an anti-war or nonviolence club on college campuses any day of the week. It is sweetly collaborative, mainly focused on raising awareness among students, very keyed in to particular dates (Love Your Body Day, Earth Day, Black History Month), and most of all, safe. This is not terribly surprising considering that these clubs are sanctioned and funded (sometimes with upward of thousands of dollars a year) by the school administration through a formal application process. They are structured to legitimize but also to domesticate student passions and actions from the start.

And students do have passions, contrary to what some hippies-turned-well-paid-pundits argue. A survey conducted just this year by the National Association of Campus Activities (NACA) found that 98 percent of students at their annual meeting saw the war in Iraq as one of the issues most important to them. Erin Wilson, the director of communication for NACA, reports that student involvement in campus activities is increasing all the time and adds that among their 1,040 member schools, a yearly total of $150 million is spent on campus programming.

As great as it might seem that colleges and universities are supporting student causes, I actually believe that it has tamed the critical energy necessary to be young, outraged, and active. When you're being funded by a team of white-haired academics in suits, taking real risks -- acts of civil disobedience like sit-ins, hunger strikes, boycotts -- don't seem like such a smart idea. Students rightly wonder whether they will "ruin it" for the next class if they cross the line and lose the school leadership's support. Plus, it's so much easier to just eat the free pizza and cut the three-inch ribbons than to mastermind a rebellious and potentially dangerous student uprising.

The academy, in general, encourages specialization, intellectualization, civility -- not exactly the key ingredients for effective social action. Students are surrounded by professors reminiscing about the glory days of youth activism, when groups like Students for a Democratic Society, the Weather Underground, and the Black Panther Party really ignited social change. But the professors don't seem to make the connection that none of these were school-sanctioned organizations.

Today's youth activism is largely enacted within the gated fortresses of higher learning. Students are overwhelmingly and often motivated by applying to law school or resumé-building. (How do you think they got into these undergraduate institutions in the first place?) They funnel their outrage into weekly club meetings and awareness campaigns that look good on paper -- activities that convey to future employers and institutions that they are socially involved and aware but not at odds with the system. Students seem to join sanctioned, existing clubs, rather than launch their own radical actions, without much resistance or critical questioning. Perhaps they've been socialized to accept the status quo, but even more, I believe they simply don't have the time or energy to start innovative revolutions from scratch because they are so busy taking standardized tests and building their resumés with internships and assistantships.

I watched a group of them sort through a brightly colored stack of anti-war quotations to make sure that every single one, literally, bore the stamp of approval from the college activities office so they could hang them around campus without getting in trouble. It made me cringe. This is where their energies were being diverted during the deadliest month yet in the Iraq War.

It made me reflect on my own undergraduate days -- just about five years ago now. I wasn't a rah-rah student government officer, but I certainly did my share of club activities: school newspaper, writing fellows program, resident assistant, volunteering at a Harlem preschool, even the hip-hop club (talk about taming outrage). I remember feeling so busy, so responsible, so important. Now I realize that there was a real cost to that frenzy of school-sanctioned productivity. I rarely thought beyond the borders of folding tables that lined the student activities fairs. I rarely put my body or my future on the line. While I was tutoring fellow students in grammar and composition and making door tags for my residence halls, I missed the escalation of a bogus justification for a messy war in my name.

In one of the largest studies ever conducted of Generation Y, psychology professor Jean M. Twenge found that college students "increasingly believe that their lives are controlled by outside forces" -- called "externality" in the psychology field. Twenge writes, "The average college student in 2002 had more external control beliefs than 80 percent of college students in the early 1960s."

Is it any wonder? We were raised to organize our adolescent lives in pursuit of external approval: church awards, athletic scholarships, and college admissions. More than any generation in history, we've been signed up, roped in, and overscheduled. When we get to college, many of us rush to join clubs in an attempt to recreate this safe feeling of sanctioned activity, of organized energies, of potential approval by authorities. Our innate passions and spontaneous actions have essentially been bred out of us.

The LearningWork Connection, a consulting firm on youth issues, reports that from September 2004 to September 2005, 79 percent of first-year males and 87 percent of first-year females described themselves as "volunteers." They add, however, that "Gen Y is less engaged with civic and political activities than they are with other causes."

Which prompts me to ask, what are "causes," really? The word stinks of bureaucracy and timidity, of the most educated, wanted generation in history sprawled across standard university furniture -- not planning the next revolution, but eating free cookies and voting on whether buttons or ribbons will be less destructive to students' clothing.

I saw the surefire glimmer of pure passion in these students' eyes. I know they are capable of great and ingenious uprisings, a type of protest that is totally 21st century, a trademark Generation Y invention. Viruses in campus administrators' computers with pop-up windows demanding no more expansion into poor, local neighborhoods? Mock draft cards sent home to their parents? A dance party -- 1 million youth strong -- on the Washington lawn? It all seems possible.

They need to stay out of the student center long enough to figure out what their version of outraged activism really is. Small as it may sound, big change would happen if college students today could protect their purest intentions from the pacifying force of free pizza and resumé kudos. Our generation needs to step into our raw power -- the priceless power of being young and mad. We need to stay hungry long enough to get angry.

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The institutionalization of activism on college campuses is a key culprit in the absence of visible youth movements in this country.

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What is climate change? What could happen? Get all the facts you need to know.

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Volunteering Can Reduce the Risk of Substance Abuse in Kids

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Volunteering Can Reduce the Risk of Substance Abuse in Kids

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Having trouble with your rebellious teen? Get them involved in community volunteer work. A new study from the University of Missouri found that this type of prosocial activity makes youth less likely to turn to drugs and alcohol.

Young adults between the ages of 18 and 25 report the highest rates of substance use and dependence, the U.S. National Survey on Drug Use and Health says. Gustavo Carlo, a professor in the University of Missouri's Human Development and Family Studies Department, found that prosocial behaviors, such as volunteering and donating to charity, serve as protective factors against adolescents engaging in risky behaviors as young adults. His study was published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

Good deeds pay it forward

Carlo examined data from surveys of 531 youths in rural Pennsylvania counties. The group was surveyed over a seven-year period as participants moved through junior high school to young adulthood.

"Prosocial behaviors are good for society and communities, but also they are a marker of moral development," the professor says. "Parents want their kids to be kind, selfless, considerate and respectful. We now have evidence that these prosocial behaviors make adolescents less likely to break moral codes and engage in illegal activities."

Youth in rural communities are more at risk

The study focused on rural youths because research shows they may be more likely to use illicit substances earlier. Positive, prosocial activities are less available. Rural communities tend to be more spread out, making it difficult for teens to get transportation to events and activities. These communities often have less access to recreation centers, spaces for meetings, volunteers to run programs and funding for organized activities.

Community groups and schools need to organize activities

"We need to organize prosocial activities in schools and communities," Carlo says. "If we start early in childhood, kids can practice and learn to reap the rewards of prosocialness so that it becomes normative and habitual. These opportunities are not costly and kids are very creative and can contribute to the development of these activities. In the long run, kids can become invested in their communities and become engaged community citizens."

Teens can volunteer to do community clean-up work, yard work and chores for seniors, mentor younger kids in reading or math, or help coach community sports teams.

Substance abuse prevention is less costly than treatment

The research has important implications for substance use prevention and intervention programs aimed at teens, Carlo says. "The emphasis on prevention is far less costly and likely more effective than treatment after the problem presents itself. It involves transforming the culture of our schools so that we emphasize both academics and psychological and behavioral well-being."

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Volunteering reduces teens' risk of addiction

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Having trouble with your rebellious teen? Get them involved in community volunteer work. A new study suggests volunteering makes youth less likely to turn to drugs and alcohol.

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Kids are Making a Difference in the World: The Real Story of Gabriel

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Kids are Making a Difference in the World: The Real Story of Gabriel

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Muslim Teen Hopes to Help Diversify Emojis with a Hijab Version 

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Muslim Teen Hopes to Help Diversify Emojis with a Hijab Version 

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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How Teenage Activist Malala is Turning Her Fame Into a Movement

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How Teenage Activist Malala is Turning Her Fame Into a Movement

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Genetic EngineeringA guide for kids by Tiki the Penguin Genetic engineering is a way humans have found to modify the genes which you find in all living things. Genes are the instructions for building the body that contains them. That body can be a shrimp, a snail, a whale, a human, a potato...

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Alex Lin (Courtesy of Alex Lin) Living on Earth interviews Alex Lin, who won the Brower Youth Award for his pioneering work on electronic waste. Lin recycled and refurbishes computers for kids in the U.S. and around the world.
Transcript

CURWOOD: One kid who needs no New Year's resolutions on the environment is 14-year-old Alex Lin. When he was 11 he came across a newspaper article about the massive piles of E-waste-that's waste from electronics and computers that's generated around the world.

When the electronic devices we use every day get taken apart or dumped, toxic substances, like lead, leech into the environment. Alex decided to attack E-waste, starting at home. He founded WIN - Westerly Innovations Network (named after his town of Westerly, Rhode Island).

And this year he received the prestigious Brower Youth Award for young environmental leaders. Alex Lin, welcome to Living on Earth.

LIN: Thanks a lot.

CURWOOD: So one day you're reading the newspaper. You see this article about E-waste and you decide to do something about it. What was it that grabbed you? What made you decide to make this your mission?

LIN: I think what helped me choose to do this was that it's such a little known problem, really. When we started our project in our town, like, when we found out how many people knew about it, it was just less than 15 percent. It was like, ten percent or so of residents even knew what E-waste was, so I mean, just the fact that it's so little known and that by raising awareness we could just do so much to help it. That kind of grabbed our attention when we started the project.

CURWOOD: So how many computers are you guys recycling?

LIN: Recycling-wise we're not really sure about the amount. We just kind of hear back from CR2 Recycling because they weigh the trucks and they let us know how much we've been recycling every month or so. Because whenever a container fills up, the people at the transportation station they call them and they'll send down a truck to bring it to the facility in Massachusetts.

CURWOOD: So it's what-5,000 pounds a month or something like that?

LIN: Something like that. I mean it varies between month and month. I mean, some months it's like 25 hundred, some months it's a lot more. It all depends.

CURWOOD: Now you're working internationally. You've taken the whole thing that you started in Westerly, Rhode Island and you've taken it to people around the world. How's that working?

LIN: Yeah, it's working really well right now. Right now one of our contacts and friends in Cameroon-Rosemary-and she's been helping us to establish WIN teams in Africa and she's been looking around in Kenya, Tanzania, Cameroon. Right now we have two definite set-up WIN teams in Kenya and Cameroon and the rest are on the way. And she's also helped us a lot by looking for schools that need computers so that computers in the U.S. used by companies in large numbers can be reused and sent to people across the world who really need these computers to help better their lives. And we have a Mexican WIN team who's raising awareness. And right now I think Rosemary's been talking with a team in the UK about starting a group there and we're just kind of dealing with it as it comes because it's been coming pretty fast for the past couple of months. But we're going to have to do the work and we're ready to do it, I guess.

CURWOOD: Hey, Alex. Can you tell me a story of where you know one of your computers helped change somebody's life?

LIN: Yeah, I definitely have a pretty good one that we did. You know, after the tsunami in 2004 there was a lot of shortages of computers, learning equipment, schools, teachers. We actually had a local pediatrician from our area-she went to Malaysia and Sri Lanka I think at the time to help out and she met an English teacher there and he contacted us saying there's a need for computers over there and we ended up sending five computers and a laptop. And it was really cool because he sent us some pictures afterward of the children singing to like Barney software and other educational stuff that we put on there and afterwards they named the school the WIN learning center after our team and that was just like really cool that we could have such an impact on the other side of the world.

CURWOOD: By the way, how do you find the time to do all this work on top of what-homework, sports, piano, and well, let's face it, being a kid?

LIN: Yeah. I don't know. It kind of just depends. Like it's more of a-I remember one of my friends I met at Brower in Boston-Carlos. He said it's more of a lifestyle and I totally agree with him. Environmental justice community work is like a lifestyle. You kind of incorporate time to do it into every day and if not every day, definitely on a regular basis because I mean, sure there are times where I would have projects, reports, tests the next day. Or, even sports games and stuff that I need to get with, but usually I'm able to find time during the week to do the work.

CURWOOD: Alex Lin's organization is called WIN, Westerly Innovations Network. Alex received the prestigious Brower Youth Award for young environmental leaders. Congratulations Alex, and thank you so much for taking this time.

LIN: Thanks a lot, Steve.

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Living on Earth interviews Alex Lin, who won the Brower Youth Award for his pioneering work on electronic waste. Lin recycled and refurbishes computers for kids in the U.S. and around the world.

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Why Don't Men Volunteer as Much as Women?

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Why Don't Men Volunteer as Much as Women?

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Though Olivia Bryant, the CEO of YCore, had observed the gender gap at other nonprofits, she was still surprised at the discrepancy. She knew women often dominated volunteer spaces, but 95%? The YCore team set to work to recruit men, and they have since increased the proportion of applications from men to about 25%.

So are women just the more altruistic sex? Or is this a reflection of other social realities, like fewer women choosing to be in the labour force, or working part-time? Our data analysis reveals that no matter how you cut it, women do seem to have a higher proclivity for volunteering. We explore why this might be.

25.3% of Americans choose to volunteer at least once a year, and nearly half of the individuals that volunteer do so an average of more than one hour per week. These numbers come from a September 2014 of Americans ages 15 and older conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics . Volunteering is defined as any unpaid work performed for an organization. It can include anything tutoring English at the local library, coaching your child's basketball team, or helping your church with a fundraiser.

Not all Americans are equally likely to volunteer. The probability that a given person will volunteer is impacted by their age, income, education level and, not least of all, by gender. In 2014, 28.4% of women volunteered at least once, while only 22.2% of men did so.

The following chart displays the percentage of Americans that volunteer at any given age. We can see from this chart that the likelihood of volunteering changes a great deal over our lives, but that women are always more inclined than men.

The likelihood of volunteering rises again in the late 30s and reaches its zenith in the early 40s. Over 30% of Americans between the ages of 40 and 45 volunteer. This is related to the increased likelihood of volunteering when having children. While having a baby actually makes you less likely to volunteer - only 17% of people whose first child is 2-years-old or less volunteer - when their child reaches school age, people become dramatically more likely to volunteer. Over 35% of parents with children between 6-13 volunteer, often for a school activity.

Though women volunteer more than men at all ages, the effect of having children does seem to be greater for women. We can see in the chart above that the gender difference is largest between 35 and 45, when 10% more women volunteer than men.

Parents frequently volunteer for their kids' school.

Yet even when we only compare men and women who work full-time, we still find a large gender gap in terms of who volunteers. 30.1% of women who work full-time also find the time to volunteer in comparison to just 23.8% of men.

Given the importance of income on the likelihood to volunteer, we wondered whether the gender gap might disappear at different levels of family earnings. These next three charts display the percentage of adult men and women working full-time who volunteer by family income and age.

We wondered if looking at what women and men actually do when they volunteer might give us some insight into the gender imbalance. The table below shows the proportion of men and women, of those who volunteer, who volunteer for different types of groups. Only the primary volunteer organization of the individual is included, so each individual is only counted once. For example, the main volunteer organization for 35.1% of women is a religious one, while this is only true of 33.2% of men.

Overall, looking at the groups that women volunteer for does not give us much of a clue to the discrepancy, but it does point to the gendered nature of certain types of volunteering.

So what accounts for the volunteer gap between the sexes?

Jesse Eubanks of the non-profit Love Thy Neighborhood blames the "suspended adolescence" of young American men today. He sees a large number of young men unwilling to embrace responsibility. "Man-boys" who are not ready to take on the risks and relationships of being in a community. The guys in probably were not doing much volunteer work.

Energize Inc. , a consultancy for nonprofits, published an entire dedicated to helping volunteer organizations recruit men. They suggest that one problem is that much of the recruiting material from organizations is oriented towards women. Men may feel like the organization is a female space when they only see female faces in brochures and other materials. Another challenge is that many organizations already have a preponderance of women, and any new men will feel that they don't belong. Being the first guy can be be uncomfortable.

When asked it was important to have men volunteer, Bryant responded that it was the same reason she wanted people of different races and economic backgrounds participating in her organization. "We want our group of volunteers as diverse as possible," Bryant explained. "Men can bring a different perspective."

By any way you slice it, when it comes to demonstrating altruism through volunteering, women are simply dominating men. Regardless of whether they work or not, how old they are, or how rich they are, women just volunteer more.

For our next post, we tell the story of Esurance's old mascot, who was discontinued after being made into cartoon porn. To get notified when we post it →

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Why Don't Men Volunteer as Much as Women? - Priceonomics

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We analyze the female dominance of volunteerism in America.

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Climate Change 101 with Bill Nye | National Geographic

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Think about the last time you volunteered your time and talents to an important effort or cause. How did it make you feel? With the busy lives we lead, just the thought of volunteering might seem overwhelming, but in reality it could be very beneficial. It's easy to think about the positive impact that volunteers have on others, but we don't often consider how rewarding it can be for a volunteer to reach out and make a difference in someone's life. As we approach the summer solstice, put those many hours of daylight to good use. Here are five good reasons for seniors and caregivers alike to volunteer:

1.Find Meaning and Purpose at Any Age: Sharing what you've learned with others can be a rewarding opportunity to give back. It's also an opportunity not relegated to the young. Between 2009 and 2011, the average national volunteer rate of older adults was 23.9% per year, as compared to baby boomers at 29.2% and young adults at 22.1%. Average older adult volunteer rates for states ranged from 17.4% to 39.3%. For older adults, a study showed that formal volunteering moderated the loss of a sense of purpose for those who had experienced the loss of major role identities, such as wage-earner and parent. Residents, and family members of residents, at Sunrise Senior Living volunteer through ongoing community service projects. At Sunrise, there are many family members who volunteer as 'family buddies' to give advice and encouragement to families of new residents in Reminiscence Memory Care Neighborhoods. They say that they receive satisfaction in knowing they are helping others and that sharing their own personal stories is therapeutic.

2.Experience Improved Health and Well-being: Many people who volunteer say that helping others gives them a good feeling inside, something that researchers call a "helpers high". There seems to be an actual physical sensation that occurs when people help others that makes them experience greater energy and strength, less depression and increased feelings of self-worth, reports Psychology Today. Another survey of a large group of older adults showed that while those who received social support did not experience a marked improvement in health, those who gave support to others had lower mortality rates. That means that caregivers actually benefit the most when they help others.

3.Make New Friends and Improve Your Mind: Volunteering provides an opportunity for seniors and caregivers alike to increase their social engagement as well as their brain power. A study conducted by the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center showed that there was a link between higher levels of social connections and participation in social activities with better cognitive function.

4.Learn New Skills: It's never too late to learn a new skill or develop a new hobby. Volunteering can open the door to new learning opportunities that you may have not previously considered or thought you were capable of doing. For example, I know someone at Sunrise that started as a volunteer who is now a memory care coordinator at a Sunrise community. Volunteering gave her the opportunity to discover just how much she loved working with the senior population and was a springboard to a fulfilling career where she has a positive impact on the quality of life of residents and their families every day.

5.Know That You Can Make a Powerful Difference: Regardless of your age or situation, you can also have a positive influence in someone's life. The simple act of visiting with a resident in a retirement home or dementia care neighborhood, holding their hand or offering a listening ear may seem like a small thing, but is actually quite powerful because that simple act of caring brings them immeasurable comfort, joy and encouragement.

In addition, volunteering not only provides us with the opportunity to get involved in a cause that we are passionate about, but also provides the chance to look beyond our own circumstances and appreciate what others are experiencing. The difference that you'll make in someone else's life will make an even bigger difference in yours.

Related

healthy living Volunteering impact caregivers Healthy Living Spirit

Senior Vice President of Memory Care & Program Services at Sunrise Senior Living

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Volunteering not only provides us with the opportunity to get involved in a cause that we are passionate about, but also provides the chance to look beyond our own circumstances and appreciate what others are experiencing.

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The Benefits of Volunteerism, if the Service is Real

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The Benefits of Volunteerism, if the Service is Real

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The Benefits of Volunteerism, if the Service Is Real (Published 2010)

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Even community service done simply to build a résumé for college can be a good thing, but there needs to be a connection between the work and the overall issue.

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What's the difference between bacteria and viruses?

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What's the difference between bacteria and viruses?

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Ask Smithsonian: Whats the Difference Between Bacteria and Viruses?

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Teen Vogue's Political Coverage isn't Surprising

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Teen Vogue's Political Coverage isn't Surprising

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The publication's recent shift toward social issues, identity, and activism is giving its readers what they want.

On Saturday morning, Teen Vogue published an op-ed by Lauren Duca titled "Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America." The tone and message of the piece, which compared the ways in which the president-elect talks about his record to the ways abusive spouses psychologically manipulate their partners, struck a notable chord with readers on social media, garnering almost 30,000 retweets from Teen Vogue 's account, and getting shared by personalities from Patton Oswalt to Dan Rather. Many people tweeting the story did so with an incredulous tone, seeming surprised that a teen-oriented magazine was publishing incisive political coverage rather than makeup tutorials or One Direction interviews.

.@teenvogue may be an unlikely source for a detailed look at "Gaslighting" + Donald Trump, but there you have it... https://t.co/mgh534J8AG
- Dan Rather (@DanRather) December 11, 2016

Did not expect this exegesis of gaslighting and its relationship to current day politics from Teen Vogue https://t.co/cwNhZ6wvJH
- David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) December 10, 2016

But the tone of Duca's piece was representative of a larger shift Teen Vogue has made over the last year. In May, 29-year-old Elaine Welteroth took over as editor from Amy Astley, who helped found the magazine in 2003. Welteroth, the digital editorial director Phillip Picardi, and the creative director Marie Suter have moved the magazine more aggressively into covering politics, feminism, identity, and activism. Together, the three have shepherded a range of timely, newsy stories, including an interview exploring what it's like to be a Muslim woman facing a Trump presidency, a list of reasons why Mike Pence's record on women's rights and LGBTQ rights should trouble readers, and a video in which two Native American teenagers from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe discuss the Dakota Access Pipeline protests.

The pivot in editorial strategy has drawn praise on social media, with some writers commenting that Teen Vogue is doing a better job of covering important stories in 2016 than legacy news publications. But the move is also an intelligent one from a business perspective. Teenagers who've grown up on the internet are as likely to be informed about social issues as their parents are, and just as eager to read and share stories that reflect their concerns about the world. While some casual observers might seem surprised that a teen fashion magazine is focused on racism and sexism rather than on "hairstyles and celebrity gossip," their assumptions dismiss how attentive young readers are to politics-an interest Teen Vogue is astutely capitalizing on.

T een Vogue was founded in 2003 at the behest of Vogue's editor-in-chief, Anna Wintour, who tasked Astley, the magazine's beauty editor at the time, to conceive test issues of a spinoff publication for teens. The publication's early focus was fashion. "We are going to do what we do well, which is fashion, beauty, and style," Astley told The New York Times 's David Carr shortly before its launch. "A lot of other teen magazines are focused on relationships, boys, sex, and embarrassing moments. That is not our equity."

At the time, Carr noted, many rival teen publications were struggling. And since Teen Vogue debuted, a number of them- Elle Girl, CosmoGirl!, Teen People, Teen-have folded. * One of the challenges is that teen audiences tend to evolve faster than the adults catering to them can catch up. "It's always been such a volatile market because your audience morphs so rapidly," John Harrington, a publishing consultant, told in 2013. The genius of the current iteration of Teen Vogue is that it's caught on to its current readers' enthusiasm for topical issues in a timely enough fashion to actually engage them.

"I think in 2016 we found our footing and our voice as a publication in a strong way," Picardi, the publication's digital editorial director, told me via email. "Obviously, the election has provided unique circumstances and a real need for someone to dissect the news for young people. Since we are, in particular, a brand that speaks directly to millions of young women, we have a responsibility to do right by them and view the news through that very specific lens."
The September issue featured a personal essay by Hillary Clinton, a conversation between Amandla Stenberg and Gloria Steinem, and an interview with Loretta Lynch.
Teen Vogue's two strongest traffic days in 2016, Picardi says, were November 9, the day following the election, and Sunday, as Duca's piece about Trump picked up steam. (The publication's traffic is up 208 percent over the last 18 months; it reached 9.4 million uniques in November.) But he notes that the publication's coverage of politics is of a piece with its coverage of fashion, beauty, and entertainment. Its top five most-read pieces of the year speak to the myriad subjects Teen Vogue covers, as well as the diverse interests of teen girls:

1. Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America
2. How to Apply Glitter Nail Polish the Right Way
3. Netflix Arrivals October 2016: See the Full List
4. Mike Pence's Record on Reproductive and LGBTQ Rights Is Seriously Concerning
5. Dark Marks and Acne Scars: Your Complete Guide

In engaging with social issues, though, the magazine isn't breaking entirely new ground. On Sunday, Tavi Gevinson, the editor of Rookie, appeared to acknowledge other publications' debt to the magazine she founded at the age of 15. "Why should it be shocking that mainstream pubs reckoning w/ accountability culture & the rising currency of feminism are suddenly feminist?" she tweeted. (Gevinson was on the cover of the September issue of Teen Vogue, in a shoot styled by the longtime Vogue creative director Grace Coddington.) Later, she followed up with a lengthier statement:

Good will can and does coexist with wanting to make profit. I am saying that as the cultural currency/relevance of feminism goes up, confusing fiscal interest with moral interest and keeping our expectations of mainstream women's mags so low will make us more and more likely to confuse magazines doing what they need in order to stay relevant, with advancing the cause of feminism. Media literacy is more important now than ever, and we should never stop asking ourselves, after everything one reads, "how does it benefit this publication to post this?" this is an exciting moment in which places with lots of money and reach-in many industries: publishing, film, TV, art, etc.-have finally understood that women and teens do not, in fact, want to see stuff that makes them hate themselves. What a relief! But I would be remiss not to enjoy it all with a healthy dose of skepticism.

Rookie was launched in 2011 as a deliberate counterforce to much of the existing journalism for teenage girls. In creating Rookie, Gevinson-whose ability to connect with her peers and whimsical approach to clothing drew both praise and irritation within the fashion world- aimed to respect "a kind of intelligence in the readers that right now a lot of writing about teenage girls doesn't." Over the past five years, Rookie has published work by writers including Sady Doyle, Amy Rose Spiegel, and Jenny Zhang, in themed issues covering topics from "Action" to "Work" to "Consumption" to "Invention." But while traffic to rookiemag.com has declined recently, with Gevinson pursuing other acting and music opportunities, Teen Vogue's has been steadily climbing. This fall, Condé Nast announced its print magazine would be reduced to four issues a year, with the publication focusing more on digital readers.

Teen Vogue's recent September issue, typically the month in which fashion magazines focus on upcoming trends, was noteworthy for its politically oriented content. It featured a personal essay by the presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, a conversation between the actor Amandla Stenberg with the feminist Gloria Steinem, and an interview with the U.S. attorney general Loretta Lynch, conducted by the black-ish star Yara Shahidi. The issue also introduced " 21 Under 21," the magazine's "official guide to the girls and femmes changing the world." The list of young activists, artists, and advocates featured few household names, but a notable majority of young people of color.

If the magazine is finally gaining recognition among adults for its thoughtful, nuanced coverage of topical issues, it's less surprising to teen readers who've been for months taking in (and sharing) stories about the Standing Rock Protests or Texas's campus-carry laws. In many ways, Teen Vogue is simply doing what a fashion magazine does best: observing trends, and disseminating them. But it's also giving young women valuable information about issues they care about, not to mention taking them-and their manifold interests-seriously.

"When it comes to news and politics, we look at ourselves as an ally and a platform-particularly to young women, and young people from marginalized communities," Picardi said. "I think young people, and perhaps particularly young women are so wildly underestimated by the world at large, and I want us to be a platform that challenges that idea."
* This article originally referred to CosmoGirl! magazine as Cosmo Teen. We regret the error.

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Teen Vogue's Political Coverage Isn't Surprising

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The publication's recent shift toward social issues, identity, and activism is giving its readers what they want.

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Haters gonna hate. Teen activists shake it off and try again.

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Haters gonna hate. Teen activists shake it off and try again.

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Ruhy Patel, 17, lives in Doylestown, Pa. When she was 15 she was planning to run for student council office. "All the other people running were boys," she says, "and people were like, 'Well, you're not going to win.' You feel intimidated because you're the only girl in the room. It makes you question if you'd be OK in the field of politics."

Did she drop out? No.

Did she win? "I did!"

"I feel like it kind of makes you want to try harder when people say no," says Patel.

That could be the motto for the activists of Girl Up. There are nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 66 countries who volunteer for the U.N. Foundation group. They speak out and raise money so every girl can go to school - there are an estimated 62 million who don't - and can receive official government identification papers, can get proper health care and gain the skills to pursue her dreams.

This week, we met with 13 "teen advisers" from Girl Up. They were a few of the 225 members in Washington, D.C., for the annual leadership summit.

Unlike the 62 million out-of-school girls, these Girl Up girls are all in school. They're thinking about college; they lead comfortable lives. Sometimes their friends can't understand their activism. "They don't think we're able to make a difference," says Janet Ho, 18, who lives in Los Angeles. But that's not true, she says.

Kennede Reese, 18, from Denver, mentions a SchoolCycle fundraiser. The proceeds were used to send bikes to girls in Malawi: "Because even though they have the school supplies, there's no way to get to school to get the education they need. We think of the small things."

The girls we spoke with all live in the U.S., but some have roots in the countries they're trying to help. So they know firsthand what life can be like outside the American bubble.

"My family is from the most rural part of China," says Amy Gong Liu, 18, of Alameda, Calif. "My dad was chosen to go to school instead of my aunt. My aunt was very brilliant, very outspoken about women's issues." But she never learned to read and write.

"When [my dad] told her he was going to have a daughter - me - she said, 'Make sure you educate her, keep her in the loop at the dinner table, make sure she has a voice.' "

Liu pauses: "It's hard not to think, 'What if I was born in China and my aunt was born in America, and she had the opportunity [for] success and I didn't?' "

Does the unfairness of it all make the teen leaders feel guilty?

The unanimous reply: Yes, yes, yes!

Yet they've learned that even though girls in low-income countries face many obstacles, they have a sense of hope and gratitude.

Ishana Nigam, 17, from Charlotte, N.C., visits India every year or so. That's where her parents are from. The girls she meets have "a lack of education, poor health care," she says. "But they're not jealous of me. They always tell me, 'I'm thankful for what I have, thankful just to be breathing.' And that takes a toll on me because I have so many more things than they have."

Meanwhile, all the girls bond over pop culture.

"I tutor refugees in Chicago," says Celia Buckman, 16. "They're 10 to 12, from all over, Malaysia, Kenya, India, Iraq. And they like to listen to ' Shake It Off' by Taylor Swift. They come from all over the world, they practice different religions, speak different languages, but they can all sit down and watch Taylor Swift videos, and that's great!"

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Haters Gonna Hate. Teen Girl Activists Shake It Off And Try Again

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These Girl Up leaders know that it's hard being a girl anywhere in the world - whether you're fighting to go to school or convincing boys that yes, girls can run for student council, too!

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     Many teens consider community service a bore, a chore to complete in order to graduate or include on a college application. I see it as much more - it’s a way to help yourself and others. Each year I rack up 400 hours o

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When she arrived in the Eastern Washington farming community of Wapato last spring for a six-day school service trip, Overlake High School junior Caroline Spencer expected to learn about migrant farm workers' issues and work alongside them in apple orchards. What she didn't expect was that her experiences with the community's children, and seeing the challenges they face trying to succeed in school, would touch her so deeply. She would return to live in a Latino farming community the following summer for six weeks, tutoring young children to read in Spanish and English. "Volunteering opened up a whole new world for me," she says, "one that I plan on exploring in college and beyond."

Many public and private high schools in the greater Seattle area are asking teens to take part in community service as a graduation requirement. Some schools see volunteering as a way to show students that they can positively impact their community, or to build students' empathy and increase their awareness of the needs of others. Some counselors encourage volunteering as a way to gain valuable work experience. Parents and students may even hope it will strengthen a college application. Whatever the impetus, teens who embrace the experience find they get a lot more out of it than just fulfilling credits toward graduation.

Finding opportunities

There are probably as many ways to volunteer as there are student interests. School counselors can help their students find volunteer opportunities, often using the Web to point teens in the right direction. Seattle's Garfield High School website lists volunteer opportunities alongside its scholarship and internship opportunities.

Garfield's head counselor, Ken Courtney, advises students to pick an area of personal interest, such as the outdoors, for which they might enjoy volunteering, or to choose a possible future career interest, such as medicine or working with children. Serving in that area is a way to explore it and gain experience and skills that might help secure a job in the future, he says.

Websites such as those of United Way of King County, Mercer Island's Volunteer Outreach in Communities Everywhere (VOICE) and Teens in Public Service (teensinpublicservice.org) also list opportunities. And, of course, families can directly contact any organization they are interested in serving.

Austen Dowell, a junior at Ingraham High School in Seattle, started volunteering with the TOPsoccer program, which serves disabled children ages 6-17, to fulfill the 160 volunteer hours he needs to graduate from his school's international baccalaureate program. On most Sundays for the past year, he has been running drills and scrimmages for children with autism, in wheelchairs or with other disabilities. At first he felt trepidation: How should he interact with these kids? Would he feel awkward? How could he help?

"I learned that speaking calmly and not jumping around yelling like a typical coach worked best," he says. Dowell adds that he loves to see what his players can achieve and hopes to keep coaching in the future. "They really light up when they learn something new," he says. While it started as an obligation, Dowell says, coaching is now the best part of his Sundays.

Opening windows to the future

Volunteering is especially beneficial to low-income teens. According to a 2007 federal study, disadvantaged teens who volunteer feel empowered, and are more likely to become politically engaged and to believe they will graduate from college and make a difference in their communities.

Volunteering can also expand a teenager's perspective. "I learned that you don't have to go to another country to find people in need," Spencer says. She hopes her time in the farming community, coupled with her education, will allow her to engage in immigration and human rights issues more deeply in the future. She aspires to influence policy on behalf of people who might not have a strong voice in the debate.

Students who put more effort into volunteering may also benefit when it comes to college. Most students who apply to college these days list volunteer experience on their application, according to Paul Seegert, associate director in the admissions office at the University of Washington. The students who stand out, he says, are ones who have taken on leadership roles, shown a long-term commitment to service, or brought innovation or creative solutions to their work. Beyond showing up, students who have "helped make the service more effective" get more notice, Seegert says. While academics still trump activities in the college admissions process, he says, volunteering is taken into consideration.

Whether it is a one-time trail-maintenance outing in the rain, a weekly tutoring commitment or an organizational role in rallying classmates to pitch in, volunteering can help teens gain a sense of responsibility, feel more connected to their communities and prepare for the future. And the unexpected rewards of discovering a new interest, or feeling as though they've made a difference, can last a lifetime.

Julie Weed is a Seattle-based freelance writer for The New York Times and others.

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When she arrived in the Eastern Washington farming community of Wapato last spring for a six-day school service trip, Overlake High School junior Caroline Spencer expected to learn about migrant farm workers' issues and work alongside them in apple orchards.

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New Mexico teen, once homeless, helps others through his growing business

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New Mexico teen, once homeless, helps others through his growing business

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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Teens in France Have Been Leading Major Protests

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Teens in France Have Been Leading Major Protests

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On April 23, in France, Emmanuel Macron, an independent centrist, and Marine Le Pen, of the far-right National Front party, were chosen by voters as the top two candidates in the first round of the country's presidential election, sparking demonstrations in Paris, Rennes, and elsewhere across the country.

Students of the French equivalent of high school, called lycée, took to the streets in protest against both candidates as part of what's being called "Night of the Barricades." High schools shut down as students fought with police in the streets. It was one of the latest in a series of massive protests held over the last 15 months, largely led by high school and college students.

This resistance has risen out of a variety of struggles. Even before the recent election, French youth helped lead major protests against rallies held by the National Front in Bordeaux on April 2 and in Paris on April 16, bringing together refugees and anti-fascists to combat Le Pen's anti-immigrant, nationalistic rhetoric.

While it's difficult to speculate on the ages of the young protestors, as they often keep their faces covered, most enrolled in lycée are between 15 and 18 years old. They are violently opposed to Le Pen and her far-right National Front party. But these protests have equally targeted Macron, whom students worry will prioritize the concerns of banks and financial institutions over the desires of French students and workers, continuing the unpopular labor reforms begun by current president François Hollande.

As recently as May 1, French students took to the streets for reasons not unfamiliar to other young people in countries around the world: They're tired of wage inequality, police brutality, racism, and a political system that they believe makes big promises but leaves too many behind. In order to better understand their struggle and the yearlong protests they've led across France ahead of the final presidential vote on Sunday, we are here to help explain their positions.
The movement started in March 2016 in protest of the current government.
Since then, students have continued to be at the forefront of many major political struggles in France. They are largely unaffiliated with existing formal political organizations, but feel President Hollande's Socialist party failed in its campaign promise to help French youth, who have suffered greatly in the economic downturn after the 2008 financial crisis. The administration introduced a law, known as the "loi travail," or "labor law," which gave more power to businesses in labor negotiations, making it easier to fire employees or avoid paying them overtime. Faced with this prospect, high school students decided to take matters into their own hands and called for massive demonstrations against the proposed law.
They managed to shut down city streets - and their schools.
High schools all over Paris were shut down by their own students who blockaded school doors, choosing instead to take to the streets in opposition to the government. These massive demonstrations continued almost every day for the entire month of March last year, growing in size and determination, despite often-violent police repression. "Tout le monde déteste la police," or "Everyone hates the police," became a rallying cry for protesters against inequality, the mistreatment of refugees, racist policing, and government corruption. What started specifically in protest of the labor law expanded to include criticism of the French government as a whole.
They've been joined in solidarity by other groups across France.
At the end of March 2016, an occupation known as Nuit Debout was launched in the Place de République in Paris, where students were joined by refugees, factory workers, teachers, anarchists, and many others. At its height, the marches launched by Nuit Debout gathered several hundred thousand people from across the nation. When the labor law was passed in July, the occupation and protests continued throughout the summer and fall, including a massive student demonstration on September 15, the first day of the school year, in which informal groups of students vowed to continue their struggle. (At the same time, France's powerful unions expressed that they might give up.)
Police violence has informed French protests, too.
In February of this year, Théo, a 22-year-old black man, was raped and beaten by police in a Paris suburb. This launched yet another new wave of student protests against police racism, brutality, and the state. Students again blockaded their schools, demanding justice for Théo and all victims of police brutality. At least 16 high schools were closed as a result.
And though they're denouncing electoral candidates, some consider themselves totally "ungovernable."
While these students renounce their current president and both candidates in the current election, they continually posit that the path to a better life cannot be found in any presidential candidate or in any governmental structure at all. Rather, the "Ungovernable Generation" believes that creative, collective solutions, implemented from the ground up, will build a more just, free, and joyful world. In their rejection of Macron along with Le Pen, the students deny both the regressive nationalism of the right (the National Front's leaders have been accused of anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial), and the unwelcome alternative of continuing with the status quo offered by Macron and his predecessor Hollande.
No matter what happens next, they're likely to fight.
The second round of the French presidential election, from which either Macron or Le Pen will emerge as the new president, will take place on May 7. While Macron is projected to win, the result, of course, is uncertain. What is certain is that these students - who blockade, carry banners, and chant, "Not Marine nor Macon, not homeland nor bosses" - won't be happy about the result. But they also won't stop trying to build the world they want to see.

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All The Major Anti-Government Protests in France Are Led By TEENS

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For over a year, students in France have led massive anti-government protests across the country.

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Capres Willow Turner Organized a London Black Lives Matter Protest

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Capres Willow Turner Organized a London Black Lives Matter Protest

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Last summer, while checking Twitter, Capres Willow, then 18, noticed a particularly jarring video on her feed. The video was of Philando Castile, a black man shot and killed by Minnesota police during a traffic stop while driving with his girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter. Capres, who lives in a suburb of London and is now 19, was outraged by the images she saw of Castile sitting there, bleeding to death in the driver's seat.

"I lost my mom when I was younger and I just remember thinking, 'there's a little girl in the backseat watching [her mother's boyfriend] being killed,'" Capres tells Teen Vogue. Not only was it jarring because she was watching a death happen over Twitter, but "then I'm watching [the] family witness the murder as well, and then nothing is going to happen about [it], like it's OK that this is happening," she adds. "That's what really got me riled up and frustrated me because it was just, like, why? What's going on with the world? I thought we had hope. I thought things were getting better."

At the time, the issue of police brutality was dominating the news cycle in America with not only the death of Philando Castile, but also of Alton Sterling, a black man who was fatally shot by Baton Rouge, Louisiana police. Shaken to the core after watching the video of Castile in particular, a fire lit within Capres, springing her to action. "I was like you know what, I'm tired of everybody just ranting. We need to show the world - and grab media attention - that we are in solidarity with the U.S. and what's going on over there," she says.

Capres took to Facebook to organize a Black Lives Matter protest in Central London that would commence at the Oxford Circus tube station on July 10, 2016. She posted a screenshot of the event page on Twitter, and people immediately began sharing it onto their own accounts. Eventually, it caught the attention of the BBC - they tweeted it out - as well as singer-songwriter, Kehlani, who posted it on her Instagram page.

When July 10th arrived, Capres was nervous having never planned a protest before at that point. On the day, she had simply set out on the London tube wishing for the best. "I [didn't] even have a megaphone," Capres admits. She had only expected a handful of people to show up - 30 at most, she recalls. To her surprise, far more showed up. "I walked out of Oxford Circus station and there's already like 60 people there and I'm like, oh my gosh, what do I do?" A novice protester, let alone organizer, Capres walked up to the police officers on the premise for guidance, to which they instructed her to address the crowd about the day's agenda. Standing on her tippy toes, she shouted into the crowd, "Hello everybody, thank you so much for coming. It's going to be an amazing day!" At that it was. As the day rolled on, a plethora of people joined in on the organized march, cheering and chanting slogans to spread the poignant message of Black Lives Matter. In the end, approximately 3,000 people attended, a feat that still stuns Capres.

In the days after the protest, Capres received a range of responses from the public, including messages from people who had put on events in their own communities after being inspired by her. While the feedback was overwhelmingly positive, she did receive some negativity from someone expressing their skepticism about her being an inexperienced teenager involved in a critical global movement, Capres recalls. Thankfully, she hasn't let those negative comments deter her, knowing all too well the importance of being civically engaged no matter your age.

Now a university student at Goldsmiths, University of London, studying sociology and anthropology, Capres is committed to expanding her knowledge and understanding of race relations and pressing humanitarian issues. Having organized a widely-attended protest as a teenager, Capres is a prime example of the immense power young people have in bringing to light the civil rights issues of our time.
Related:

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Meet the Teen Who Organized a Black Lives Matter Protest Attended By THOUSANDS of People

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Rising activist Capres Willow Turner talked to Teen Vogue about the surreal experience of organizing a #BlackLivesMatter protest in London when she was just 18-years-old.

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Teens Help Teens Through Targeted Volunteer Work

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Teens Help Teens Through Targeted Volunteer Work

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Students can choose from any number of activities to enrich their social and educational experiences while in high school. One that can provide unique benefits is volunteering.

Some high schools require students to accumulate a certain amount of service-learning hours in order to graduate, but students should welcome opportunities to volunteer even when it's not required, experts agree.

Volunteering presents a tangible way for students to make a positive impact in their community and help organizations accomplish their missions, all while bolstering students' resumes for college applications and jobs.

Volunteering is a two-way street, with both the high school student and organization benefitting, says Jennifer Bennett, director of education and training for California-based VolunteerMatch. As a student, she says, you should consider, "What could you learn? What could you explore? What problem or challenge do you see in your community to be able to make a difference around you, or somebody you might be able to help?"

Here are some of the many reasons high school students should consider doing volunteer work in their spare time.

The Benefits of Volunteering as a High Schooler

Community Perspective

One of the immediate benefits of volunteering is that it allows students to be in tune with and give back to their local community.

Due to staffing and budget constraints, some organizations rely on volunteers to achieve their mission. And for many teenagers, doing volunteer work is a chance to experience a culture or group of people that they wouldn't have otherwise encountered.

It's also a chance to become aware of problems in their community that they may not otherwise have known about. That was the case for Laura Rusk, now a student at Indiana University-Bloomington's Mauer School of Law. In high school she volunteered with Indiana Legal Services, a nonprofit that offers free legal services to low-income individuals. For the first time, she saw that members of the homeless community dealt with legal issues and often didn't have many places to turn for help.

"These are real issues for real people," Rusk says.

Rusk was also a member of her high school's student council, which prioritized community service.Those experiences, coupled with ones she sought out on her own, were invaluable during her high school years, she says.

"It gave me a lot of opportunities to meet people from different backgrounds who were having very different lived experiences in this city that I was never even aware of - different community problems and things like that," she says.

Gaining this perspective can help students become more well-rounded when they enter college and eventually the professional world, says Melanie Keeling, a college and career-transition readiness coach at Warren East High School in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

"It shows a certain kind of connection to your community when you do that because you want to give back," she says.

Develop Career Skills and Interests

For high school students who are undecided about a career path or college major, volunteering can help narrow down potential areas of interest.

Students can learn an assortment of skills, from hands-on manual labor to office and administrative skills, says Marie Schwartz, CEO and founder of TeenLife, a company that helps students in grades 7-12 find community service opportunities.

"Lack of exposure is the biggest barrier to success," she says. "Volunteering is one of those ways to get that exposure at no cost."

It can also be a "low-risk way" of figuring out what skills students have and want to apply in the real world, says Kathryn Campbell, associate director of editorial policy at the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce.

"You might think you want to do one thing, but when you're in a workplace, you might find that you don't like it in the same way you thought you would," Campbell says.

If students stay engaged with nonprofits or other community organizations for an extended period of time, it can serve the same purpose as a job, experts say. Students learn skills like responsibility, punctuality and being accountable. They also cultivate leadership skills and learn how to delegate tasks to others.

Those competencies are attractive on college applications and are things eventual employers look for, Keeling says.

"Many of them are willing to trade off the perfect 4.0 for a person who's got gumption, a person who's willing to get teeth in the game, a person who is a self-starter," she says.

Networking and Mentorship

In addition, experts say the relationships students build during volunteer opportunities can be useful down the road when applying to college or for jobs.

Rusk volunteered on a local politician's campaign while in high school in addition to her legal volunteering. She credits that experience with spurring her passion for public policy and says the relationships she built there have connected her with internships while in college and law school. In college she interned for a U.S. congressman and she spent this past summer with Lambda Legal, a nonprofit civil rights advocacy group that offers free legal services for LGBTQ individuals.

Schwartz says she's heard similar stories from students, as well as from businesses that later hired former volunteers.

Volunteer Opportunities for High Schoolers

While it can be tempting for students to fill their resume with a lot of different volunteer experiences, experts say it's better for students to stay focused.

"Hopscotching around," as Schwartz calls it, might signal to colleges that a student is trying to pad their resume, while "fewer, more intense experiences" allow the student to see a project through and show commitment to a cause.

Organizations like TeenLife and VolunteerMatch can help students and parents to find applicable volunteer opportunities in their geographic region. There are also now more virtual volunteering opportunities as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, Brilliant Detroit, an organization focused on early childhood development, accepts volunteers to serve as virtual literacy tutors and story readers.

As students are beginning their search, here are a few practical opportunities that Schwartz suggests, in various fields of interest:

Teach computer skills at a local senior center

Help at a walk-a-thon like Race for the Cure or Relay for Life

Donate food to a local food bank

Work on a political campaign or at an election day voting site

Provide social media services for a nonprofit

Tutor students in an afterschool program

Students can also look to organizations like the Boys & Girls Club, Special Olympics, Best Buddies International and Big Brothers Big Sisters, many of which have local chapters, for chances to volunteer.

No matter what students choose to do, they'll grow from the experience, Bennett says. "It gives kids that opportunity to explore the things that they're passionate about, find those things that matter to them and then make a difference."

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Find Volunteer Opportunities for High Schoolers

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Volunteering can help students grow into more well-rounded people while also helping others, experts say.

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Kids vs Global Warming: How teens are making a difference

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Kids vs Global Warming: How teens are making a difference

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Teens care about more than just dating, going out on a Friday night and getting their driver's licenses. Some teens are taking action on big initiatives, like putting an end to global warming. Learn how Alec Loorz from the iMatter movement is working to help save the earth.

Alec Loorz makes your average 40-year-old, stay-at-home mom really re-think her bucket list.

By age 18, he had sued the U.S. government, trained with Al Gore, shared philosophies with the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and inspired tens of thousands of youth from 45 countries and more than 200 cities to march in their streets with a unified message - "Our future matters!"

Alec and his mother, Victoria, launched Kids vs Global Warming when Alec was only 13 years old. The iMatter Campaign, an initiative of Kids vs Global Warming, began in 2009. Its mission is to "empower youth to become the voice of the climate crisis so that our society wakes up and actually begins to live as if our future matters."

Alec says he didn't set out to spark a movement. "I just did what I felt I needed to do to raise awareness that my generation's future was at stake, and we all need to be involved in bringing about a new way of living if we are going to survive," he explains. "I guess that really resonated with people."

Youth passion needs matching funds

The iMatter Youth Council (iMYC) is an international team of young leaders who act as spokespeople for their generation through school presentations, speeches, videos, blogs and articles. But iMYC isn't just talk.

Members also organize marches and meet with government officials. The goal is to change the way people think, live and act.

But big goals often need big budgets - and that's where iMatter struggles.

"We need to build infrastructure and raise funds to keep up with the momentum," says Victoria Loorz, Alec's mother and the executive director of iMatter. "It's a huge challenge. I know there are many people out there who would want to join us in our work, but it's a skill we're still learning."

Climate crisis is "moral issue"

While Al Gore inspired much of Alec's philosophy on climate change, iMatter hopes to differentiate itself from the liberal pigeonhole into which many environmental organizations find themselves plunged.

"The climate crisis is not a political issue," Victoria says. "In fact, it's not even an environmental issue. It's a moral issue. But corporate money from oil interests have made it into a political one."

Akilah Sanders-Reed, 18, is an iMatter youth council member and student at Macalester College. She has been a climate activist since she was about 14 years old.

"Climate action isn't some strange litmus test for how liberal or conservative a person is," Akilah says. "It's a test of a person's commitment to every young and future American, and every citizen of the planet."

Adult support, partnership is key

In addition to recruiting Republicans, iMatter hopes to attract individuals with large fan bases to help organically expand iMatter's reach. While growing funding and reach are paramount, iMatter's long-term goal is "to see some actual change in our political system to reduce carbon emissions as prescribed by scientists to bring down carbon levels to 350 ppm," explains Valerie Serrels, mother to three teens who have worked with iMatter. Valerie is also coordinator of the iMatter youth council for Kids vs Global Warming.

While Kids vs Global Warming is primarily driven by youth, the organization says it strives to involve parents and plans to launch a mentor program this year. "Elders are needed as much as youth are," says Victoria, Alec's mother. "Both need to be honored, supported and mobilized together."

Grant Serrels, 17, is an iMatter youth council member and Valerie's son. He describes why he believes this youth movement is poised to succeed.

"The unique thing about youth leadership as part of the climate movement is that our voices represent future generations and put focus on the need to change the way we live, act, use, abuse and profit from our environment," he says. "History has shown us that a movement of young people can bring change."

In 50 years, Larry King will be dead, "but I won't be"

Alec says his passion is especially fueled by people who tell him something cannot be done.

"I love it when people tell me that!" he says. "It makes me mad and I have to prove them wrong. Larry King stated the problem plainly... a few years ago [when he said], 'Nobody cares about what's going to happen in 50 years.'"

"Well that's easy for him to say, he'll be dead," Alec points out. "But I won't be. Our children won't be. This planet won't be. So I believe that it is up to us - the youngest generation - to stand up and ignite a movement that will change the mindset of every person on this planet.

"In fact, I believe it's what we were born to do."

More about kids making a difference
8 Earth Day traditions kids will love
What your kids should know about global warming
Volunteering opportunities for teens

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Teens vs Global Warming's iMatter movement rallies youth worldwide to change the way people think, live and act.

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Interview with Mary Grace Henry, founder of Reverse the Course

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Interview with Mary Grace Henry, founder of Reverse the Course

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One of Mary Grace Henry's favorite quotes is from Mother Teresa:

Not all of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.

- Mother Teresa

Doing small things with great love epitomizes the work of Mary Grace, recipient of our 2014 Youth Award. That combined with an ability to achieve anything she puts her mind to.

"My advice is just to begin," Mary Grace told us. "When you see a need, act. Dream big, but start small, taking little steps."

When she was 12, Mary Grace became determined to change the life of an underprivileged girl by funding her education. She taught herself how to make reversible headbands with a plan to use 100% of the profits to send girls living in extreme poverty to school.

"I realized that the very best tool that would give someone a real chance was one she could use to pursue her own dreams: an education," Mary Grace said.

Undaunted by the fact that she knew nothing about sewing or running a business, Mary Grace got to work. She asked her parents for an early birthday present - a sewing machine, practiced sewing headbands for months, and eventually made enough to sell at her school's bookstore.

Pretty soon, Mary Grace had raised enough money to reach her goal. But she couldn't stop there: so many other girls still did not have access to education.

"The greatest obstacle to education faced by both girls and boys is poverty," Mary Grace said. "Girls, though, face a second hurdle that is far more difficult to address: their culture. In many countries throughout the world, girls are viewed as having not just lesser value than boys, but often devastatingly little or no value."

Today, Mary Grace is the Founder of Reverse The Course, a social business that has sold more than 11,000 hair accessories, through her website and through retail partners in seven states, to fund the education of girls in Kenya, Uganda, Paraguay and Haiti.

Read more below about why Mary Grace started Reverse The Course, and why she doesn't plan on slowing down anytime soon:

1. What do you think is the number one obstacle preventing girls from getting an education?
The greatest obstacle to education faced by both girls and boys is poverty. Girls, though, face a second hurdle that is far more difficult to address: their culture. In many countries throughout the world, girls are viewed as having not just lesser value than boys, but often devastatingly little or no value.

This manifests itself in different ways depending on geography and, in many countries, religion. Girls are aborted because families do not want to pay a dowry; desperately poor families sell their daughters, dooming them to lives chained to a sewing machines 15 hours a day; in many regions, women and girls are used as "free labor;" in places where a woman's value is in the number of children she bears, girls as young as 11 and 12 are married. Families often believe it is better to invest in sons who will remain with them than in daughters who will join their husbands' families.

Though the patriarchal society dominant in so many countries perpetuates the discrimination against girls, the passage of laws mandating primary school education for girls has finally helped put a crack in these barriers.

2. What does it mean to you to win a World of Children?
It means that I am part of something bigger than my dream, part of an entire community that cares deeply about the fate of the most vulnerable: children.

World of Children's network will be a resource in ways I have yet to comprehend. This Award is a seal of approval that will allow us to become more financially stable, ensuring the Foundation's ability to expand and continue our mission to educate girls.

The World of Children Youth Award validates my work as being effective, empowering and life-changing in "reversing the course" of marginalized girls' lives. I am humbled and forever grateful that I've been chosen for this extraordinary honor.

3. Do you have any advice for any other young people who want to start programs for vulnerable children?
One of my favorite quotes is from Mother Teresa: "Not all of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love."

My advice is to just begin. When you see a need, act. Dream big, but start small, taking little steps. Set an initial goal and don't scare yourself thinking about the "what ifs." Each step taken will present both new opportunities and new challenges. Face each one as it comes and then keep going. All those little steps, done with love, will lead you to places impossible to imagine.

4. With all that you have accomplished, could you share one moment that has stuck with you?
Growing up, I was always talking about what I wanted to be. I spent a year wanting to be an artist, another a teacher, several years envisioning myself as an astronaut.

When I asked Barbara Lee Shaw, the Founder of the Maasai Girls Education Fund, to find out what our students wanted to be, I expected to hear similar answers.

A month later, Barbara called me to say that when the girls were asked to write me a little note answering my question, they sat looking at the discussion leader, Lucy, silently. When she repeated the request, one girl raised her hand and asked what did "to be" mean. As Lucy explained, one girl looked shocked and said she never thought she could be anything except what the village elders told her to be. Another girl began to cry as she thought about all the possibilities before her. That was when I fully comprehended my work was really accomplishing what I hoped: giving girls the chance to define their own dreams.
On November 6, Mary Grace will be honored in New York City with the 2014 World of Children Youth Award at our annual Awards Ceremony along with 5 other extraordinary changemakers for children. Learn more >>

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Interview with Mary Grace Henry, founder of Reverse The Course, World of Children

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One of Mary Grace Henry's favorite quotes is from Mother Teresa: Not all of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love. - Mother Teresa Doing small things with great love epitomizes the work of Mary Grace, recipient of our 2014 Youth Award.

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How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?

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How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones?

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How do cancer cells behave differently from healthy ones? - George Zaidan

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Whether you're a freshman or a senior, high school is a great time to try things that you haven't done before - including volunteering.

Students may think it's not worth their time to get involved in the community because it doesn't pay like a normal job would. However, there are several benefits that volunteering can give you that no other job can.

Read on to find out about all the benefits of community service for you, your personal fulfillment, and practical purposes like college applications!

What Is Community Service?

Community service is when you work for free to help benefit the public or your community. Usually, students who choose to do community service do so as volunteers, meaning that they choose to help out because they want to do so. Community service can have a lot of positive effects on students, such as helping them to develop skills, making contacts, and allowing them to improve the quality of life of others.

You probably know some students in your school who choose to volunteer their free time through community service. There are many ways that you can do this, such as joining a non-profit organization, working with a church group, or you can choose a cause and create your own service project.

For some ideas of community service activities, see our list of volunteer ideas.

Volunteer work can range from the relatively simple, like helping coach the lacrosse team at your old junior high, to the much more complex, like starting a non-profit that helps settle new refugees in your area.

As I'm sure you can imagine, there are a lot of benefits to doing volunteer work. They include...

School Benefits

You may be familiar with community service already because it is something that your school requires. In fact, many high schools throughout the United States require their students to help out the community in some way in order to graduate. Though it's often on the honor system to report what you've done, these high schools may require up to 200 hours of community service before they're willing to grant a degree.

This type of requirement can be especially common at religious schools, and in particular at Christian schools. Many Christian schools set requirements based on the Biblical idea that it is the Christian's duty to do community outreach with whatever "gift" they have been given by God. Because of this, many of these Christian schools will have branches of Christian non-profits, such as the Salvation Army or Habitat for Humanity, on campus or affiliated with the school, which make it much easier for students to donate their time.

Many other schools require service learning. This term describes an approach to education that aims to connect lessons learned in the classroom with real-life lessons learned through community service. It is a practice that has become increasingly common in both high schools and universities in the United States, because educators like that the learning process benefits both the students and the communities. It allows students to learn more about their personal motivations, practice academic material outside of the context of the classroom and testing, develop critical thinking skills while solving real-world problems, and to think about problems and social issues in new ways.

This kind of experiential learning, or applying what you have learned in the classroom to the real world, has a lot of positive benefits for students apart from meeting a requirement to graduate. These include a better understanding of the value of teamwork, decision-making skills, development of leadership abilities, and the gain of practical skills.

For example, let's imagine that as part of your school-required community service or service learning, you've decided to use the writing skills you developed in AP English to volunteer at a local non-profit that raises awareness of Alzheimer's disease. As a strong writer, you may start out writing press releases for the charity. Immediately you would be developing a new skill: the ability to write for a targeted, non-academic audience. Working with a team, you would gain a better understanding of the importance of sharing information in a usable way. You might eventually expand your duties into other areas, such as managing the organization's social media accounts, which would further develop your writing skills.

Additionally, you would be gaining a new perspective on your community and on what life is like for a group of people that is often overlooked: the terminally ill. This could change how you see the world and your role in it.

In fact, many students report that this kind of personal development is the most valuable part of a service learning projects.

Personal Development Benefits

One of the big ways that students will benefit from volunteer work is through personal development.

This happens in a number of ways.

First of all, many students learn about their personal strengths and weaknesses. When you're working on campaigns and projects and getting to see real-life results, you'll get to know how your personal attributes and actions can make a difference. Many of these qualities are things that students can't get good feedback on in the classroom. For example, students may learn that they have excellent skills in coping with a crisis or other stressful situations, or may learn that they find taking charge of a team to be a struggle. This kind of exposure to different situations can then teach students how to further develop skills that they have, and how to work on areas they struggle in.

In particular, students find that they are able to develop skills in leadership, communication, working well with a team, and finding solutions for problems.

Many students also find that community service makes them more aware of and interested in issues of social justice.

For example, if you spend your days going to school, playing sports, and doing homework, you will likely not spend a lot of time thinking about the problems that homeless people encounter.

On the other hand, if you're working every day at a homeless shelter, you'll have a chance to dispel stereotypes about why people become homeless while also learning about the unique challenges that homeless people face in getting off the streets. Many homeless people face prejudice that makes returning to work and earning a self-supporting living more difficult than it is for non-homeless people.

Once people learn more about struggles and injustices that other groups of people face, they are statistically more likely to want to actively take part in making a change in the policies and social structures that keep certain groups from succeeding. This change can take many forms, such as active campaigning, voting in elections, and continuing to volunteer time to important causes.

Volunteering has also been shown to have one other, more tangible major personal benefit. Did you know that it's actually good for your health?

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Health Benefits

Numerous studies over the past several years have shown that volunteering isn't just good for your mind and conscience; it's also good for your body. By focusing on others' problems instead of their own, students have reported reduced stress, and overall improvement in mood and health.

Researchers at the London School of Economics and Political Science found a link between self-reported levels of good health and happiness and formal volunteer work. Furthermore, a study by United Health Group says that 76% of people who have volunteered in the past twelve months say that volunteering has made them feel happier, and 94% of people report that it improves their mood. 78% of volunteers say that it has lowered their stress levels.

Volunteering can also help protect people from depression during challenging times, as it tends to help create a strong support system for participants. Volunteering also keeps people physically healthy by keeping them active. Certain activities, such as working to clean up a park or a beach, can be good exercise. Studies have shown that especially as people get older, volunteering in these kinds of projects can keep people healthy and can even lessen the symptoms of certain diseases.

Of course, not all the benefits of volunteering are limited to the volunteer. Another big way that people benefit is in their involvement with their community.

Community Benefits

Volunteering allows students to become directly involved in their communities. Some students don't realize how important volunteers are to the country and to many organizations. But try to imagine if no volunteers showed up to work tomorrow. Can you imagine what would change?

Volunteers are responsible for many things that we take for granted. When hurricanes hit the south coast or wildfires burn up California, volunteers are critical in helping victims get re-settled, fed, and back to their "normal" lives as quickly as possible. Without volunteers, many of our country's elderly would not be able to get food. Our parks and beaches would be much dirtier. Our children would struggle more without the help of volunteer tutors and mentors.

To get a real idea of how important volunteers are to keeping the country running, let's look at the numbers.

The Corporation for National and Community Service says that in 2013, 62.6 million Americans volunteered 7.7 billion hours of work. The estimated value of this work is almost $173 billion. That's almost as much as the GDP of Ukraine - just in volunteer hours!

The top activities performed included raising money for important causes; collecting, preparing, and giving out food to people who need it; providing labor and transportation; tutoring and mentoring youth; and lending professional expertise.

Furthermore, volunteers are almost twice as likely to donate to charities as non-volunteers. In all, just over 50% of Americans donated over $25 to charities in 2013, making at least $4 billion in donations.

The knowledge that they are making a real difference also affects student volunteers on a more personal level. When students know their work is helping someone, they show increased rates of self-esteem. Furthermore, students who volunteer are more likely to become actively involved citizens who take a strong interest in current events and local affairs, and are much more likely to vote.

Apart from helping out your community here and now, you'll also be helping out your future self.

College Benefits

Have you ever wondered if volunteering makes a big difference in college admissions?

The truth is that it's one of the most popular extracurricular activities that students list on their college applications. And while colleges don't necessarily expect students to have spent all their free time volunteering, schools (especially the more competitive ones) will usually notice a total lack of community service.

Colleges like seeing that students have done community service. Keep in mind that most universities want to admit students who are actively involved in activities that better themselves, and eventually, will better the world. Students who have been actively involved in community service in high school show colleges that they will be the type of student who will be actively involved in making the college community a better place to be. Eventually, that they will be the kind of people who care about changing the world.

On a more practical level, the personal benefits and development that you will get from volunteering can be great topic matter for a college application essay.

The people you work with on community service projects will be good people to turn to when the time comes for letters of recommendation. They'll be able to speak to your leadership abilities, passion, and character. Finally, doing this kind of work shows prospective schools that you can balance activities with your schoolwork and that you have good time management.

Did you know that your volunteer work can also be helpful in paying for college? See our list of community service scholarships to see how you can make volunteering work for you financially.

The good news doesn't end there, though. The benefits of volunteering will follow you out of school and into the workplace, as well.

Professional Benefits

Did you know that employers love volunteers?

TimeBank, a UK-based volunteering charity, and Reed, a recruitment company, partnered to create a study on how employers think about volunteer work. The results were very positive for those who have chosen to donate their time:

84% of employers agreed that volunteering is a good way for people to find work.

70% of employers said that volunteers have a better chance of getting a higher salary and a promotion.

80% of employers said that they like to see volunteer work on a resume.

23% of employers said that volunteering had helped their staff learn key skills, such as time management, communication skills, and leadership skills.

The study also showed that half of the employees surveyed thought that their volunteer experience had helped them land their job, and up to 20% of employees thought that their volunteer experience helped them gain key skills in communication, leadership, and time management that were important to their jobs.

As you can see, there are a lot of ways that your community service work will help you down the road once you start work, beginning with what you choose to do.

Volunteering is a great way to explore different interests. High school students who do community service can try different kinds of work and work environments that they otherwise would likely not be exposed to at such a young age. Most paying jobs that high school students are eligible for - such as working in fast food - are not the most interesting. But volunteering can give you a chance to try things that you will be interested in as a career, such as working in social media, organizing events, or working in a specific type of institution such as a hospital.

The experiences that you gain will also look great on your resume. Future employers will likely be much more interested in hearing about a fundraiser that you ran than they will be in hearing about your burger flipping skills. Why? A lot of the personal development benefits discussed above, such as leadership skills and the ability to collaborate with a team, are things that translate well to many jobs and workplaces.

Networking is another major benefit of volunteering. As a volunteer, you will be very likely to meet like-minded individuals who share your interests. In the future, these people can be important contacts for writing letters of recommendation and for putting you in touch with the right people for scholarships and jobs.

Now that you know that community service is an extracurricular that will help you out in your personal life, as well as in high school, college, and your professional life, what are you waiting for?

How to Get Started

If you've decided you're ready to take the plunge, here are some Do's and Don'ts to get you started in your volunteer career.

Do try to find the right opportunity for you. It's important to find something that you are going to enjoy and that you are capable of doing well. Ask yourself what kind of people you like working with (kids? people your own age?), whether you work better alone or as part of a team, how much time you have to commit and how much responsibility you can take on, and what special skills you have that you can contribute.

Don't volunteer abroad just because you think it looks better. Especially for college applications, admissions officers prefer to see a local long-term volunteer commitment than something that has only lasted a week or two during a summer break. Some volunteer abroad programs can also cause more trouble than good to local people.

Do try to find a cause that you are passionate about. If you have always had an affinity for animals, try working at a shelter or a charity working on animal rights. If you have always valued education, try tutoring or an education charity. The more you care about the cause, the more dedicated you will be to continue working for it over a long period of time.

Don't be afraid of making a change. Ask questions when something doesn't seem right. If you end up doing work that doesn't seem like a good fit, is causing excessive stress, or if the experience isn't allowing you to do the things you thought you would be working on, it's ok to leave to find something else.

Do enjoy yourself! The more you are having fun with volunteering, the more it will be a positive experience both for you and the organization you are working with.

What's Next?

Now that you know the benefits, check out the 9 best places to do community service.

If you need money for college, volunteering may be the answer. Check out our list of volunteer scholarships.

Want to use your community service for your college applications? Check out how to write a good community service essay and how to get a community service letter.

Want to improve your SAT score by 160 points or your ACT score by 4 points? We've written a guide for each test about the top 5 strategies you must be using to have a shot at improving your score. Download it for free now:

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Why should you do community service? What are the benefits of volunteering for teens and college applications? Learn here.

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Last week, Michelle Obama traveled across the country promoting her "Let's Move" Campaign, which encourages schools, families, and communities to combat childhood obesity through healthy food and exercise. The First Lady is asking schools to do their part by providing nutritious meals and strong P.E. programs to their students-important goals, given that obesity can cause serious physical and mental health issues and reduce academic achievement among kids.

© MarkHatfield

But new scientific findings suggest that Mrs. Obama may need to add another component to her program: volunteering.

In a study published yesterday in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, 106 10th-grade students were asked to volunteer in after-school programs where they worked with elementary-aged children for 60 to 90 minutes per week for 10 weeks; another group of 10th graders, who were waitlisted for volunteering, served as a control group.

Compared to the non-volunteers, the students who volunteered showed a steep drop in risk factors for cardiovascular disease, including cholesterol levels and body mass index, at the end of 10 weeks. These benefits were even more pronounced for students whose empathy and altruistic behaviors increased the most and whose negative moods lessened over those 10 weeks.

So, while the study didn't focus on decreasing obesity specifically, it did show that volunteering may prevent one of its potential consequences: heart disease. And it has the added value of increasing kind, helpful (or "pro-social") behavior-a nice alternative to the low self-esteem and academic troubles that can result from childhood obesity.

The findings add an exciting new physical dimension to what scientists know about the many social and emotional benefits volunteering brings students, including: higher levels of positive emotions; a stronger ability to regulate their emotions; lower levels of risk behavior, such as early pregnancy and drug use; increased civic engagement and moral reasoning; and a greater likelihood of volunteering in adulthood.

So for schools that already provide volunteer opportunities for their students-keep up the great work! Research tells us that you're benefiting your students not only mentally and emotionally but physically as well.

But for those schools that haven't yet integrated volunteering into the curriculum, or for those that would like to make student volunteering more effective, here are some research-based tips.

1) Make service social. As much as possible, provide opportunities for students to engage directly with people who are receiving the service. One study discovered that student volunteers who worked directly with people versus those who didn't afterwards felt a stronger connection to other people in general, along with the belief that they could make a difference in the world. Another study showed that direct contact made students more likely to take a stand on issues they cared about, for instance by demonstrating or boycotting about those issues. In general, research has found that social connection provides a vast array of physical and mental health benefits, whereas loneliness weakens our cardiovascular and immune systems.

While the authors of the JAMA study didn't test different kinds of service, I think it's quite possible that volunteering helped the students' hearts because it fostered greater connections between them and younger students; indeed, if they felt stronger empathic connection to others, these cardiovascular benefits increased even more. I know when I was a teacher, I saw a significant change in my older students when they were given the responsibility of working with kindergartners. It was as if they had taken an empathy pill-one that made them more patient, understanding, and kind.

2) Service-learning vs. community service-take your pick! Some schools mandate community service through formal service-learning programs, while others make service voluntary through more informal community service opportunities.

According to researchers, it doesn't matter which way you go-both have the same positive impact on students, particularly when compared with students who never volunteer. So, what's important is that students are volunteering-period.

However, I would add from personal experience that requiring service might help students who would never consider volunteering try it out-and they just might fall in love with it. Case in point: One of my best friends was required to do community service in high school and found that working with autistic children changed his life. Rather than becoming a lawyer, he decided to teach high school and start his own fabulous service-learning program.

3) Consider the people and organizations receiving service. While most of the studies on service-learning and volunteering focus on the students who perform the service, some researchers decided to turn the lens around and ask those receiving service about their experience. And what they found isn't all roses.

Imagine this scenario: An enthusiastic 16-year old arrives at your workplace, ready to save the world. However, this teen has very few skills and even less knowledge about the work your organization does. Oh-and can only help three hours a week for six weeks total. Needless to say, the organizations interviewed for the study responded with a hearty, "AAACKK!!"

So when you're sending your students off to volunteer, be sure to communicate with the organizations ahead of time to find out what their needs are and consider if your students have the skills and time to fill those needs.

I take heart that so many schools already have volunteer programs in place-together, you're creating a world of do-gooders. And as we're learning, so many activities that are good for the world are also good for students' own minds, bodies, and hearts.
I'd love to hear from those of you who work with student volunteer programs about what does and doesn't work. Please leave a comment below if you'd like to share your experience with other readers.
Greater Good wants to know: Do you think this article will influence your opinions or behavior?

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New research shows that adolescents who volunteer decrease their risk for heart disease.

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A genetically modified organism, or GMO, is an organism that has had its DNA altered or modified in some way through genetic engineering.

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Six Graphics that Explain Climate Change

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Six Graphics that Explain Climate Change

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A breakthrough deal to attempt to limit global temperature rises was agreed at a conference of world nations in December 2015. These charts from the time show how and why the Earth's climate is changing.

1. What is the problem?

The world is getting warmer

The average temperature of the Earth's surface has increased by about 0.85°C (1.4F) in the last 100 years. Up until 2015, 13 of the 14 warmest years had been recorded in the 21st Century. 2015 then became the hottest year on record, but was surpassed by record-breaking 2016.

10 warmest years

10 coldest years

20th Century average temperature

Hotter

Colder

Source: NOAA

2. Why is this happening?

Greenhouse gases, mainly carbon dioxide

Scientists believe that gases released from industry and agriculture (known as emissions) are adding to the natural greenhouse effect, the way the Earth's atmosphere traps some of the energy from the Sun.

Human activities such as burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2), the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming. Carbon-absorbing forests are also being cut down.

The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now higher than at any time in the last 800,000 years and reached a record high in May 2015. But 2016 marked five consecutive years of CO2 increases of at least two parts per million.

Scripps CO2 Program, data from the Mauna Loa Observatory

3. What are the effects?

Arctic sea ice melt

Higher temperatures, extreme weather events and higher sea levels are all linked to a warming climate and could have a drastic effect on the world's regions.

Since 1900, sea levels have risen by on average about 19cm globally. The rate of sea-level rise has accelerated in recent decades, placing a number of islands and low-lying countries at risk.

The retreat of polar ice sheets is an important contributor to this rise.

Arctic sea ice is also shrinking because of higher temperatures, though it makes little contribution to raised sea levels.

An area of sea ice roughly 10 times the size of the UK has been lost when the current day is compared with average levels from the early 1980s.

Arctic sea ice min. extent: 1980, 7.8 million sq km. 2015, 4.6 million sq km

Source: National Snow and Ice Data Center

4. What does the future hold?

Higher temperatures and more extreme weather

The scale of potential impacts is uncertain.

The changes could drive shortages in freshwater, bring about major changes in food production conditions and cause a rise in the number of casualties from floods, storms, heat waves and droughts.

This is because climate change is expected to increase the frequency of extreme weather events - however linking any single event to global warming is complicated.

Projected temperature change (1986-2005 to 2081-2100)

If greenhouse gas emissions peak between 2010-2020 and then decline substantially (RCP2.6)

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise throughout the 21st century (RCP8.5)

Source: International Panel on Climate Change - Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)

5. What can be done?

World's top ten greenhouse gas emitters

The top 10 greenhouse gas emitters make up over 70% of total emissions

Source: Carbon Brief, figures are for 2012

6. Limiting the damage

By the end of October 2015, 146 countries had submitted national climate plans on curbing emissions that are expected to form the cornerstone of a binding, global treaty on climate change.

According to a UN report, submissions in their current form point to a rise of 2.7°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

Scientists have determined that if temperature rises surpass 2°C, this will lead to substantial and dangerous climate impacts, which will hit the world's poor in particular.

Average warming (°C) projected by 2100

Source: Climate Action Tracker, data compiled by Climate Analytics, ECOFYS, New Climate Institute and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

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Six graphics that explain climate change as world leaders gathered in Paris for COP21.

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History for kids - Free history network for kids

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Hiroshima and Nagasaki - History for kids

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Atomic Bomb Background Before the war, many scientists had been investigating the possibility of generating energy and even weapons from the atom, the building block of the universe and everything that surrounds us. The famous scientist Albert Einstein represented these leading thinkers by writing to the American president Franklin Roosevelt in August 1939. He told

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Physics for Kids: Nuclear Energy and Fission

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Physics for Kids: Nuclear Energy and Fission

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Kids learn about nuclear energy and fission in the science of physics including E=mc2, power plants, uses of nuclear power, and fusion.

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Kids learn about the history of the Atomic Bomb during World War II. Dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki of Japan to end WW2.

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While Germany had surrendered, the continued. One of the most significant events of World War Two happened in 1945. This was the dropping of on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American forces.

The decision to drop the atom bomb was taken by President Harry S. Truman, who had replaced Franklin Roosevelt following his death in April 1945. On 6 August 1945, Truman ordered an atom bomb to be dropped on the city of Hiroshima. It was dropped by a bomber plane named the Enola Gay. It is thought that at least 140,000 people were killed, of a total population of around 350,000.

When the atom bomb was dropped:

The temperature at the centre of the explosion reached 3000ºC - 4000ºC - three times hotter than volcanic lava.

Everything within a mile of the centre of the blast was flattened.

Fires spread and around 67 per cent of Hiroshima's buildings were destroyed.

Three days after the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a second one was dropped on the city of Nagasaki by a bomber plane called Bockscar. A further 74,000 people, at least, were killed. The Japanese Emperor, Hirohito, announced that Japan would surrender on 15 August. They formally signed a surrender agreement on 2 September.

This brought World War Two to an end.

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Find out about World War Two with BBC Bitesize History. For students between the ages of 11 and 14.

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The earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan last week killed thousands of people and caused incredible damage to homes, schools, roads and office buildings. But the damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and another nearby plant has put words such as radiation, nuclear reactors and fuel rods on the front page of the newspaper and all over the Internet and television. KidsPost answers some questions you might have about nuclear energy and what's happening in Japan.
What is nuclear energy?
It's the energy in the center (or nucleus) of an atom. Atoms make up everything in the universe and are held together with great force. In a process called fission, atoms are broken apart, and the energy released can be used to generate electricity at power plants, including the one in Japan that was damaged. Atoms of uranium, a common element that can be mined from the Earth, are used in nuclear reactions. In fission, a tiny particle called a neutron hits a uranium atom; the atom splits, releasing more neutrons and generating a chain reaction. That reaction releases huge amounts of energy. That energy can boil water to create steam, which in turn causes turbines to spin, generating electricity in a power plant.
What is a nuclear reactor?
A nuclear reactor is the device in a power plant where fission takes place. Pieces of uranium about the size of your fingertip get stacked up in 12-foot-long metal tubes, called rods. Bunches of rods form the core of the reactor.
So what happened in Japan?
Rods are normally kept under water, which keeps the reactor core cool. When the earthquake hit last Friday, the entire electrical grid went down, just as it can here when we have an ice storm. The nuclear plant switched to a backup system of generators. But an hour after the earthquake, the tsunami hit the plant, knocking out the generators. Backup batteries lasted only eight hours. Without power, the water couldn't circulate and began to boil away, allowing the rods to get hot. The inability to keep cooling water on the fuel rods led to explosions and fires. Those events have sent radioactive elements into the air. High levels of radiation can be dangerous, even deadly. Close to the reactors, the radition levels have gone up and down. About 50 workers trying to fix the problem are risking their lives to save their fellow citizens.
Are people getting sick now?
No. People within 19 miles of the plant have been told to stay indoors. There is medicine that can treat the effects of radiation sickness, but it has not been given to people yet.
What will happen next?
Nobody knows for sure. If there isn't water available to keep the fuel rods cool, the fingertip-size pellets can melt, like candles. This melting damages the core, which could lead to the release of more radioactive gases.
Is nuclear power safe?
That question has been asked for many years, and you will hear much more debate about it now because of the events in Japan. Nuclear power is very efficient. For example, one of those small uranium pellets can produce as much electricity as 150 gallons of oil. Many people see nuclear power as an alternative energy source. The situation at the Japanese reactors will have people talking about developing other power sources, including solar and wind.

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The earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan killed thousands of people and caused incredible damage. But the damage to the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant has put words like radiation, nuclear reactors and fuel rods on the front page of the newspaper KidsPost answers some questions you might have about nuclear energy and what's happening in Japan.

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DK Find Out! | Fun Facts for Kids on Animals, Earth, History and more!

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Visit DK Find Out! to learn about dinosaurs, space, animals, nature & more. Fun learning activities for kids with videos, quizzes & galleries at DKFindOut.com

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Ingenuiously Charting the Horrifying Power of Today's Nuclear Bombs

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Ingenuiously Charting the Horrifying Power of Today's Nuclear Bombs

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Ingeniously Charting The Horrifying Power Of Today’s Nuclear Bombs

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The mushroom cloud of Russia’s biggest nuke was 8 times the height of Mt. Everest. This infographic will give you a visceral feel for that that means.

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Kids learn about infectious diseases including pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, parasites, and fungi as well as transmission and other types of diseases.

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Animation shows the deadly evolution of nuclear weapons

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Animation shows the deadly evolution of nuclear weapons

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Animation shows the deadly evolution of nuclear weapons

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Building and Detonating the Atom Bomb in Nevada

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Building and Detonating the Atom Bomb in Nevada

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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What it was like to survive the atomic bomb in Hiroshima

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What it was like to survive the atomic bomb in Hiroshima

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In this Aug. 6, 1945, file photo, survivors of the first atomic bomb ever used in warfare are seen as they await emergency medical treatment in Hiroshima, Japan. (AP Photo, File)
This post was originally written last year to mark the 70th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima. It has been updated in conjunction with President Obama's visit to the shrine on Friday.
Seven decades ago, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. It almost instantly leveled most of the city and killed as many as 140,000 people. Three days later, on Aug. 9, another American bomber dropped a nuclear device on the city of Nagasaki, killing 40,000 to 80,000 people.

The devastation was followed by World War II's swift conclusion. It's seared into the collective global memory -- no other time in history has a nuclear weapon been used in war. The simple fact of the atomic bomb's awesome power went on to shape a half-century of Cold War geopolitics.

The justification for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings remains the source of perennial historical study and debate. As the world marks the events' 70th anniversary this week, the legacy of what was first unleashed above Hiroshima now looms over newer conversations about disarmament and the nuclear programs of emerging powers.

But what of the victims? Swaths of Hiroshima disappeared in a blistering flash, yet there were survivors. Here are some of the eyewitness testimonies of what took place on that terrible day in August 1945. (They have been gleaned from a number of oral history projects, all of which are easily accessible online.)

Yasuhiko Taketa was on his way to middle school, like many of the "hibakusha," or survivors of the atomic bombings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki who live to this day. At a train station, according to a speech he later delivered, he saw a "dazzling flash of light, brighter than even the sun," and then "an earsplitting roar" followed by a seismic explosion that shattered glass everywhere.

"My forehead felt hot, and I unconsciously touched it with my hand," narrates Taketa. "When I looked at the sky over Hiroshima, I saw a tiny, glittering, white object, about the size of a grain of rice, tinged with yellow, and red, which soon grew into a monstrous fireball. It was travelling in my direction, and I felt as though it was going to envelop me."

Akiko Takakura, a 20-year-old at the time, was near the hypocenter, or "ground zero" of the bomb. This was how she described the apocalyptic moment:

What I felt at that moment was that Hiroshima was entirely covered with only three colors. I remember red, black and brown, but, but, nothing else. Many people on the street were killed almost instantly. The fingertips of those dead bodies caught fire and the fire gradually spread over their entire bodies from their fingers. A light gray liquid dripped down their hands, scorching their fingers.

Those who found shelter after the explosion entered a strange, hideous world, where everyone's hair was literally fried and human shadows were etched onto stone.

"I felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden," said Akihiro Takahashi, a 14-year-old at the time in line for school, whose testimony was recorded by researchers in the late 1980s. "Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the heat. I was probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both legs. My skin was peeling and hanging like this."

Michiko Hachiya was then the director of a hospital in Hiroshima. He recorded the dazed, stumbling confusion of those still alive in the aftermath of the explosion. It was published in English in 1955.

"There were the shadowy forms of people, some of whom looked like walking ghosts. Others moved as though in pain, like scarecrows, their arms held out from their bodies with forearms and hands dangling," Hachiya wrote. "These people puzzled me until I suddenly realized that they had been burned and were holding their arms out to prevent the painful friction of raw surfaces rubbing together."

So many had, in an instant, lost those dearest to them. Eiko Taoka, then 21-years-old, was carrying her 1-year-old infant son in her arms aboard a streetcar. He didn't survive the day. "I think fragments of glass had pierced his head," she recounts. "His face was a mess because of the blood flowing from his head. But he looked at my face and smiled. His smile has remained glued in my memory."

Miyo Watanabe, then a volunteer at a steel factory, endured the initial blast by lying on her stomach. When she came to, she walked through a desolation.

Watanabe remembers this chilling scene:

...a woman lying dead at a house by the river bank, her neck stuck through with a piece of glass blown by the blast. The glass must have cut the artery. Blood was scattered around her. She had been suckling her baby. The baby was still absorbed in sucking the breast.

And she describes the horrific sights in makeshift hospital wards, where all the living victims ached with a desperate thirst:

They were delirious, begging for water. Those whose backs were burned lay on their stomachs, and those whose front was burned lay on their back. They could not even move to change their position. Their wounds and burns were covered with countless flies laying eggs there. Those eggs hatched into maggots, and these crawled all over their bodies causing them infernal agony.

Burn injuries were ubiquitous, recounts Hiroshi Sawachika, then a 28-year-old army doctor.

"The smell was quite strong," he said. "It's a sad reality that the smell human beings produce when they are burned is the same as that of the dried squid when it is grilled."

Sawachika tended to hundreds of patients that day, with limited knowledge of what to do. The exposure to radiation suffered by countless survivors would have a range of ill effects in the decades to come.

"I learned that the nuclear weapons which gnaw the minds and bodies of human beings should never be used," he concludes. "Even the slightest idea using nuclear arms should be completely exterminated."

Archive footage from the plane that dropped 'Little Boy' on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and the aftermath of that detonation. (Video: Internet Archive)

Related on WorldViews How the Soviet Union saved the world from Hitler In defense of Neville Chamberlain, hindsight's most battered punching bag The dark side of Winston Churchill

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What it was like to survive the atomic bombing of Hiroshima

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What survivors from Hiroshima endured seventy years ago.

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This page will help you understand the science behind climate change, the impacts of a changing climate, and how you can help slow climate change and prepare for it. We've also created a list of resources and activities for educators and students of all ages.

The Science

Science paints a clear picture: Climate change is happening; it is caused mostly by humans; and it creates many serious and damaging effects. The primary cause of climate change is human activities - like driving cars, creating electricity, and cutting down forests - not natural changes in the climate. These human activities release gases into the atmosphere called greenhouse gases, which slowly warm the planet, creating climate change.

The climate is very complex, and there are still some things we don't know about it. But through centuries of studies and experiments, we've been able to create a strong understanding of how the system works, and how humans are changing it.

The Greenhouse Effect

Imagine a greenhouse made of glass used to grow plants, like flowers and vegetables. The greenhouse keeps the plants inside warm even when it's cold outside because it traps heat from the sun. The earth's atmosphere acts like a greenhouse: When light from the sun passes through the atmosphere, some of it is absorbed by the Earth's surface to heat it, but some heat is also trapped in our atmosphere by certain gases. These heat-trapping gases are called greenhouse gases, and they act like a blanket, keeping the earth warm. This greenhouse effect is a natural process that makes the planet comfortable to live.

But human activities are increasing the amount of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere. One type of greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has reached a level in our atmosphere that the Earth hasn't seen for more than 400,000 years! Plants, soils, and the ocean can absorb carbon dioxide, but they can't keep up with all the extra greenhouse gases that we have been releasing. And some greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere for a long time, from hundreds to even thousands of years. All these gases are making things hotter than natural, so we need to stop producing them to avoid climate change.

Weather vs. Climate

Weather refers to the state of the atmosphere in a short period of time, like minutes or days. It includes lots of things we are familiar with, like temperature, humidity, precipitation, and wind speeds. The weather changes every day, but the climate is much more consistent because it measures the patterns of weather over long periods of time (at least several decades). Let's say you were going to visit Florida for a few days in June. You would expect it to be hot and humid, because that's what the climate of Florida is usually like in June. It might turn out to be hot during your trip, or it could rain or be cloudy. All of those are examples of possible weather during those days.

The Greenhouse Effect Explained

Where do greenhouse gases come from?

Up until about 150 years ago, humans did not produce many greenhouse gases. That changed as the human population grew, we cut down forests to make way for cities and farms, and important inventions and technology, like in-home electricity and cars, transformed the way we live.

These inventions and technologies need energy. Some types of energy called fossil fuels - like coal, oil, and natural gas - have become important sources of that energy. Burning fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. We call the release of these gases emissions.

Today in the United States, electricity and transportation (cars, trucks, and planes) are responsible for almost 60 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. The rest comes from agriculture, industry - such as factories that make products we use - and from energy we use in our homes and businesses.
Learn more about U.S. greenhouse gas emissions here.
Greenhouse Gases

The most common types of greenhouse gases are:

Carbon Dioxide (CO ₂): Carbon dioxide is the most common greenhouse gas created by human activities. It makes up 80 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Most carbon dioxide enters the atmosphere when fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, and coal) are burned for electricity and transportation, and because of other processes like making cement. Carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere and stored when it is absorbed by plants, soils, animals, and the ocean as part of the carbon cycle.
Learn more about how energy emissions are controlled in the United States.

Methane (CH ₄): Methane is the next most common greenhouse gas emitted by human activities. It makes up 10 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Most methane emissions come from raising livestock (like cows), but methane is also released when coal, natural gas, and oil are produced and transported, and when organic waste (like food) decays in landfills. Methane is a stronger gas than carbon dioxide, meaning it creates more warming, but it stays in the atmosphere for a shorter time.
Learn more about how industrial greenhouse gases like methane are controlled in the United States.

Nitrous Oxide (N ₂ O): Most nitrous oxide is emitted by agricultural activities, like applying fertilizer, but it also comes from industrial activities, burning fossil fuels, and other sources. It makes up 6 percent of U.S. greenhouse emissions. Nitrous oxide is even more powerful than methane and carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere.

Hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), Perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and Sulfur Hexafluoride (SF6): Try saying these gases three times fast! They're called "fluorinated gases" for short. These gases combined make up only 3 percent of all U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. That may sound small, but they are very important to solving climate change because they stay in the atmosphere for a very long time (sometimes for thousands of years!) and are much more powerful warmers than all other gases. These gases are made by humans and are used to cool our refrigerators, freezers, buildings and cars.

U.S. Greenhouse Gases by Gas Type and Sector, 2021

Impacts of a Changing Climate

Because of increases in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures are rising. Each of the past four decades has been warmer than the previous one. 2016 and 2020 were the warmest years on record, and the six warmest years have all been since 2010.
Learn more about the relationship between extreme weather and climate change.
The following charts show how emissions and temperatures have gone up since 1900, and how they could continue to change in the future. If we continue to emit more and more greenhouse gases, the temperature of the Earth will rise a lot - maybe as much as 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. Even if we reduce our emissions right now, the temperature of the Earth will still rise slightly, but we might be able to keep the rise below 2 degrees Celsius (or about 4.8 degrees Fahrenheit). Two degrees might not sound like much, but scientists agree that even that small amount of warming can have large impacts on humans and the environment.

Past and Projected Changes in Carbon Emissions and Temperature

Rising global temperatures affect many things, like extreme weather, human health, food supply, and ecosystems. These impacts are already being felt today, and groups like the poor, elderly, and others are especially vulnerable.
Impacts of climate change include:

Heat waves. Heat waves are long periods of time with temperatures that are hotter than normal. As the Earth warms, more areas will be at risk for hotter and more common extreme heat waves. Learn more about the link between climate change and extreme heat.

Heavy precipitation and storms. Heavy precipitation - like rain or snow - is becoming more common in many locations, which can lead to flooding and other dangerous weather. As seas warm, coastal storms like hurricanes are also becoming more frequent and damaging. Learn more about the link between climate change and heavy precipitation and hurricanes.

Sea level rise. Sea levels have risen about 8 inches since 1880 because glaciers and ice sheets are melting and seas are warming. Scientists predict that, with 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, sea levels could rise by as much as 1.8 feet this century, which would harm communities living on islands and near coasts. These rises could be even higher if glaciers in Greenland or Antarctica melt very quickly.

Threats to habitats and animals. Warming temperatures, rising seas, melting ice, and other impacts of climate change can threaten the habitat of many plants and animals. Some species are moving to new habitats, but others may struggle to adapt and become endangered or extinct.

Ocean acidification. Extra carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is absorbed by the oceans, making them more acidic. This can make it difficult for corals and organisms that form shells to survive, which can create problems in the food chain for other sea animals.

Wildfires. These are fires that burn large amounts of forests and brush. When they are not controlled, wildfires can destroy homes and be deadly. The number of large wildfires and the length of the season when they're most likely and threatening have been increasing in recent years. Find out how climate change will worsen wildfire conditions.

Drought. A drought is a period with little rain and not enough water. Global warming will increase the risk of drought in some places and make it harder to grow food. Learn about the links between climate change and drought.

How can you help?

Even though climate change sounds scary, we still have time to avoid some of the worst impacts. Everyone can play a part, including government, businesses, and you.

There are two main things we need to do:

The first is to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions responsible for climate change. By choosing cleaner ways to power our homes, offices, and cars, and being more efficient and less wasteful, we can produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions.

There are lot of things you can do to help, like turning off the lights when you leave a room to reduce the electricity you use, walking or biking where you can, or planting trees to absorb carbon dioxide. If you do any of these things, make sure you communicate with other people (like your family, teachers, and friends) about why you're doing them! Communication can inspire more people to change their habits and help save the climate.

Look for more ideas on what we can do together and individually.

The second is to prepare for life in a changing climate. Even if we could stop creating greenhouse gases tomorrow, the climate would still change some because of our past emissions. So we need to make sure our buildings, roads, businesses, and communities are ready for the climate changes that we can't avoid. This includes things like helping cities on the coast prepare for floods, preventing wildfires in our forests, and more.

Learn how communities and companies are preparing.

The power of YOUth

Around the world, young people are learning about climate change and taking action. In fact, young people are some of the most important voices in the climate movement because you can inspire powerful people to create a better future for you.

You don't have to be a rocket scientist or a politician to make a difference in the fight against climate change. Whatever your talents are, there's a role for you to play. Some young people, like Greta Thunberg, Vanessa Nakate, and others, are leading the Fridays for Future movement to tell their governments to create strong policies to fight climate change. Other students are inventing new technologies to cut emissions and reduce waste. And others are using their creativity to bring awareness to climate change by writing music and creating art.

You can also look for ways to get involved in your community - maybe you can help your school set up a composting program to keep food waste out of the landfill. Maybe your synagogue or mosque needs help switching to energy efficient lights. Maybe you can write a letter to your local government to encourage your community to prepare for extreme weather or wildfires. Everyone can do something to fight climate change.

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The Crew of Enola Gay on Dropping the Atomic Bomb

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The Crew of Enola Gay on Dropping the Atomic Bomb

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On August 6, 1945, the B-29 bomber Enola Gay dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. Twelve men were on that flight. Some chose to keep a low profile and others spoke out about their place in history. Almost all had something to say after the war.

The 509th Composite Group was formed by the U.S. Army Air Force to deliver and deploy the first atomic bombs during World War II. The group was segregated from the rest of the military and trained in secret. Even those in the group only knew as much as they needed to know in order to perform their duties. The group deployed to Tinian in 1945 with 15 B-29 bombers, flight crews, ground crews, and other personnel, a total of about 1770 men. The mission to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan (special mission 13) involved seven planes, but the one we remember was the Enola Gay.

Air Force captain Theodore "Dutch" Van Kirk did not know the destructive force of the nuclear bomb before Hiroshima. He was 24 years old at that time, a veteran of 58 missions in North Africa. Paul Tibbets told him this mission would shorten or end the war, but Van Kirk had heard that line before. Hiroshima made him a believer. Van Kirk felt the bombing of Hiroshima was worth the price in that it ended the war before the invasion of Japan, which promised to be devastating to both sides.

I honestly believe the use of the atomic bomb saved lives in the long run. There were a lot of lives saved. Most of the lives saved were Japanese.

In 2005, Van Kirk came as close as he ever got to regret.

I pray no man will have to witness that sight again. Such a terrible waste, such a loss of life. We unleashed the first atomic bomb, and I hope there will never be another. I pray that we have learned a lesson for all time. But I'm not sure that we have.

After the war, Van Kirk got a masters degree in chemical engineering and worked for DuPont until his retirement. Van Kirk passed away in 2014.

Thomas Ferebee pushed the button that dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. He slept in the plane both before and after he did his part. After the war, Ferebee stayed with the Air Force, serving in the Strategic Air Command and in Vietnam. He retired as a full Colonel.

Colonel Ferebee, who retired from the Air Force in 1970, always argued that the Hiroshima bomb was necessary. "I'm convinced that the bombing saved many lives by ending the war," he told Newsweek magazine in 1970.

That doesn't mean he had no opinion on the further use of such weapons.

"Now we should look back and remember what just one bomb did, or two bombs," he told The Charlotte Observer in 1995, the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. "Then I think we should realize that this can't happen again."

Colonel Ferebee died in Florida in 2000, at the age of 81.

Army Air Force radar specialist Jacob Beser was the only man who served on both the Enola Gay in the Hiroshima bombing mission and the Bock's Car three days later when its crew bombed Nagasaki. He couldn't look at the detonation of the bombs because he was charged with monitoring for outside signals that could have detonated the bomb early and monitoring for signals of the proper detonation. This is addition for keeping an eye on radar for any enemy planes.

In this 1985 interview for the Washington Post, Beser was asked if he would do it again.

Given the same circumstances in the same kind of context, the answer is yes. However, you have to admit that the circumstances don't exist now. They probably never will again. I have no regrets, no remorse about it. As far as our country was concerned, we were three years downstream in a war, going on four. The world had been at war, really, from the '30s in China, continuously, and millions and millions of people had been killed. Add to that the deliberate killing that went on in Europe, [and] it's kind of ludicrous to say well, geez, look at all those people that were instantly murdered. In November of 1945 there was an invasion of Japan planned. Three million men were gonna be thrown against Japan. There were about three million Japanese digging in for the defense of their homeland, and there was a casualty potential of over a million people. That's what was avoided. If you take the highest figures of casualties of both cities, say, 300,000 combined casualties in Hiroshima [and] Nagasaki, versus a million, I'm sorry to say, it's a good tradeoff. It's a very cold way to look at it, but it's the only way to look at it. Now looking into tomorrow, that's something else again. I don't have any pat answers for that.

After the war, Beser was an engineer at Sandia Laboratories where nuclear research continued and at Westinghouse where he worked on classified projects for the military. He retired in 1985. In 1988, Beser wrote a book called Hiroshima and Nagasaki Revisited. He died of cancer in 1992 at age 71.

There isn't a lot of biographical information available on radar operator Joe Stiborik, except for some of his reminiscences of the mission.

Joe Stiborik remembered the crew sitting in stunned silence on the return flight. The only words he recollected hearing were Lewis's "My God, what have we done." He explained, "I was dumbfounded. Remember, nobody had ever seen what an A-bomb could do before. Here was a whole damn town nearly as big as Dallas, one minute all in good shape and the next minute disappeared and covered with fires and smoke...There was almost no talk I can remember on our trip back to the base. It was just too much to express in words, I guess. We were all in a kind of state of shock. I think the foremost thing in all our minds was that this thing was going to bring an end to the war and we tried to look at it that way."

Stiborik died of a heart attack in 1984 at age 69.

Morris Jeppson was only 23 years old when he was assigned to accompany the atomic bomb on the Enola Gay. It was his duty to arm the bomb and make sure it would work. Jeppson had the power to abort the mission if it didn't. It was his first and last mission of the war. Jeppson had worked in developing the mechanics of the bomb, and after the war he continued on the nuclear path. He studied physics at Berkeley and worked in the radiation laboratory there. Then he worked on developing hydrogen thermonuclear weapons at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. Jeppson went on to invent and market hi-tech machinery for medical and industrial uses.

In 1995, Jeppson looked back at the Hiroshima mission.

Until the 509th reunion that year Jeppson hadn't given the mission much thought. "Those bomb plugs were just kicking around in a drawer" for years, he says. Still, he maintains that dropping the bomb on Hiroshima was a necessary means to help end the war. He points to wartime concerns that Germany was developing nuclear bomb technology. "If that had happened, the world would be an entirely different place (today)," he says.

Jeppson passed away in 2010.

Richard Nelson was the youngest of the Enola Gay crew. He was 20 years old in August of 1945. He relayed the news of the atomic bomb to his superiors in code, who forwarded it to President Truman: "Results excellent." After the war, Nelson got a degree in business administration and made a career as a salesman. Fifty years later, he had no regrets about his part in the mission.

"War is a terrible thing," he told The Riverside Press-Enterprise on the 50th anniversary of the bombing. "It takes and it destroys. Anyone feels sorry for people who are killed. We are all human beings. But I don't feel sorry I participated in it. If I had known the results of the mission beforehand, I would have flown it anyway."

Nelson died from emphysema in 2003 at age 77.

Enola Gay tail gunner Bob Caron wrote a book about the mission called Fire of a Thousand Suns. Despite his description of the bomb's effects, he never regretted being part of the mission.

In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News published two weeks before he died, Mr. Caron said he had no regrets about his role in the World War II bombing. "No remorse, no bad dreams," he said. "We accomplished our mission."

Caron died of pneumonia in 1995. He was 75 years old.

Wyatt Duzenbury kept tabs on the Enola Gay's engines and other systems while others tended the bomb and the mission itself. He considered it an honor to be chosen for the secret bombing mission that was to shorten the war. After 1945, he stayed with the Air Force. In his retirement, he looked back at the mission.

...he told the Lansing State Journal in 1985, "We were told to go, cranked up, dropped it, and came home." He told the newspaper that he didn't feel guilty about his mission, but did "not feel good about the 100,000 people who died." In an earlier interview, he said, "Personally, I feel that if we hadn't dropped that bomb, and the other crew hadn't dropped its bomb on Nagasaki, it would have cost thousand of US soldiers' lives establishing a beach head for the invasion of Japan."

Duzenbury died in 1992 at age 71.

Robert Shumard assisted flight engineer Wyatt Duzenbury in keeping the Enola Gay running. In a 1960 interview, Shumard said he didn't feel honored to do what they did, but he felt honored to be selected for the mission. And given the circumstances, he would do it again.

"Nobody actually wants to cause the destruction we caused," he said. "But it was through a necessity rather than a wanton type of destruction. It was something that had to be done. As much as a man has gangrene in his leg, and they have to cut it off. It's something that has to be done. It was a cancer in the world situation that had to be removed, that's all."

Naval gunnery officer William "Deke" Parsons was pulled from sea duty to work on the Manhattan Project in 1943. He helped turn the nuclear bomb into a weapon of war, from development to assembly to delivery. He armed the first atomic bomb while the Enola Gay was airborne. After the war, Parsons continued in nuclear weapons development, rising to the rank of Rear Admiral. He oversaw the Operation Crossroads nuclear testing project and also served on the Atomic Energy Commission. Parsons witnessed seven of the first eight nuclear explosions. There are no quotes available from Parsons as he was still serving in the Navy when he died of a sudden heart attack in 1953. He was 52 years old.

Air Force flier Robert Lewis was a pilot first and foremost. He was upset that commander Paul Tibbets had named his plane the Enola Gay. But he was also dedicated to the mission, and earned Tibbets' respect despite the animosity between the two. Lewis wrote a diary of the mission in a notebook during the flight to Hiroshima, against orders. He later sold it for $37,000. It was resold in 2002 for almost ten times that much. He is often quoted:

"As the bomb fell over Hiroshima and exploded, we saw an entire city disappear. I wrote in my log the words: 'My God, what have we done?'"

Some sources say that quote was a revision after the fact. Later in life, Lewis defended the mission.

Over the past half century, some of the crew have returned to the city to take part in the annual commemoration celebrations. Lewis never did. For him "it was just a job of work. I helped make the world a safer place. Nobody has dared launch an atomic bomb since then. That is how I want to be remembered. The man who helped to do that."

Lewis died of a heart attack at age 65 in 1983.

Lieutenant Colonel Paul Tibbets was chosen to head the bomb delivery mission in September of 1944, and he selected the rest of the crew. At that time, the Manhattan Project was preparing to drop a bomb on Europe as well as Asia. After the mission, Tibbets remained in the Air Force until 1966, achieving the rank of Brigadier General. He worked as an aviation executive until his retirement in 1970.

In a 2002 interview with Studs Terkel, Tibbets said he never had second thoughts about the mission:

Number one, I got into the air corps to defend the United States to the best of my ability. That's what I believe in and that's what I work for. Number two, I'd had so much experience with airplanes... I'd had jobs where there was no particular direction about how you do it and then of course I put this thing together with my own thoughts on how it should be because when I got the directive I was to be self-supporting at all times. On the way to the target I was thinking: I can't think of any mistakes I've made. Maybe I did make a mistake: maybe I was too damned assured. At 29 years of age I was so shot in the ass with confidence I didn't think there was anything I couldn't do. Of course, that applied to airplanes and people. So, no, I had no problem with it. I knew we did the right thing because when I knew we'd be doing that I thought, yes, we're going to kill a lot of people, but by God we're going to save a lot of lives. We won't have to invade [Japan].

Tibbets died in 2007 at age 92. He had requested cremation and no physical memorial, because it would become a pilgrimage site for nuclear protesters.
This post originally appeared in 2010.

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The Crew of the Enola Gay on Dropping the Atomic Bomb

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Testimony of Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors)

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Top > Foreign Policy > Japan's Security / Peace & Stability of the International Community > Disarmament and Non-Proliferation, Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Technology > Nuclear Disarmament and Non-Proliferation > Testimony of Hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors)

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The unspeakable second's explosive sequence

0.0 second: Temperature at burst point reaches several million degrees F within one-millionth of a second following detonation. All bomb material becomes ionized gas & gamma rays.

0.1 second: Bomb explodes and fireball forms. In addition to heat and blast force, radiation was 3% of total energy, of which gamma rays & neutrons damaged living organisms, soil and ground structures.

0.15 second: Shock wave expands rapidly, heating air to luminous condition. Fireball visible for following 10 seconds.

0.2 second: Thermal energy, especially infrared wave-lengths, causes most of thermal burns to humans.

1.0 second: Fireball reaches maximum diameter of 200-300 meters.

Blast (50% of energy) is now complete. Overpressure at hypocenter (or "ground zero," directly below the burst point) in Hiroshima reaches an estimated 4.5-6.7 tons per square meter, and moves through the air and across the ground at the approximate speed of sound. Maximum pressure at Nagasaki's hypocenter may have been as high as 10 tons per square meter.

Recent research has found that in the initial "non-instant" (0.0 sec.) a powerful neutron burst struck a mile-wide area directly below burst point before the bomb casing exploded. This pre-explosion burst was caused by the initial impact of the uranium bullet with the core of uranium 235. This finding resolved a long-perplexing question of a young man near ground zero who died (Sept. 3) with symptoms of severe internal bleeding but no surface burns.

Suddenly there was a brilliant flash, like a photographer's magnesium flash. Then came a blast with a deafening bang, and I felt as though I had been kicked in the guts....The world was all black.- F.J.Johnson. Australian prisoner of war, Nagasaki.

Physical Devastation

The Hiroshima bomb was exploded over the city center, which was crowded with large public buildings and countless wood-frame residences and shops. Beneath the huge column of smoke that arose from the explosion, tens of thousands were already dead or dying. As fires raced out of control, destruction of wooden structures and reinforced concrete buildings alike was virtually complete within 2 km (1.2 mi.) of ground zero.

In Nagasaki, the more powerful bomb destroyed an estimated 12,000 buildings by blast and burning. Virtually nothing was left standing of the valley's homes, schools and factories. Worshippers in shrines, temples, and churches perished as they prayed.

In both cities, fires generated by the explosions' intense heat, and fed by broken gas and electrical lines, raged out of control. Fire stations and equipment had been destroyed, fire fighters were dead or injured, and water pipes were ruptured.

Many corpses were found at places where there was some water-rivers, old wells, fire-safety cisterns, ponds, and the like. People who did not die instantly had, it appears, exerted themselves to the limit just to find some water.- Marina Transport Rescue Team member, Hiroshima.

Hiroshima's gigantic firestorm leveled 13 square kilometers (5 sq. mi.), destroying some 92% of the city's structures. Nagasaki's firestorm, hemmed in by the valley, consumed some 22.7% of the entire city's structures. The bodies of many people who were close to ground zero in the two cities were shattered by blast or burned beyond recognition in the firestorms.

Houses and trees were leveled as far as the eye could see, and fires began breaking out in the ruins. At the roadside I saw the corpse of a man who had been leading a horse cart, still on his feet, with his hair standing on end like wire.... The river was filled with the dead and half-dead; burned children were screaming, 'Mommy! Mommy!' and mothers searched for their children, calling their names in faltering voices.- Ms. Hide Kurokawa, Nagasaki

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0.0 second: Temperature at burst point reaches several million degrees F within one-millionth of a second following detonation. All bomb material becomes ionized gas & gamma rays. 0.1 second: Bomb explodes and fireball forms. In addition to heat and blast force, radiation was 3% of total energy, of which gamma rays & neutrons damaged living organisms, soil and ground structures.

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THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMBS: "Little Boy"and "Fat Man"

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THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMBS: "Little Boy"and "Fat Man"

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THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMBS: "Little Boy"and "Fat Man"

There were actually two new bombs, one using uranium, the other plutonium, with different triggering devices for each. The main research and production sites were Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The entire project operated under top secrecy, mobilizing top scientists and engineers, and at unprecedented high costs.

The Hiroshima bomb

Nicknamed "Little Boy"(for President Franklin Roosevelt), the bomb's size was 3 meters in length by 0.7 meter in diameter, using uranium 235 as its critical material. Inside a shortened smooth-bore 76.2 mm (3 in.) naval gun, a subcritical projectile of U-235 was fired at a subcritical target of U-235. At the moment of impact, a supercritical mass was formed, triggering a nuclear chain reaction, or atomic explosion. The gun barrel and heavy casing gave it a weight of over four metric tons (8,900 lbs). The subcritical material was an alloy called Oralloy, a code named derived from the secret laboratory at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where it was fabricated.

For use in the gun device, the fissile materials had to be made into geometric shapes capable of withstanding the violence of being shot down the gun's tube, then stoipped abruptly at the target, and held together long enough to detonate.

The Nagasaki bomb

Nicknamed "Fat Man" (for England's Prime Minister Winston Churchill), this bomb had a core of plutonium 239, was 3.5 meters in length by 1.5 meters in diameter, and it weighed 4.5 tons. Its plutonium core was surrounded by 64 explosive charges arranged in an inner and outer shell. The explosive charges were fabricated in geometrical shapes in a configuration similar to a soccer ball-an extremely difficult and demanding procedure. When the two shells were detonated, the shockwave slammed into a tamper surrounding the plutonium nucleus, causing a rapid increase in density that compressed the slightly sub-critical plutonium core, rapidly increasing its density, making it supercritical, thus exploding in a nuclear chain reaction.

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There were actually two new bombs, one using uranium, the other plutonium, with different triggering devices for each. The main research and production sites were Los Alamos, New Mexico; Hanford, Washington; and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The entire project operated under top secrecy, mobilizing top scientists and engineers, and at unprecedented high costs.

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The major explosive energy forms that dominate research and reports on the atomic bombings are three:

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Major population groupings

1. Persons present in Hiroshima or Nagasaki at bombing time. Of the regular resident population, many children and older persons had been previously evacuated, while certain outsiders were working in the cities on their specific bombing days. Overall, the estimated "physically present" population of Hiroshima on August 6 was 340,000-350,000. Nagasaki's estimated "physically present" population on August 9 was 90,000-120,000.

2. Early entrants into both cities following the bombings, mainly soldiers, firefighters, medical workers, and other helping personnel.

3. Persons who suffered radiation injuries in the areas surrounding the two bombed cities.

Almost all persons in the above groupings, young or old, also fell into one of the following groups: (1) broken families; (2) A-bomb orphans; (3) orphaned elderly.

Hiroshima

Of the city's 298 medical doctors, 270 (90%) became A-bomb victims. Casualty rates among pharmacists, nurses, and other medical professionals ranged between 80% and 93%. Eighteen emergency hospitals and 32 first-aid clinics were destroyed, and most of the workers needed to restore these health facilities were killed or injured. Nearby army medical facilities were also mostly destroyed.

In sum, approximately 90% of all medical personnel were dead or disabled, and remaining medical facilities were thrown into great disrepair and confusion.
All citizens faced desperate conditions; the young and old, all the more so.

Nagasaki

In the 2-km zone of total destruction around ground zero in Nagasaki's Urakami valley, the city's chief medical facilities were destroyed. These included Nagasaki Medical University and its related hospital, the Urakami branch of Mitsubishi Hospital, Urakami First Hospital, and some other smaller health care institutions.

Of the 70 or so doctors in private practice in the city, twenty were dead and twenty more seriously wounded; only 30 were available to help the mass of A-bomb victims.

As a major port city, Nagasaki was surrounded by various naval installations. Medical personnel from several naval hospitals (Isahaya, Sasebo, Omura, and other places) came with support personnel to give assistance, making the overall situation somewhat better than in Hiroshima.

Even so, food, clothing, medicine, and other relief supplies in Nagasaki were, as in Hiroshima, extremely scarce. Moreover, heavy rains hit both cities in September, making the struggle to survive desperately difficult and miserable.

Local ability to mobilize health care personnel and restore medical facilities was severely hampered by the overall loss of non-military economic wealth (65 billion yen nationwide). Of this total, Hiroshima (884 million yen) and Nagasaki (380 million yen) together suffered over 2% of the national total.

Political restraints on recovery

On top of the enormous physical, medical, and social damages imposed on Japan by the two atomic bombings, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Occupation (SCAP) imposed another onerous handicap: censorship. Formally termed the Press Code, officially issued by the Occupation GHQ on September 19, 1945, it prohibited the publication of all reports and studies of A-bomb damages, including medical and scientific studies of all injuries and losses suffered by A-bomb victims in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki, whether in newspapers, magazines, scholarly journals, books, or other public means. Thus the A-bombed citizens struggled with ignorance of the many medical and social aspects of the decimated lives.

There were minor exceptions. The Hiroshima-based magazine, Chugoku Bunka, devoted its initial issue (March 10, 1946) to A-bomb damages. A Manhattan Project team published its report, The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on June 29, 1946. And the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey Team completed its report, The Effects of the Air Attack on the Cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki the following day. These official documents, however, were printed in English and, in any case, did not touch deeply on the sufferings of the two A-bombed cities.

Most importantly, serious research on the extent and gravity of A-bomb damages and injuries could not be publicly printed and distributed by any Japanese persons or organizations, thus handicapping the surviving medical personnel trying to heal and assuage the thousands of A-bomb victims. The most revealing item, perhaps, is that the Japanese characters for "atomic bomb" ( genshi bakudan, or the short form, genbaku) could not even be used in public print. This applied to all forms: newspapers, magazines, books, public bulletins, and of course, movies.

Cameramen of the Japanese movie firm Nippon Eiga-sha were arrested by American MPs in Nagasaki on October 17, 1945, and two days later the photographing of A-bomb scenes was prohibited. A formal prohibition was issued by GHQ on December 12. It would be almost seven years later until, after the Occupation ended, the weekly magazine Asahi Gurafu ( Asahi Graph) filled an entire issue with heretofore unpublicized photographs of A-bomb damages and victims-the first A-bomb-related photos to be published in the postwar era.

One of the most moving instances of resistance to the Press Code was a small volume of tanka (a Japanese verse form of 31 syllables), penned by a hibakusha poet named Shinoe Shoda in Hiroshima. Titled Sange, it decried the cruelty of the bomb. As publication of all A-bomb-related materials was strictly banned, she took her manuscript to Tadao Nakamura, a clerk in the printing shop of a Hiroshima prison, who mimeographed 150 copies in December 1947. Shoda distributed copies to other hibakusha, all at her own expense and, of course, without SCAP permission. A hand-written copy of Sange was later donated to the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Foundation.

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Persons present in Hiroshima or Nagasaki at bombing time. Of the regular resident population, many children and older persons had been previously evacuated, while certain outsiders were working in the cities on their specific bombing days. Overall, the estimated "physically present" population of Hiroshima on August 6 was 340,000-350,000.

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How the Hiroshima bombing is taught around the world

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How the Hiroshima bombing is taught around the world

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Seventy years after the United States dropped the world's first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, its place in history remains secure. As The Post has written: "It's seared into the collective global memory - no other time in history has a nuclear weapon been used in war." But how do the United States and Japan, and the rest of the world for that matter, teach this seminal event so many decades after the world witnessed this incredible display of force.

For the occasion, we asked the users of the social platform Reddit, " How is the Hiroshima atomic bomb taught in your country?"

The post received more than 2,500 comments, and these were some of the common threads:

The bombing saved lives by ending the war more quickly and without a land invasion.

Although it may not have been necessary, especially the subsequent bombing of Nagasaki, the United States wanted to send a message to the rest of the world.

The bombing was only a small part of the overall coverage of World War II (or barely mentioned at all).

It was the start of the Cold War.

It led to independence.

A more scholarly approach to global viewpoints can be found in " History Lessons: How Textbooks from Around the World Portray U.S. History," which was published in 2004 and collected excerpts from textbooks in different parts of the world. Here's a sample from Asia, North America and Europe:

Philippines: "Horrible atomic bombs" brought Japan to her knees.

Canada: "Most Canadians are unaware of the crucial role Canada played in the development of the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki." (A uranium refinery in Ontario supplied the Manhattan Project.)

Italy: "There was no doubt that in very little time the Japanese, already at the end of their tether, would have had to surrender ... What seems certain is that the show of force, made indiscriminately at the expense of unarmed people, increased the United States' weight in post-war tensions and decisions, especially concerning the Soviet Union. It is probably therefore that Truman's decision was inspired more by post-war prospects than by calculations on the most convenient method to put an end to the conflict with Japan."

Alex Wellerstein, a nuclear historian at the Stevens Institute of Technology, said that although countries that were invaded by Japan were very much in favor of the atomic bomb, Europe generally takes a dim view. "They find it completely shocking that a majority of Americans still think Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified and morally correct." Meanwhile, an analysis of U.S. and Japanese textbooks in use during the 1990s concluded that "there is a gap between what the historical evidence presents, what academic historians now know and the evidence presented to pupils."

This account by a Reddit user reflects what this reporter learned in high school in the mid-1990s.

I am an American, which like 90% of the people who have commented so far were as well, so I don't know how helpful this will be.

By the latter half of the 2000s, though, American textbooks were taking on a more nuanced approach, offering perspectives from Japanese victims and even dissension by U.S. officials. The change is attributable partly to the passage of time and partly to the evolution in the way students are taught, says Christopher Hamner, who teaches history at George Mason University. "The textbook has walked away from this idea that it speaks with this omniscient voice and it tells you facts. Textbooks will have documents from both sides, they acknowledge that there are multiple perspectives." He added that students today "are just a little more skeptical, and I mean that in the best possible sense."

Archive footage from the plane that dropped 'Little Boy' on the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and the aftermath of that detonation. (Video: Internet Archive)

Interesting, a user claiming to be an American teacher offered a perspective of today's classroom:

I am from America, but I feel I can contribute because I am a high school history teacher. When I was in school, it was simply stated that we dropped two bombs, thus ending the war. When in college the focus around the bomb was an emphasis on the pacific theatre. Very much an idea of, "they won't quit so we must use the bomb, it will save many American and Japanese lives to do so." Last year when I taught U.S history to Juniors, we took the latter approach. We looked at casualties of each island, projected casualties, and discussed why the bomb was so effective. It is a more "matter of fact" that it was used and not a real dwelling point. However, the bomb is the heart and center of the Cold War section.

Also, these Reddit comment threads speak to the changing currency of textbooks, pillars of knowledge whose preeminence has dimmed in a world where books, articles and discussions are readily available to the curious mind. The comments are edited for length, but not for grammar or typos.
Japan
In response to comment asking for anyone taught in Japan:

My wife is Japanese, born and raised in Hiroshima. Her grandparents witnessed the bomb from two different locations just outside the city as children.

She has told me about how they were taught about the bomb in her school in Hiroshima. It seems they have special classes all about the bomb. She says they learn technically how it works, all about the effects of radiation, and about its development. She says they are taught about the decision making process behind the decision to drop it. She says they are taught in great detail about the physical and psychological effects of being directly affected by it. They are also taught about the aftermath of the bomb with regards to rebuilding the city.

It sounded very different from the lesson taught to me in U.S. schools - that the bomb was a "necessary evil" that was going to cost less lives than the supposed only alternative of an invasion of the Japanese main islands.

The Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima is visited by the young students. They can see the A-bomb Dome from their equivalent of Central Park. In other words, there are constant reminders of this tragedy that put their city on the map.

My wife told me that these special classes on the A-bomb are only taught in Hirishima and Nagasaki and are not part of the national curriculum in Japan in general.

The rest of the world
I am an Australian who learnt about the bombings primarily through japanese language class. As you can probably guess there was a bias toward the japanese with a focus on the lives lost (mostly stories about children during and born after the bombings).

Brazilian here. I remember this part of World History being very sad and polemic. Our teachers tried hard to show us the consequences and power of the bomb.

Canadian here. ... I remember being taught that the second bomb was unnecessary. My social studies teachers tended to vilify the U.S. for Nagasaki.

Chilean here. It was only pointed as the weapon that ended the war. Really brief

French here. Basically we see the bombings as part of the atrocious disasters of world war 2, through the technological advanced massive killings weapons "progress".

German here. In school, most of the history of war was about the German atrocities. ... Other atrocities (killing of native Americans, Hiroshima, CIA involvement in toppling democratic states leading to torture etc.) were not covered at all, or only very briefly.

In Greece, it goes like this: The WWII ended with the atomic bomb of Hiroshima and Nagashaki. That's it, really, just a reference.

What I was taught in India was that even though the Japanese never surrender, when there was a possibility of a nuclear threat, they were ready to surrender. However, the president at the time chose to do it anyway to send a message to the world (or mainly the USSR).

Nowadays, when we were taught this important moment in Indonesian history, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was seen as a stepping stone that eventually provided the opportunity to proclaim our independence.

Iranian here. They teach us that the U.S dropped one bomb, Japan surrendered, the U.S dropped the other bomb to test it.

Italian here. In 4th grade (10 years old) we studied it the first time, dedicating a lot of time to the victims and the horrors of the bomb.... Later on, in middle school and high school the message was always the same: the Americans compellingly "thought" the bomb was the ONLY thing that could end the war.

Korean here and I attended a school in Seoul. From what I remember being taught about the bomb while in Korea was 2 parts - first, to end a long drawn out invasion of Japan and any territories in order to secure a surrender. There were moral considerations but mostly the discussion involved the mechanics of using war technology developed during a time of war to save American lives. And secondly, to demonstrate to the world that the US had the technology and was willing to use it as the US considered a post war political climate.

Here in Lithuania it just said the US needed to finish the war with Japan quickly but at the same time they needed to show strength. So that they will be taken seriously in the future.

Malaysia. There wasnt much detail explained about the bombing, just that it happened after pearl harbour and the japanese surrendered after that and then the war ended.

I'm from Mexico, and I remember there was some emphasis on how the bomb was unnecessary (since the war was already drawing to a close) and how it was one of the many atrocities of the war.

Netherlands here. The main narrative in high school history was the cost of invasion and the political desire for a swift end to the war.

In New Zealand I was taught it was to speed the end of the war. The morality of it was questionable but understandable in the context of the time (i.e. no one at the time knew about black rain and the horrible drawn out deaths from radiation). The reasons for dropping it were to save American lives in a landing on the main islands after the high causalities in Okinawa and other island hopping campaigns.

Singaporean. The main questions raised were not why the bombs were dropped, but why they were dropped so late, and only after so many died and suffered.

Here in South Africa, we learned why the bombs were dropped, and whether that was reasonable as an action of war and as a prevention of even more deaths. We read/listened to countless primary sources, and ended the quarter with a week-long debate on whether or not it was justified.

Swede here. We were mostly just taught about the war going on in Europe from what I can remember. ... It almost felt like we were running out of time at the end of the semester; "The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor so the Americans dropped two bombs to end that fight".

I was taught in Switzerland. We were taught about them as more of a start to the Cold War, rather than as an end to the Second World War. This was because it was viewed as an American show of nuclear strength to the Soviets in order to act as a deterrent, rather than just an act of aggression against Japan.

UK History teacher here (secondary). I like to use it as an example to develop the student's argument formation. It's usually taught as a standalone lesson with the topic 'Was the dropping of the atomic bombs justified?'. Give the kids evidence, reports, accounts and let them make up their mind.
Read more: As their numbers dwindle, Hiroshima survivors have a plan to keep memories alive What it was like to survive the atomic bombing of Hiroshima After the A-bomb: What photographers encountered in Hiroshima What it would look like if the Hiroshima bomb hit your city

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How the Hiroshima bombing is taught around the world

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Perspectives about the seminal event have evolved over time in classrooms around the world.

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The best step you can take to prevent influenza (flu) and its potentially serious complications is getting a yearly flu vaccine.

Flu Vaccine Benefits:
While flu vaccines vary in how well they work, flu vaccination is the best way to prevent flu and its potentially serious complications.

Flu vaccines prevent millions of illnesses, tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths every season.

Flu vaccines are safe. Hundreds of millions of flu vaccines have been safely given to Americans for more than 50 years.

CDC kicks off the 2019-2020 seasonal flu vaccination campaign on Thursday, September 26 at 10 a.m. at the National Foundation for Infectious Disease (NFID) press conference in Washington, D.C.

Vaccination helps protect women during and after pregnancy. A CDC multi-year, multi-country study showed it reduced the risk of flu hospitalization among pregnant women by 40% on average. Flu vaccination during pregnancy also helps protects babies from flu for the first several months after birth when they are too young to be vaccinatedFlu vaccination can lower the risk of serious outcomes from heart disease and diabetes.

Getting vaccinated yourself may also protect people around you, including those who are more vulnerable to serious flu illness, like babies and young children, older people, and people with certain chronic health conditions.

While some people who get vaccinated do still get sick, there is a growing amount of data showing that vaccination makes illness less severe, helping to prevent serious outcomes.

For more information, visit What are the benefits of flu vaccination?

CDC kicks off the 2019-2020 seasonal flu vaccination campaign on Thursday, September 26 at 10 a.m. at the National Foundation for Infectious Disease (NFID) press conference in Washington, D.C.

What flu vaccines are available this season?
For the 2019-2020 flu season, options include:

CDC and its Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommend providers use any licensed, age-appropriate flu vaccine with no preference for one vaccine over another.
Where to Get Vaccinated:
Flu vaccines are offered in many locations, including doctor's offices, clinics, health departments, pharmacies, and college health centers, as well as by many employers, and even in some schools. To find flu vaccine in your area, use the HealthMap Vaccine Finder.

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Everything you need to know about the flu illness, including symptoms, treatment and prevention.

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Overview of the Process of Genetically Engineering Plants

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Overview of the Process of Genetically Engineering Plants

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The improvement of crops with the use of genetics has been occurring for years. Traditionally, crop improvement was accomplished by selecting the best looking plants/seeds and saving them to plant for the next years crop.

Once the science of genetics became better understood, plant breeders used what they knew about the genes of a plant to select for specific desirable traits. This type of genetic modification, called traditional plant breeding, modifies the genetic composition of plants by making crosses and selecting new superior genotype combinations. Traditional plant breeding has been going on for hundreds of years and is still commonly used today.

Plant breeding is an important tool, but has limitations. First, breeding can only be done between two plants that can sexually mate with each other. This limits the new traits that can be added to those that already exist in that species. Second, when plants are mated, (crossed), many traits are transferred along with the trait of interest including traits with undesirable effects on yield potential.

Genetic engineering is a new type of genetic modification. It is the purposeful addition of a foreign gene or genes to the genome of an organism. A gene holds information that will give the organism a trait. Genetic engineering is not bound by the limitations of traditional plant breeding. Genetic engineering physically removes the DNA from one organism and transfers the gene(s) for one or a few traits into another. Since crossing is not necessary, the 'sexual' barrier between species is overcome. Therefore, traits from any living organism can be transferred into a plant. This method is also more specific in that a single trait can be added to a plant.

The process of genetic engineering requires the successful completion of a series of five steps. Step 1: DNA Extraction

Step 2 : Gene Cloning
The second step of the genetic engineering process is gene cloning. During DNA extraction, all of the DNA from the organism is extracted at once. Scientists use gene cloning to separate the single gene of interest from the rest of the genes extracted and make thousands of copies of it.

Step 3 : Gene Design
Once a gene has been cloned, genetic engineers begin the third step, designing the gene to work once inside a different organism. This is done in a test tube by cutting the gene apart with enzymes and replacing gene regions that have been seperated./span>

The modified gene is now ready for the fourth step in the process, transformation or gene insertion. Step 4 : Transformation

The new gene is inserted into some of the cells using various techniques. Some of the more common methods include the gene gun, agrobacterium, microfibers, and electroporation. The main goal of each of these methods is to transport the new gene(s) and deliver them into the nucleus of a cell without killing it. Transformed plant cells are then regenerated into transgenic plants. The transgenic plants are grown to maturity in greenhouses and the seed they produce, which has inherited the transgene, is collected. The genetic engineer's job is now complete. He/she will hand the transgenic seeds over to a plant breeder who is responsible for the final step.

Step 5 : Backcross Breeding
The fifth and final part of producing a genetically engineered crop is backcross breeding. Transgenic plants are crossed with elite breeding lines using traditional plant breeding methods to combine the desired traits of elite parents and the transgene into a single line. The offspring are repeatedly crossed back to the elite line to obtain a high yielding transgenic line. The result will be a plant with a yield potential close to current hybrids that expresses the trait encoded by the new transgene.

Want to learn more about the process of genetic engineering?

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AgBiosafety at UNL - Biotech Basic The Preocess of Plant Genetic Engineering

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The improvement of crops with the use of genetics has been occurring for years. Traditionally, crop improvement was accomplished by selecting the best looking plants/seeds and saving them to plant for the next years crop. Once the science of genetics became better understood, plant breeders used what they knew about the genes of a plant to select for specific desirable traits.

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What’s Really Warming the World? Climate deniers blame natural factors; NASA data proves otherwise

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Home - Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. Current news and data streams about global warming and climate change from NASA.

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Lesotho Is An Example of How Climate Change Disproportionately Affects Developing Countries

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Lesotho Is An Example of How Climate Change Disproportionately Affects Developing Countries

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And it's large countries, like the United States, contributing the most to climate pollution.

Before the humanitarian workers came to his village just outside of Maseru, Lesotho, 24-year-old Makalo Makara and his neighbors mistook climate change for divine punishment.

"We thought what was happening here was a calamity of God," he tells Teen Vogue, poking a wooden staff at a hard patch of dirt. "I have been a herder almost my whole life. I started when I was 8. I would go after school." Like many other young men his age in Lesotho, to step into the profession of herding is considered a rite of passage into manhood.

In the morning, Makalo gets up before the sun with his seven cows and walks until dark while they graze. He does this in every type of weather: rain, sun, or, in recent years, occasionally abrupt snow.

It was only a few years ago that he started to see a marked difference in the soil and grass in his village because of the erratic change in weather. The rainfall, which for most of his life ushered in the planting season in September, has become unpredictable. "The rains are late this year," he says, pointing at a barren patch of dirt that in years past has been speckled with green buds by now. "It affects the way we till the land and my herd doesn't have enough to eat now. Because they don't have enough to eat, [the cattle] are getting thinner and it's harder to use them for plowing." He gestures at a bull standing feet away, whose ribs are showing through a mat of bristled hair.

Lesotho is a country where more than 70% of people are dependent on just 10% of arable land, whether for commerce or to feed their families. Countries with large economies have long been the largest contributors to climate change that threatens the livelihoods of those everywhere, but a broader awareness about the issue within developing countries and their ability to act against it has been a more recent development.

Makalo's testimony is one of many, another page in the endless story of climate change and the impact caused by neglect of the world's second-largest climate polluter: the United States. In November 2017, Syria became the latest country to sign the Paris climate accord, leaving the United States as the only country to proclaim it will not align with the landmark deal. The Trump administration's decision to pull out of the agreement in June of 2017 has been felt worldwide, causing a ripple effect in countries like Lesotho, where the effects of climate change are felt the hardest. "This has been very disappointing for us for several reasons," said Moeketsi Majoro, minister of finance to Lesotho. "It sends a damaging message that the U.S. cannot be counted upon to deliver leadership in matters of global importance. So we are wondering and other countries are asking, can we still count on the U.S. at all?"

Lesotho isn't a country popularly known to the West. Nicknamed "the Kingdom in the Sky" and surrounded by South Africa on all sides, its mountainous landscape covers a space slightly larger than the state of Vermont. Farmers and herders here, similar to many other African countries, are waging war against the elements. When the delayed rains do come, they appear with increasing force that often wash away the nutrient-rich topsoil necessary for most plants to grow.

At the current rate, Lesotho is losing 3-5% of its topsoil every year. "It looks minuscule, but it's actually a huge amount and it's expected to get worse," Eshan Rizvi, who runs the Natural Resource Management Program for Catholic Relief Services (CRS) in country, tells Teen Vogue. He's worked in the field for 12 years to help communities become more resilient in the face of climate change. Citing findings from a recent CRS study on soil degradation, Ehsan says, "soil-loss rates are going to increase because of high temperature, less vegetation cover, and more intense rainfall."

While Lesotho battles a slow crawl to the death of its land, its figurative big brother, South Africa, fights a much more urgent war. Day Zero is tentatively scheduled for July 9 in the port city of Cape Town, South Africa's second-most populous area. It's the moment when city officials will cut off the water to businesses and homes in an effort to save what little is left. Roughly 4 million residents will have to go to one of around 200 water collection points where they will be rationed just 25 liters (about 6.6 gallons) a day. Now in the third year of the worst drought in a century, Cape Town has a water system that has long relied on rain water, rendering locals helpless.

"What is happening in Cape Town is just one example of how climate change is affecting the continent," Dan Shepard, an information officer who works on climate change for the United Nations, tells Teen Vogue. "We are also seeing coastal erosion in Western Africa and changing currents in the water off South Africa, which affects everything from fishing patterns to penguin populations. Climate change exacerbates things, so as temperatures are rising across the continent, it causes more extreme weather, intense droughts, the list goes on."

CRS says it runs climate and agricultural programs in 43 countries reaching over 9 million people. In Lesotho, they are possibly the only organization in-country that is focusing efforts on the youngest generation of agricultural workers to change their behavior to adapt to the changing ecosystem. They start by teaching farmers what climate change is, enlightening communities on how pollution that occurs thousands of miles away is linked to the increasingly erratic and extreme weather patterns at home. Experts also ensure that locals understand not only the global impact of human behavior on their land locally, but also new farming techniques that are more resilient to global climate trends.

For the rising generation of farmers, that means learning how to plant smart crops and use the land as wisely as possible. "As crop production declines with the change in rainfall, people make up for losses by cutting down more trees to expand their land. But that just makes things worse because it releases more carbon into the atmosphere," Ehsan says. "Those trees also prevent water-run off which keeps the soil moist, so they are taking away an important preventative mechanism that they might not know they need."

CRS also trains farmers on how to diversify crops. Corn is often a staple crop because it is hearty and cheap to plant, but farmers are now learning that it isn't good for the soil, Ehsan says. Environmental experts are promoting climate-smart agriculture by recommending intercropping, planting things like beans alongside other crops to put more nitrogen in the soil. Experts also show farmers how to rotate their crops, making them more resistant to pests. "All of this is good insurance against [the changing] weather, and people get excited about it. They see the economic returns," Ehsan says.

CRS is also arming Makalo and his fellow herd boys with an unlikely tool that both helps them economically and works to reduce the impact of climate change on the land: seeds for trees. Using apple, peach, and acacia seedlings, herder communities are trained to create nurseries that grow the trees, which they sell to the government. The Ministry of Forestry, Range and Conservation (MFRC) then plants the trees in local areas as part of an effort to restore the degraded ecosystems.

The success of the new agriculture practices is clear. "It's a win-win with long lasting impact," Ehsan says. "Farmers get another way to make money, they learn importance of trees in fighting climate change, while helping to restore and protect their land in the process."

Makalo says after all he's learned about why the land is changing, it's a small relief to know there is something he can do. "For me this is a difficult situation, because those polluters are far away," he says, frustration in his voice. "We have no way to contact them to tell them or speak with them about it. So what we have to do is focus on planting trees, to absorb the carbon emissions. We have to focus on how to be part of the solution here."

To do your part to help counter climate change, address your congressional representative here.

Related: How Climate Change Is Impacting Animals in the Canadian Arctic
Check this out:

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Poor Countries Are Suffering the Most From Climate Change

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Climate-change effects are mainly felt by small, poor countries that rely on a farming economy, such as Lesotho in Africa. It is large countries, like the United States, that are contributing to these negative effects the most.

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Climate Change in National Parks Video Collection

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Climate Change in National Parks Video Collection

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The Science of Climate Change in National Parks Video Series - Climate Change (U.S. National Park Service)

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The discussion surrounding climate change is often focused on natural resources. The National Park Service is also tasked with preserving and protecting cultural and historical resources, and they are relevant to climate change too. In this video, National Park Service staff and partnering scientists talk about climate change in the context of Jamestown Island in Virginia, the site of the first permanent English settlement.

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The greenhouse effect occurs when Earth's atmosphere traps solar radiation because of the presence of certain gases, which causes temperatures to rise.

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Artic Voyage finds Global Warming Impact on Ice and Animals

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Artic Voyage finds Global Warming Impact on Ice and Animals

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As of Monday, October 24, content that was on TweenTribune.com will now be available here on our new educational resources page and on our learning pages. While much of the content that you enjoyed will still exist, educators will unfortunately no longer be able to assign content to students. Tween Tribune has been a valued educational brand of Smithsonian magazine, and we appreciate your continued support.

Though the Girl Scouts of the USA initially declared itself a space for all girls, the reality was different for girls of color

Erin Blakemore

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As of Monday, October 24, content that was on TweenTribune.com will now be available here on our new educational resources page and on our learning pages. While much of the content that you enjoyed will still exist, educators will unfortunately no longer be able to assign content to students.

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The Science of Climate Change Explained: Facts, Evidence and Proof

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Definitive answers to the big questions.

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How Scientists Know the Earth is Warming

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How Scientists Know the Earth is Warming

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Explainer: How scientists know Earth is warming

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Scientists can calculate global temperatures, both present and past. Their findings show that the planet is rapidly heating up.

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People are seeing change all over the world. Arctic sea ice is melting earlier and forming later. Glaciers are disappearing. Heat waves, storms and floods are becoming more extreme. Insects are emerging sooner and flowers are blooming earlier. In some places, birds are laying eggs before they're expected and bears have stopped hibernating.

So what's going on? Our planet is getting warmer, and even a small increase in temperature can change our climate. And when our climate changes, we're all affected.

A Natural Greenhouse

Earth is the only planet we know of that can support life. The reason Earth is different than the rest relies on a number of factors. We get just the right amount of energy from the sun (if we were any closer, we would burn up; if we were any further, we'd freeze). Our atmosphere is a layer of gases surrounding the Earth that absorbs ultra violet radiation and prevents temperatures from rising too high or getting too cold. The greenhouse effect is the process that causes the surface of the Earth to be warmer than it would be if we had no atmosphere. Without these three factors, most like on Earth couldn't exist.

The Greenhouse Effect

Natural Cycles

Several natural cycles of the Earth keep it and its atmosphere in perfect balance. Carbon is essential to life and the carbon cycle keeps it moving throughout all Earth's systems. Water is one of the most important things to our survival, and the water cycle keeps it moving around and around our Earth and atmosphere - even through our bodies.

Weather Versus Climate

Weather is what's happening with the atmosphere that surrounds us. It's not the same as climate, which refers to the pattern of weather we expect to see in a particular place. The weather is always driven by the sun's energy, whether it's warm outside or snowing due to the circulation of warm air to cold places and cold air to warm places by the atmosphere. This, combined with the movement of the oceans and the amount of moisture in the air creates everything from perfect sunny days to terror-filled tornadoes.

Even though the weather changes frequently, the climate of a particular place should always be about the same. In Alaska, for example, there shouldn't be any tropical-like weather. In California, it shouldn't snow too much in the winter.

The fact is, while the Earth's climate has changed many times over millions of years (ice ages, for example, happen naturally every 100,000 years or so), it really shouldn't be changing much during any one person's lifetime. We're still recovering from the last ice age, which is said to have wiped out the dinosaurs. While temperatures do rise gradually over time after an ice age, today our planet's surface temperatures seem to be rising faster now than they were 100 years ago. And this is what has many people worried.

Balancing Act

Our planet is always changing and its systems are constantly working together to keep a kind of balance. All forms of life, including humans, depend on this balance for their existence.

All living things are connected to each other in ecosystems by food chains and food webs. Plants get energy from the sun. Herbivores (species that don't eat meat) get energy by eating plants. Carnivores (that eat meat) get energy by eating herbivores. This is how energy flows through all ecosystems - starting from the sun.

When any one part of an ecosystem chain breaks, the survival of the entire system, along with every living thing that depends on it for survival, hangs in the balance. For example, if someone decides to spray a poisonous pesticide on plants to keep bugs from eating them, then lizards may accidentally ingest that poison when they eat the plants and cats may be poisoned, too, when they catch and eat the lizards. With no cats around, the rat population could explode - and rats carry diseases that are even more dangerous for humans.

Another example is when a volcano erupts. If the eruption is very big, it could do a lot of damage besides killing thousands of people. A volcanic eruption spreads huge amounts of ash and gases into the atmosphere and around the globe, which could cause temperatures worldwide to fall. And when temperatures change dramatically like this, it affects crop patterns and could lead to massive food shortages.

Temperature Rising

Whether you believe in global warming or not, the fact is that the 11 hottest years recorded in the last 100 years have all happened after 1995. The world is definitely getting warmer.

When the world's temperatures get warmer, a few things happen. The water cycle speeds up, causing more rain, droughts, wildfires and extreme heat waves. There will be more greenhouse gases in the air, as the atmosphere reaches capacity of how many gases it can absorb. Arctic ice will melt sooner and faster and won't be as thick or expensive when it reforms. The oceans will warm and cause sea levels to rise more quickly, which can cause flooding on land and water contamination. Glacier ice will melt.

Greenhouse Gases

These gases help keep the world from being too hot or too cold. But the amounts of some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are increasing, making our planet warmer. Greenhouse gases include water vapor (mostly natural source), carbon dioxide (mostly human source), methane (mostly human source) and nitrous oxide (mostly human source).

Far North & South

The most global warming has been seen in the Earth's coldest places, like the Arctic, Antarctica, Alaska and parts of Canada, Scandinavia and Russia.

Arctic temperatures are rising twice as fast as anywhere else on Earth. There has been a huge amount of ice loss in the last 20-30 years. While some is natural, global warming seems to be the main culprit. Ice shelves that have been around for tens of thousands of years have collapsed due to lower temperatures, which causes sea levels to rise. Permafrost has started to melt, which results in forests and even towns and cities to crumble as the ground beneath them thaws.

Because the far north and south have very fragile ecosystems, when one part of the chain breaks the effects can be seen almost immediately. As the ice disappears, so are tiny sea creatures called krill are dying - and so are the many fish, birds and whales that eat them. Polar bears spend most of their time on sea ice hunting seals and other sea animals. As the ice melts, the bears' hunting season is shortened and female bears, with lowered body weights, can't seem to produce cubs. Warmer summers also mean certain pests' life cycles are longer than before. For example, the spruce bark beetle, which is only supposed to live for one summer, is now surviving for two. This tiny bug destroys an unimaginable number of trees in Arctic forests - and now it can do it two years in a row instead of just one.

Polar Bear on floating ice

The World Ocean

Most of the Earth's surface is covered by a single ocean. All forms of life - even those that don't actually live in the ocean itself - depend on it for survival. For example, our ocean helps control the Earth's temperature with its currents, by constantly keeping cold and warm water moving. Ocean water dissolves lots of substances, including carbon dioxide gas. All ocean creatures and even sea birds depend on microscopic plankton - tiny plants that take in carbon dioxide to grow - for food and survival.

But when the ocean warms (which it has been), it can't dissolve as much carbon dioxide, plankton can't survive and the currents change (which greatly affects the weather and other things on dry land). Also, the sea level rises, so certain islands that are currently above water may actually disappear in the next 100 years.

The effects of global warming on things that live in the ocean are massive. We already talked about plankton, but what about other species? Coral reefs - home to many ecosystems and living creatures - can die as water temperatures rise. Sea turtles depend on beaches to lay their eggs, but many beaches are disappearing thanks to rising sea levels. Whales, who depend on krill who depend on plankton, die. Fish stocks fall, translating into food shortages for humans.

Where is global warming going?

We All Live On Land

What changes are we seeing on land as a result of global warming? We're seeing longer periods of drought, more wildfires, growing deserts (which can't support farming), glacier melt and deforestation. In fact, every second a chunk of forest the size of a football field is cut down or burned somewhere in the world.

In terms of living things, the effects of global warming are causing huge changes and disruptions. Plants and insects are moving upward (north) and causing distress to the natural, original ecosystems of those areas. Birds are also moving further north and some are even laying their eggs earlier, which can be a problem when it's out of sync with insect hatchings (since birds are insects' main predators). The winter of 2006 was so warm that mountain bears in Spain decided not to hibernate (sleep for the winter).

And what about us humans? How does and will global warming affect us, our lives and our survival as a species? First off, all human needs fresh water to survive. But changing rainfall patterns and melting glaciers will cause severe droughts, during which crops will fail, causing huge food shortages. We can also expect more heat waves. In 2003, Europe experienced such an extreme spell of hot weather that more than 20,000 people died as a direct result of the heat. Also, mass extinction of many other species we depend on for survival will mean big trouble for humanity.

Our Energy Use

There is no doubt that it's our own fault the world's temperature is rising and global warming is happening. We depend too much on fossil fuels that release deadly amounts carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. We need to start considering alternative sources of energy quickly, like nuclear, solar and wind. We cut down trees, which use carbon dioxide in their natural life cycles, so less of the poisonous gas can be absorbed naturally.

Humans are high energy consumers. Every day, we each exhale 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of carbon dioxide into the air. We keep ourselves warm in cold places by burning huge amounts of fuel. We use tons of energy pumping, cleaning, heating and then disposing of water. The food we eat is a huge source of greenhouse gases: fossil fuels used in fertilizers and farm machinery, food processing, transportation, packing and cooking. Construction requires all kinds of building materials that can only be made with massive amounts of energy. Our major sources of transportation are huge consumers of energy - ships, jets and cars. Electricity isn't captured magically - it takes the burning of massive amounts of fossil fuel to convert energy into electrical current. And all the "things" in your life - clothes, cell phones, toothbrushes, etc. - are made using energy... and so are the packages all these things come in.

You CAN Help!

The problem seems so big, it may be hard for you to imagine that anything you do can really help at all. But it will. Here are some changes you can make in your life to help prevent global warming:

Plant trees

Start a seed bank (keep the seeds of many varieties of plants stored away safely)

Switch every light in your house to an energy-saving bulb

Reduce, reuse, recycle

Wear a sweater instead of turning up the heat in your house

Wear lighter clothing when it's hot instead of turning on a fan

Turn lights, computers and all your chargers off and unplug them when they're not in use

Only do full loads of laundry

Take shorter showers

Skip the car ride and use your bike, or walk or take the bus

Don't buy bottled water; drink tap water, and filter it if you like

Eat lower on the food chain (less meat) and eat fewer processed foods

Knowledge is power. Change can only happen if all of us read about, listen to and discuss what's happening in the world today.

Planet Power

If scientists are right, each one of us is at least a little bit responsible for global warming. So each of us has to decide what we're going to do about it, and what kind of world we want to live in.

Our planet has been around for almost 5 billion years. It's gone through so many changes during that time - global warming may be the Earth's next big change.

No matter what changes lie ahead, our planet isn't going anywhere. And neither are we. But what we do now could have a big effect on what our lives could be like in the near future. This is our planet - let's make sure in the future it stays as wonderful a place to live in as it is now.

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We are seeing change all over the world. Arctic sea ice is melting earlier and Glaciers are disappearing. Heat waves and storms are becoming more extreme. Learn all about Global Warming on Kidzworld!

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How Climate Change is Impacting Animals in the Canadian Arctic

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How Climate Change is Impacting Animals in the Canadian Arctic

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Traditional practices have also undergone the impact of climate change. Before her grandfather died, Jennifer interviewed him about his favorite spot for hunting seals, which was only reachable when the water was frozen solid. "It doesn't get that cold anymore, so it doesn't actually freeze anymore," Jennifer says. "The traditional knowledge that has been passed down orally, telling stories of that particular place, it was gone with him. He was the last of his family to have known all the traditional knowledge of that specific place."

A week before we were in Cape Dorset, ice barricaded the Inuit community. Ships normally can get through the Arctic for only about six weeks in the summer. The only way out most of the year is by snowmobile or airplane, according to what locals told me.

In July, the roads are ditches of mud. Clouds of mosquitoes swarmed Brianna Rowe, 26, a shipmate I followed as she interviewed Inuit children and teachers about their lives, school, family, and traditions.

Brianna, who works for Reach the World and is director of the climate-change education project Disappearing Ice, connects classrooms with travelers via the Internet, so kids can travel the world virtually. She was using her vacation, as a student member of the Explorers Club, to connect U.S. classrooms with Arctic classrooms so kids can learn about one another's cultures - including how the U.S. is one of the main countries affecting the climate much farther north.

"The decisions that people make in the U.S. have a global impact," Brianna tells Teen Vogue. "It is important for everybody to be aware of their decisions, and their impact on the environment has an effect on the entire world's environment."

Kristin Gates, a park ranger who trekked alone across the Brooks Range, knows this all too well. Part of the year, 30-year-old Kristin patrols Denali National Park by dog sled, and she's making a short film about plastics pollution and garbage in the Arctic. "Climate change is something that affects us every day during the winter months," she tells Teen Vogue. Frozen rivers are Alaska's highways, and when they don't freeze solid, travel becomes dangerous and difficult.

Unfortunately, mushing (a form of travel that relies on dogs to pull a sled), which Kristin was hoping to learn about first-hand, is now almost nonexistent. Dog mushing as a practice mostly died out after Inuit communities were settled in villages by the Canadian government in the 1950s, so she heard stories about the old days but has not found anyone traveling by dog sled. Nowadays, travel mostly uses motors and gas, in four-wheelers, snowmobiles, and trucks. Kristin enlisted some of us from the ship and others from the community to clean up the beach. In about an hour we collected 17 bags of trash, a potential threat to seabirds and mammals.

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I Went to the Canadian Arctic and Saw Climate Change's Impact First-Hand

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In this reported piece, 12-year-old writer Roxanna Pearl Beebe-Center explains what she learned about the impact of climate change on animals while visiting the Canadian Arctic.

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Arctic Thaw is Spreading Wildlife Diseases

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Arctic Thaw is Spreading Wildlife Diseases

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Arctic thaw is spreading wildlife diseases

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Polar animals are encountering new, killer parasites as melting ice unlocks their access to new hosts.

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Earth's warming threatens to tilt populations of an unusual reptile so dramatically that the species' long-term survival could be put in peril. The change could leave the species, a survivor from the age of the dinosaurs, without enough females to avoid extinction.

The tuatara (TOO-ah-TAAR-ah) is about the size of a squirrel. A crest of floppy white spikes runs down its back. Although it resembles a lizard, the grey-green species ( Sphenodon punctatus) actually belongs to a separate and distinct reptile order. (An order is that place on the tree of life directly above species, genus and family).

There are four orders of reptiles. Three have many distinct species. Not so the Rhynchocephalia (RIN-ko-suh-FAY-lee-uh). This order holds on with just a single member: the tuatara.

That wasn't always true. More than 200 million years ago, different rhynchocephalians could be found across much of the globe. Alas, most of these ancient reptiles died out around 60 million years ago, along with the last of the dinosaurs. Today, their descendants inhabit several dozen islands and fenced nature reserves, all in New Zealand.

And these animals are unique. For instance, unlike other reptiles, which have one row of teeth in its upper jaw, the tuatara have two parallel rows. As the animal chews, its bottom single row of teeth slots neatly in between the top two rows. The tuatara also have extra, rib-like bones, called gastralia (or "belly-ribs").

Humans introduced rats and other mammals to New Zealand, in the South Pacific. For centuries, these animals have threatened the survival of the island nation's unusual reptiles ( see Explainer). Although tuatara have survived that catastrophe, they now face a new threat: too few females. One reason: With global warming, their island homes are becoming way too hot!

Temperature sensitive

For all of its oddities, in one important way the tuatara resemble many of their reptile cousins: Whether an individual hatches from its egg as a male or a female depends on the temperature at which that egg had incubated.

Mom doesn't sit on her eggs. She just digs a nest in the ground and then leaves her eggs to develop. Cooler temperatures produce more girls; warmer temperatures, more boys. But with global warming, average temperatures across New Zealand have been increasing. And more male tuatara will hatch.

Adding to the problem, females don't seem to do well when males greatly outnumber them. Already on at least one island, the local population of tuatara risks dying out. There, guys outnumber gals by more than 2-to-1, according to a study published April 8 in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

For a long time, scientists didn't realize the impact that temperatures can have on these reptiles. Then, in 1992, Alison Cree discovered something odd. Cree is a zoologist at New Zealand's University of Otago. She and her students needed to know the sex of some tuatara that had been born in captivity. And that required surgery.

Outwardly, young tuatara males look just like females. To tell them apart, scientists must cut a tiny slit through the animal's skin. Only then can experts peer inside to see whether the reptile has ovaries or testes. A female's ovaries make eggs. A male's testes produce the sperm needed to fertilize those eggs.

All of the eggs deposited by a mom into one nest are a clutch. And Cree noticed that one clutch of seven tuatara from a New Zealand zoo were all boys. That made her suspicious.

She knew scientists had incubated the eggs in a cupboard that sometimes got warm. Could the all-male clutch reflect the influence of temperature? That certainly happens in some other reptiles, including crocodiles, alligators and most turtles. Yet extra warmth wouldn't necessarily mean more males. In many of those species, eggs incubated at the highest temperatures produce mostly females.

Alison Cree, University of Otago

So Cree's team incubated tuatara eggs at different temperatures. And these experts confirmed that eggs kept at warmer temperatures hatched more males.

This is completely different from the way sex is decided in mammals, including people. In them, chromosomes determine a baby's sex. A human embryo always inherits an X-chromosome from its mother. Its dad - as all men - have an X- and a Y-chromosome. If the baby inherits an X-chromosome from dad, she will be a girl. If the baby instead gets one of dad's Y-chromosomes, he will be a boy.

But tuatara don't have X- or Y-chromosomes. When a tuatara mother first lays a fertilized egg, the embryo inside is neither male nor female. In this species, temperature tends to determine how many hatchlings emerge as guys or gals. And just a small difference in nest temperature can make a difference. For example, 95 percent of eggs kept at a constant temperature of 21.2°Celsius (70.2°Fahrenheit) will develop into females. The ratio flips for eggs incubated a little more than one degree warmer - at 22.3 °C (72.1 °F). Now, 95 percent emerge as males.

That sensitivity to such minor swings in temperature has set off alarms among scientists working to ensure the tuatara's survival. They know that climate scientists have calculated that temperatures in New Zealand could rise by as much as 4 °C (7.2 °F) by 2080. According to the new PLOS ONE study, on at least one island where the reptiles now live - North Brother Island - such a large temperature increase would mean no more female tuatara. And, eventually, that would result in no more tuatara. Period.

Andrew McMillan/Wikimedia Commons

Bad times on North Brother

This wind-battered island is a mere 4 hectares (roughly 10 acres) in size. It's home to an old lighthouse and several hundred tuatara. And here, roughly seven out of every 10 of the reptiles are males.

Nicola Mitchell is a biologist at the University of Western Australia and co-author of the new study. She and her colleagues now estimate that at today's temperatures, 56 percent of tuatara eggs on North Brother Island should become males. That's far fewer than the real number. So Mitchell suspects the tiny island's shortage of females must be due to more than just climate change. Something else must be helping tilt the ratio in favor of males.

And it may be the males' behavior.

Her team has noticed that tuatara on North Brother have been getting skinnier over the past few decades. But females have slimming faster than males. One reason could be that males chase and harass females they try to get to mate with them. (With few females, each gal may find herself getting far more attention than she wants.) The males also are generally larger and more aggressive than the females. So the guys may be better than females at staking a claim to prime territory and food.

The end result is that the North Brother females have become slow to reproduce. Healthy females normally lay eggs every two to five years. But North Brother's gals only lay eggs once every nine years or so. Observes Mitchell, "We've got higher mortality in females and lower reproductive rates." Project this trend out into the future and within 150 years "there would only be males," she says.

Indeed, all signs suggest the North Brother population is slowly collapsing. "You can see this spiraling pattern and it's all heading in the wrong direction," says Nicola Nelson. Another member of the tuatara research team, she works at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

Nelson says that it's possible the island is just too small and barren for tuatara to survive there forever. Maybe its colony is destined to die out. But many other tuatara populations also live on tiny islands. By monitoring the struggling group on North Brother, researchers are now learning what can happen when males start to greatly outnumber females.

Seeking shade

One question that scientists still haven't answered is whether tuatara mothers could change their behavior to match a new climate. After all, they've survived other swings in temperature over the species' long history. It is certainly possible the reptiles could shift where they lay their eggs or when. That would help them to avoid soil that is too warm.

This seems to be true for at least some other reptiles that have their sex set by egg temperature. Among them is the painted turtle, notes Jeanine Refsnider. She is an ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley.

Painted turtles are a common sight in rivers and lakes across the United States. Among these colorful creatures, more females hatch when temperatures are higher. However, they sometimes adjust to change, Refsnider notes.

"Normally they nest out in sunny, open habitats," she says. "I found that if you expose turtles to warmer temperatures than they are used to, they choose shadier spots to nest."

But shade is not always available. One group she studied lived in the desert. For those turtles, there just weren't any shade in which to nest.

Such a limit could endanger other reptiles living in small areas where there is little choice about where to lay eggs, Refsnider says. After all, she notes, "Reptiles don't migrate like birds."

Jeanine Refsnider, University of California, Berkeley

Other reptiles indeed could end up with either too many males or too many females in a warming world, points out Fredric Janzen. He is an ecologist at Iowa State University in Ames. While unfortunate, he notes, such changes could warn of potential threats facing other species.

The reptiles "may serve as the 'canaries in the coal mine' for all species with key parts of their biology affected by temperature," says Janzen. Coal miners used to take caged canaries into the mines. When levels of toxic gases began to rise, the birds would have trouble breathing - or die. This would signal to the miners that they must flee to safety or risk a similar fate. Today, scientists liken many environmental warning signs to those old mine canaries.

Moving south

The tuatara could migrate to cooler climes - but only with help from people.

Part of New Zealand's long-term plan for looking after tuatara is to return them to places they lived before humans arrived. Old tuatara bones have been found up and down the two larger islands that make up New Zealand's mainland, from the warm tip of the North Island right down to the cool far end of the South Island.

Right now, tuatara live mostly on small islands off of the North Island. Cree says that moving some tuatara back into different types of habitat, including cooler areas, should ensure the species can survive.

With that in mind, scientists released 87 tuatara into the South Island's Orokonui Ecosanctuary in early 2012. More than 8 kilometers (5 miles) of steel fence surrounds the sanctuary. The high fence keeps out any mammals that might view the reptiles as lunch. Temperatures too are milder there - around 3 °C (5.4 °F) cooler on average than on the islands where tuatara now live.

Scott Jarvie, University of Otago

In fact, many potential nesting sites at Orokonui appear too cool to produce boys. Still, climate scientists predict that before the end of the century, even Orokonui will be as warm as Stephens Island, where tuatara now flourish. "That's within the lifespan of a tuatara," Cree says. These reptiles can live for at least 80 years and likely more than 100 years.

So moving tuatara into lots of new habitats is like an insurance policy. "We were down to 32 populations," says Nelson. "now we're up to 45 populations of tuatara in lots of different locations. We've certainly got our eggs in more baskets."

That's a good thing, since the tuatara face other future challenges as well. Drought likely will increase in some areas of its range. That can destroy eggs and kill hatchlings. And sea level rise will shrink the island territory available for this reptile to inhabit. "It's climate that's changing, not just temperature," explains Cree.

For now, wherever tuatara live under protection, the reptiles are thriving. Scientists already have found two tuatara nests at Orokonui. Their eggs should hatch this year. Those babies will be relatively safe in their sanctuary, but likely see many changes over the course of their very long lives.

Power Words

behavior The way a person or animal acts towards others, or conducts itself.

chromosome A single threadlike piece of coiled DNA found in a cell's nucleus. A chromosome is generally X-shaped in animals and plants. Some segments of DNA in a chromosome are genes. Other segments of DNA in a chromosome are landing pads for proteins. The function of other segments of DNA in chromosomes is still not fully understood by scientists.

clutch (in biology) The eggs in a nest or the hatchlings from that collective group of eggs.

ecology A branch of biology that deals with the relations of organisms to one another and to their physical surroundings. A scientist who works in this field is called an ecologist.

embryo A vertebrate, or animal with a backbone, in its early stages of development.

gastralia Bones nicknamed "belly ribs" that are only found in tuatara, crocodiles and alligators. They support the abdomen but are not attached to the spine.

hatchling A young animal that recently emerged from its egg.

mammal A warm-blooded animal distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for feeding the young, and (typically) the bearing of live young.

New Zealand An island nation in the southwest Pacific Ocean, roughly 1,500 kilometers (some 900 miles) east of Australia. Its "mainland" - consisting of a North and South Island - is quite volcanically active. In addition, the country includes many far smaller offshore islands.

order (in biology) It is that place on the tree of life directly above species, genus and family.

reptile Cold-blooded vertebrate animals, whose skin is covered with scales or horny plates. Snakes, turtles, lizards and alligators are all reptiles.

sperm In animals, the male reproductive cell that can fuse with an egg of its species to create a new organism.

testis (plural: testes) The organ in the males of many species that makes sperm, the reproductive cells that fertilize eggs. This organ also is the primary site that makes testosterone, the primary male sex hormone.

tuatara A reptile native to New Zealand. The tuatara are the sole remaining species of one of the four orders of reptiles.

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When temperatures rise, New Zealand's tuatara produce more males. With global warming, that could leave the ancient reptile species with too few females to avoid going extinct.

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In parts of the Arctic, entire forests are creeping northward. Luckily, ecologist Serge Payette is hot on their trail. Like the two other scientists we will meet here, Payette has spent decades trying to understand the often surprising ways plants influence their environment.

Together, these three experts are showing how plants don't just colonize new surroundings, but also can warm and clean them. Some plants can even rid an area of any competing plants, using chemicals that continue to marvel scientists. As work by these scientists shows, plants do many things to interact with their environment - and ours.
Move on up
Across the Arctic, temperatures are rising faster than anywhere else in the world. As that happens, the tree line that marks where forests stop and the treeless tundra starts has been shifting northward. Payette is an Arctic plant ecologist who works at Université Laval in Québec, Canada. And he's been studying how trees respond to this climate change in northern Canada.

Trees growing along the tree line must protect themselves from the cold wind. His research has shown that to do this, plants tend to grow horizontal limbs low to the ground. The energy it takes for trees to grow this way means they don't have enough left over to make seeds.

But as Earth's climate has been warming, trees no longer have to just grow horizontally. Many can instead grow up, toward the sky. This takes less energy. And with all that leftover energy, these trees have started producing more seeds. Payette has seen this happening especially in places where white spruce grow, such as northern Québec and Labrador.

"White spruce, which is a North American tree, is quite able to produce a lot of seeds, which can move long distances in the wind," explains Payette. When windblown seeds end up on the tundra beyond the tree line, they eventually can sprout new trees. This explains how a forest can move.

Université Laval ecologist Serge Payette studies how northern forests respond to rising temperatures - including by creating some warming of their own. Credit: Josée Pelletier

Of course, the process would work only if the tundra was warm enough. But in recent years, the whole planet has been warming - including the tundra.

Seeds also drop to the ground in the sparse forests already growing below the tree line. But no matter whether trees sprout in new locations below or above the tree line, they trigger two important things that can warm snowy surroundings even more.

First, the new trees will shield some snow, keeping the sun's rays from reflecting off of the white surface. Instead, the trees' dark green needles absorb the sun's heat. This warms them and the surrounding air. The extra warmth encourages even more trees to produce seeds. That further boosts a forest's ability to expand.

Second, more trees will trap more snow, preventing much of it from blowing away. While snow is cold, it also acts an insulator. Like a blanket, snow can trap heat in the soil below. Warming the soil also encourages tree growth.

In northern Québec and Labrador, temperatures have risen 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) since the mid-1990s. That rise has helped more trees grow past the tree line. And the more trees that grow, the warmer that region has become.

"The cold landscape that we are accustomed to in northern Canada will be a thing of the past," Payette predicts.

The speed at which trees are moving north is "not well-settled," he notes. But Payette says they are moving faster in North America than anywhere else. That's because trees that grow in other parts of the far northern hemisphere, such as birch in Scandinavia, are not as quick to produce seeds as are North America's white spruce.

Of course, warmer temperatures are bringing other changes to the far North too. Payette worries about impacts on the people and wildlife that depend on frozen conditions for food and shelter.

Right now, Payette also can't think of a job he'd rather do. "I'm very lucky," he says. "I'm doing something I love."
Indoors with the outdoors
Environmental scientist Bill Wolverton loves his work too. In fact, he surrounds himself with it day and night. Wolverton's Picayune, Miss., home - including his home office - is chock-full of plants.

His houseplants include rubber plants, snake plants, yucca plants, golden pothos and peace lilies. These common plants do some uncommon good: They cleanse the air of harmful chemicals. It's a benefit Wolverton has spent most of his career studying.

He got his start in the 1980s, working for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). NASA had worried that astronauts might spend months living in stuffy spacecraft. So it asked Wolverton to figure out if plants could make the air healthier for astronauts (and the rest of us) to breathe.

Retired NASA environmental scientist Bill Wolverton is never far from his work - the houseplants that fill his sunny home office. Wolverton is an expert in how plants can clean indoor air of sometimes dangerous contaminants. Credit: Wolverton Environmental Services

Scientists had long known plants can clean the air. Wolverton went a step further. He tested common houseplants to see which do it best. He also investigated how plants do it.

Wolverton focused on three common air pollutants: formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene. Carpets, furniture and computers are among the many household products that can emit these chemicals. Their levels can be two to five times higher indoors than outdoors. And that can be concerning because people spend as much as 90 percent of their time indoors.

These pollutants can cause breathing problems, headaches and fatigue. Research suggests that some of these chemicals might even cause cancer. Luckily, bringing a touch of the outdoors indoors can help.

Houseplant leaves absorb certain chemicals, including the common contaminants Wolverton chose to study. What's more, the leaves broke these pollutants down into harmless compounds. Plants with the biggest leaves proved best at this type of cleaning.

But plants also remove pollutants from the air as they transpire water - that is, exhale water from their leaves, he found. To do this, plants must first haul water up from their roots. In the process, air gets pulled down to the roots and soil. Any pollutants in the air will get sucked down there too. Once in the soil, these pollutants can be broken down into harmless substances by microbes.

Leaves that moved water most effectively cleaned air the best, Wolverton found - "such as the palms, golden pothos, rubber plants and the peace lily." For a standard-sized bedroom, he recommends growing at least two such plants, each about 30 to 60 centimeters (12 to 24 inches) high.

Though Wolverton is retired from NASA, he now runs a company that relies on the natural ability of plants to treat indoor air. He is also working on ways to make the process more efficient. This might include adding fans and replacing potting soil with special substances that boost plant growth.
Competitive environment
While some plants can break down harmful chemicals, others make them. These plants produce poisons to keep other plant species from invading their territory. This phenomenon is called allelopathy (ah LEE loh path ee).

"Allelopathy is basically chemical warfare for plants," explains Joseph Jez. The plant biologist works at Washington University in St. Louis.

Think of plants as chemical factories, he says. Some plants make chemicals to help themselves. The sweet scent of a rose? The mix of chemicals responsible for that aroma aids in reproduction. Other plants make chemicals to poison other plants. Walnut, pecan and hickory trees, for instance, all make a compound called juglone. Juglone can trigger other plant species to wilt and die. In fact, people sometimes use juglone as a natural weed killer.

Washington University plant biologist Joseph Jez turns the chemicals plants make into crystals. That allows Jez to better understand their three-dimensional structure. Credit: Washington University

Jez studies the proteins that control the amount of certain chemicals that plants make. In particular, he studies the shape of those proteins. It turns out that a protein's shape can affect whether a plant makes a lot of some protective chemical, a little, or none at all.

To view a protein's shape, Jez has to turn the material into a crystal. He then uses X-rays to probe the arrangement of its atoms. This creates a picture of the protein's structure in three dimensions.

Better understanding the shape of these proteins should offer clues to how they control chemicals.

"I try to understand nature's machinery and how it makes proteins," Jez says. "We're still at the very early stages, but if we can figure that out, we might be able to control it." Some researchers are studying how to build useful proteins in the test tube. Others are trying to understand how to help plants boost their production of these proteins.

For example, certain crops, such as sorghum and rice, naturally produce chemicals to fight off invading species. To a farmer, those potential invaders are weeds. Not all sorghum and rice plants can do this, however.

Understanding how certain varieties of important crops protect themselves by staging chemical warfare against invading species can help plant breeders. They can use what they learn to create new crop plants that more effectively fight weeds with little help from weed-killing chemical sprays.

Of course, plants also make chemicals for gentler purposes, such as attracting pollinators.

When temperatures rise, white spruce dedicate more energy to producing seeds, like these shown here. The shape of spruce seeds allows them to be carried long distances by the wind. That movement helps the trees colonize the tundra and push the tree line farther north. Credit: Steve Hurst at USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

Pollinators, such as bees, carry powdery grains from one flower to another. When pollinators land on a flower, they drop some of those grains, called pollen. Pollen fertilizes the plant so that it can reproduce.

The lemon tree provides a good example of a plant that makes a chemical to attract pollinators. The limonene it makes has a lemony scent that pollinators - and people - like.

Limonene represents a gentler form of chemical warfare, says Jez. That's because the lemon tree is not trying to kill nearby plants. The tree instead is trying to ensure that it attracts more than its fair share of pollinators.

"It's about outcompeting the others," he explains.

The ability of plants to make chemicals fascinates Jez. However, what really thrills him is successfully turning some plant protein into a crystal. When he succeeds (and often it isn't easy), he can become the first person to ever witness the protein's structure - its skeleton.

Many more discoveries await Jez, as well as Payette, Wolverton and others. And they keep probing because they have a deep curiosity about how plants alter their environment. What they learn might ultimately help people speed those changes - or slow them down.

allelopathy A plant's production of chemicals that impair the growth and survival of other plant species.

climate change Long-term, significant change in the climate of Earth. It can happen naturally or in response to human activities, including the burning of fossil fuels and clearing of forests.

ecologist A biologist who studies the relationships among living things and their environment.

transpiration A process in which plants carry moisture from their roots to their leaves, where it is then lost to the atmosphere as vapor.

microbe A microscopic organism.

tundra A large, treeless region in the far northern hemisphere where the subsoil is permanently frozen.

Word Find
(click here to enlarge puzzle for printing) This is one in a series on careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics made possible by support from the Northrop Grumman Foundation.

Sharon Oosthoek is a freelance science journalist. She likes to write about animals and their habitats. Sharon also really likes chocolate. Her sons have learned to hide their Halloween candy.

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In parts of the Arctic, entire forests are creeping northward. Luckily, ecologist Serge Payette is hot on their trail.

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For those seeking to deny the realities of climate change, a popular counterpoint is simply: "The climate has changed before." A straightforward argument and difficult to refute. Thankfully, the ever amusing xkcd comic has just released a new visualization showing just how misleading this statement can be.

For the uninitiated, xkcd is the brainchild of Randall Munroe, a cartoonist, physicist and former NASA roboticist. The darling of scientists and nerds everywhere, Munroe has knack for humorously and insightfully illustrating complex scientific topics. From fun themes like time travel to foundational scientific concepts like DNA, Munroe has dabbled across disciplines.

For Monday's comic, xkcd tackled climate change. Looking back as far as the last glaciation-when Boston was buried under a mile of ice and glaciers stretched towards Manhattan-Munroe traces changes in the Earth's climate up through modern times. Along the way, he tracks how the climate responds to melting ice sheets, changes in the Earth's orbit and changing ocean circulations, all relative to the average temperature of the late 20th century.

Munroe aptly shows what the statement, "the climate has changed before," actually means. As you continue to scroll down and down and down, it becomes obvious that past climatic changes progress slowly and incrementally. The sudden final veer to the right at the bottom of the graphic, which represents human-caused climate change, is a stunning contrast to the otherwise minute changes.

With two climate items of note headlining the news this week, the new comic could not have been timed any better.

On Monday, NASA announced that August 2016 was the warmest August ever recorded in 136 years of recordkeeping. August 2016 actually wound up tied with July 2016 as the warmest month ever recorded, despite the fact that the seasonal temperature cycle typically peaks in July.

On the same day, Brazil announced that it had ratified the Paris climate agreement, lending a dash of optimism to the foreboding data released by NASA. Home to the largest tropical rainforest on Earth, Brazil has the third-largest emissions of any country to sign the agreement, behind only the U.S. and China. In order for the climate agreement to enter into force, 55 countries accounting for 55 percent of global emissions must sign and ratify, or otherwise approve, the agreement. Not including Brazil, 27 countries representing just over 39 percent of global emissions have signed and ratified the agreement, according to the World Resources Institute. The announcement that Brazil has now ratified the agreement is significant.

With these things in mind, take a scroll through time and check out Munroe's comic:

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New xkcd Comic Masterfully Shows How Climate Has Changed Through Time

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Scroll through 20,000 years of humorously illustrated climate data

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Climate Change: Vital Signs of the Planet

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The Greenhouse Effect

Increasing Greenhouses Gases Are Warming the Planet

Scientists attribute the global warming trend observed since the mid-20 th century to the human expansion of the "greenhouse effect" ¹ - warming that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space.

Life on Earth depends on energy coming from the Sun. About half the light energy reaching Earth's atmosphere passes through the air and clouds to the surface, where it is absorbed and radiated in the form of infrared heat. About 90% of this heat is then absorbed by greenhouse gases and re-radiated, slowing heat loss to space.

Gases that Contribute

The Role of Humans

Human Activity Is the Cause of Increased Greenhouse Gas Concentrations

Over the last century, burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil has increased the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO ₂). This increase happens because the coal or oil burning process combines carbon with oxygen in the air to make CO ₂. To a lesser extent, clearing of land for agriculture, industry, and other human activities has increased concentrations of greenhouse gases.

How do we know what greenhouse gas and temperature levels were in the distant past?

Ice cores are scientists' best source for historical climate data. Other tools for learning about Earth's ancient atmosphere include growth rings in trees, which keep a rough record of each growing season's temperature, moisture and cloudiness going back about 2,000 years. Corals also form growth rings that provide information about temperature and nutrients in the tropical ocean. Other proxies, such as benthic cores, extend our knowledge of past climate back about a billion years.

detailed answer

The industrial activities that our modern civilization depends upon have raised atmospheric carbon dioxide levels by nearly 50% since 1750 ². This increase is due to human activities, because scientists can see a distinctive isotopic fingerprint in the atmosphere.

In its Sixth Assessment Report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, composed of scientific experts from countries all over the world, concluded thatit is unequivocal that the increase of CO ₂, methane, and nitrous oxide in the atmosphere over the industrial era is the result of human activities and that human influence is the principal driver of many changes observed across the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere.

"Since systematic scientific assessments began in the 1970s, the influence of human activity on the warming of the climate system has evolved from theory to established fact."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The panel's AR6 Working Group I (WGI) Summary for Policymakers report is online at https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/.

Is the Sun to Blame?

Evidence Shows That Current Global Warming Cannot Be Explained by Solar Irradiance

Scientists use a metric called Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) to measure the changes in energy the Earth receives from the Sun. TSI incorporates the 11-year solar cycle and solar flares/storms from the Sun's surface.

Studies show that solar variability has played a role in past climate changes. For example, a decrease in solar activity coupled with increased volcanic activity helped trigger the Little Ice Age.

The above graph compares global surface temperature changes (red line) and the Sun's energy that Earth receives (yellow line) in watts (units of energy) per square meter since 1880. The lighter/thinner lines show the yearly levels while the heavier/thicker lines show the 11-year average trends. Eleven-year averages are used to reduce the year-to-year natural noise in the data, making the underlying trends more obvious.

The amount of solar energy that Earth receives has followed the Sun's natural 11-year cycle of small ups and downs with no net increase since 1880. Over the same period, global temperature has risen markedly. It is therefore extremely unlikely that the Sun has caused the observed global temperature warming trend over the past half-century. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

But several lines of evidence show that current global warming cannot be explained by changes in energy from the Sun:

Since 1750, the average amount of energy from the Sun either remained constant or decreased slightly³.

If a more active Sun caused the warming, scientists would expect warmer temperatures in all layers of the atmosphere. Instead, they have observed a cooling in the upper atmosphere and a warming at the surface and lower parts of the atmosphere. That's because greenhouse gases are slowing heat loss from the lower atmosphere.

Climate models that include solar irradiance changes can't reproduce the observed temperature trend over the past century or more without including a rise in greenhouse gases.
References
References

1. IPCC 6 th Assessment Report, WG1, Summary for Policy Makers, Sections A, " The Current State of the Climate "

IPCC 6 th Assessment Report, WG1, Technical Summary, Sections TS.1.2, TS.2.1 and TS.3.1

2. P. Friedlingstein, et al., 2022: "Global Carbon Budget 2022", Earth System Science Data ( 11 Nov 2022): 4811-4900. https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-14-4811-2022

3. IPCC 6 th Assessment Report, WG1, Chapter 2, Section 2.2.1, " Solar and Orbital Forcing"

IPCC 6 th Assessment Report, WG1, Chapter 7, Sections 7.3.4.4, 7.3.5.2, Figure 7.6, " Solar"

M. Lockwood and W.T. Ball, Placing limits on long-term variations in quiet-Sun irradiance and their contribution to total solar irradiance and solar radiative forcing of climate," Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 476, issue 2228 (24 June 2020): https://doi 10.1098/rspa.2020.0077

Header image credit: Pixabay/stevepb

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Vital Signs of the Planet: Global Climate Change and Global Warming. What is the "greenhouse effect"? What is causing it? Are humans to blame? What does solar irradiance have to do with it? Answers here.

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National Snow and Ice Data Center, W. O. Field, B. F. Molnia.

Can you feel the world getting warmer? Maybe you can't, but ice across the planet's surface has certainly been feeling the heat, according to new reports. Indeed, the dramatic shrinkage of Arctic ice-and at some spots, its seasonal near disappearance-is one sure sign that our planet has developed a fever.

So are glaciers-and not only at the poles. Around the world these massive moving fields of ice have been posting record losses. The World Glacier Monitoring Service, based at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, looked at nearly 30 reference glaciers in nine different mountain ranges across the globe. In March, its scientists reported disturbing news. The average melting and thinning rate of those glaciers has more than doubled between the 2004 and 2006.

"The latest figures are part of what appears to be an accelerating trend with no apparent end in sight," said Wilfried Haeberli, who directs the glacier-monitoring group.

In Antarctica, a large chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf recently collapsed into the sea. Satellite images show the Wilkins Shelf began falling apart in late February, when a large iceberg 41 kilometers by 2.5 kilometers (25.5 miles by 1.5 miles) broke away from the shelf. This triggered a runaway disintegration of an additional 405 square kilometers (160 square miles) of the shelf. The total loss was 8.5 times the area covered by New York's Manhattan island. As of March 23, only a 6 km (3.7 mile) wide strip of intact ice was protecting the shelf from further collapse.

Scientists from the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center and the British Antarctic Survey put the blame for the Wilkins' massive melt-triggered event on a warmer world. "We believe the Wilkins [Shelf] has been in place for at least a few hundred years," said Ted Scambos, a lead scientist with the snow and ice data center. "But warm air and exposure to ocean waves are causing a break-up."

With strong evidence that ice is melting globally atop mountains and at Earth's poles, scientists say that it's pretty clear our planet is warming. And that could spell big changes even in regions where the only ice you'd normally encounter is in a beverage.

National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, CO

Arctic ice on the rocks
Changes in the Arctic's sea ice offer more cause for concern. That's the March 18 conclusion of a team of federal scientists who performed a recent checkup on this cold region.

The Arctic is a normally ice-covered ocean surrounded by land. Sea ice grows and shrinks seasonally-building throughout the cold, sunless winter and then melting somewhat during the sunny, warmer summer.

Satellite data has shown that a colder-than-average winter this year has actually increased the amount of the Arctic's new-or seasonal-ice. However, some ice in this region can last for up to 10 years. This older-or perennial- sea ice has continued to decline.

"Perennial ice can be very thick and very tough, but there's much less of it left," says Walt Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center. "There's much more seasonal ice, which is weaker and thinner." It's also especially vulnerable to the summer sun.

The Arctic remains dark for all or part of each day throughout much of the winter. When the sun returns in the spring and a warming begins, the seasonal ice "is going to melt away," Meier warns. So any winter gains in ice cover "are going to be quickly lost."

National Snow and Ice Data Center, Boulder, CO

Perennial ice used to cover 50 to 60 percent of the Arctic, according to data collected by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. This year it covers less than 30 percent. "Since the mid 1980s, we've lost about a million square miles of perennial ice," says Meier. "That's about one and half times [the size of] the state of Alaska."

The very old, tough ice that's been around for six years or more also has declined. Once making up more than 20 percent of the Arctic area in the mid- to late 1980s, it now covers just six percent of the region.

Meier says that this is a record low for perennial ice in winter and a very sharp drop even from last winter. "There's this fear," he says, "that we're going over a cliff, in a sense, with this perennial ice." He says the planet could be heading towards a situation where there won't be any perennial ice left in the near future. Only seasonal ice would exist, which means that the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free during the summer.

The decline of Arctic sea ice "is an iconic signal of global warming," Meier says. It's something that really sticks out "as being clear cut and definitely due to global warming."
Real warming, real warning

National Snow and Ice Data Center, courtesy S. Drobot, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder

Most scientists believe people are largely responsible for the warming of Earth's atmosphere throughout the past century. Their burning of fossil fuels-such as coal, oil, and gas-releases greenhouse gases that trap the sun's heat.

Until fairly recently, scientists debated whether Earth's fever was likely to last only a few years or whether it could persist for decades-maybe even longer.

Now the debate appears to be over.

There is a scientific consensus, which means an agreement among the vast majority of researchers in the field, that global warming is not a temporary blip. The pattern of worldwide warming appears to signal a true and potentially very long-term change in climate. Indeed, global warming is "unequivocal," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated last year in a convincing set of reports.

Susan Solomon is a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo., who led one of the IPCC working groups. Using the word "unequivocal" was important, she says. The data that the IPCC reviewed were so strong, she explains, that the words "very likely" just wouldn't get the point across. There's a greater than 99 percent chance that our planet has warmed, she says. So there really "just isn't any doubt about it."

The IPCC reports describe possible dramatic and lasting impacts of global warming that may occur. But, cautions Solomon, the warming and impacts that we'll see in the next century depend a lot on how much carbon dioxide we emit. Carbon dioxide, a pollutant emitted as fossil fuels burn, is a major greenhouse gas.

How severely the climate changes and precisely when and where those changes occur remain uncertain. If humanity drastically reduced its emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon-dioxide emissions, we could reduce how high Earth's surface temperatures climb, Solomon says. But if we don't, she warns, by the end of the century Earth's average temperature could climb somewhere between 2 and 6 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit).

"And under those circumstances, a lot of things would change," Solomon says. "We'd see more drought, more heat waves. We'd also, ironically, see more heavy rainfall. We'd see sea levels rise-and though there's a lot of uncertainty in how much they'd rise, numbers like half a meter [about 20 inches] wouldn't surprise me in 100 years."

Such projections about droughts and sea-level rise aren't certain. They are simply "best guesses," Meier observes. "They could be wrong," he says. In fact, he notes, "Many skeptics focus on the fact that things might not be quite as bad as projected." On the other hand, he points out that the effects of Earth's fever could prove much worse than scientists have anticipated, "which is what we're already seeing in terms of the rate of ice melt."
No summer sea ice-soon?
The Arctic has shown the most rapid rates of warming in recent years. Surface air temperatures there have warmed at roughly twice the global rate, according to the IPCC reports. Science has predicted that the first signs of global warming would show up first and most dramatically in the Arctic. "And that's indeed what we're seeing with the decline of Arctic sea ice," says Meier.

The IPCC reports have concluded that the Arctic Ocean could lose its summer sea ice by the latter part of the century. Meier cautions, however, that such estimates are based on computer models. Those models are not up to date. In fact, he says, we're finding that changes are occurring "much, much faster than the models have projected. The way things are going it's likely that we'll have an ice-free Arctic Ocean in the summer within a couple of decades. It could be even sooner." Indeed, some scientists have speculated summer sea ice could disappear by 2013-only five years from now. "That's on the extreme pessimistic edge of the estimates," Meier says, "but it's not implausible any longer."

He thinks the complete disappearance of summer sea ice in the Arctic is probably unavoidable. The warming trend is just too strong and seems to be accelerating.

"You don't need just one cold summer or one cold winter to turn things around," he explains. "It would take many, many cold years in a row to reverse things and get things back to the way they were in the 1980s. And that's not very likely." That's especially true, he says, because people are still using fossil fuels-and spewing greenhouse gases-at high and growing rates.

Though it may be too late to save the Arctic Ocean from experiencing ice-free summers, "it's not too late to prevent the worst of the impacts of global warming," Meier argues. "The sea ice is an early warning and we can heed that warning. There is hope and there are solutions."

Next week: Part 2: What's behind global warming, and what can we do?

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National Snow and Ice Data Center, W. O. Field, B. F. Molnia. Can you feel the world getting warmer? Maybe you can't, but ice across the planet's surface has certainly been feeling the heat, according to new reports. Indeed, the dramatic shrinkage of Arctic ice-and at some spots, its seasonal near disappearance-is one sure sign that our planet has developed a fever.

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The debate about global warming appears to be pretty much over. A majority of climate scientists now agree that it's occurring and there seems no end to the accumulating evidence that rising temperatures are causing changes all over the planet.

The yellow jacket population in Alaska, for example, has undergone a significant increase during the past decade. One effect of the insect's growing numbers is that in 2006, Fairbanks experienced its first two sting-related deaths. "We think warmer temperatures are allowing the insects to thrive," says Jeffrey Demain, director of an allergy immunology center in Anchorage. Demain presented his findings in March in Philadelphia at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology.

Another symptom comes from plants: Leaves are emerging earlier in Eurasia's northern forests in the spring. Researchers in France, the United Kingdom, Japan and Russia reported the finding in the March Global Change Biology. When leaves pop out depends largely on temperature in the northern hemisphere.

And some marine mammals may need special government protection because the icy environment they depend on is melting away. For instance, on March 26, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced it was considering whether to list four types of seals as species threatened or endangered with extinction. At issue: Arctic sea ice is melting rapidly and could disappear entirely during polar summers fairly soon. Ribbon, bearded, spotted and ringed seals-the species in question-rely on sea ice for spots on which to rest, to mate and to have pups.

A second federal agency, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, is evaluating whether polar bears should be listed as a threatened species for similar reasons. These bears are completely dependent upon Arctic sea ice for their hunting grounds.

But the warming is affecting more than seals and polar bears. "There's going to be a widespread impact on the whole ecosystem of the Arctic, and the whole world," says Walt Meier, a research scientist who studies Arctic ice at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

Why is our planet running a fever? That's what scientists are investigating, and some of their findings are disturbing. But there are things that the public can do to potentially bring down that fever. Even kids.
Understanding Earth's fever
At its simplest, global warming is the rise in the average temperature of Earth's atmosphere. Since the 1950s, the planet has been experiencing a warming trend.

In a convincing set of reports issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists argued that it's very likely that this warming trend has been caused by an increase of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. (See story below: "Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect.")

The reports also blamed people and their actions for much of the increase in levels of these gases in the atmosphere. For instance, the IPCC linked increasing amounts of carbon dioxide-the most important of the greenhouse gases-primarily to humans' use of fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas.

The IPCC reports show that all but one of the years between 1995 and 2006 rank among the 12 warmest since 1850. That's when scientists first began measuring surface temperatures across the globe. During the past century, the planet's average temperature has risen about 0.74° Celsius (or 1.33° Fahrenheit). Satellite data since 1978 show that annual average Arctic sea ice has shrunk by 2.7 percent per decade. In addition, mountain glaciers and snow cover have declined all over the world. These decreases are all consistent with global warming.

Shrinking Arctic sea ice and retreating glaciers are both key and quick-responding indicators of global warming, says Meier. Long ago, coal miners brought caged canaries into their mines as a type of early-warning signal. If the birds died, it meant that toxic gases were building up in the mine, and that the workers were in trouble. Some scientists now view what's happening to glaciers and Arctic ice as the climate equivalent of canaries in the coal mine. Once sea ice and glaciers begin to undergo serious melting, Meier says, "You know you're having some kind of climate change."
Changes to the planet
The IPCC reports predict that by 2100, Earth's average global temperature will have climbed by anywhere from 1.1 to 6.4° C (2 to 11.5° F). But global warming is about more than just temperature, says Susan Solomon. She's a senior scientist at NOAA in Boulder, Colo., and led one of the IPCC working groups.

"We'll also see changes in drought and rainfall, which will affect our ability to grow food," Solomon says. "[Global warming] is about extremes of temperature and rainfall, and there are a lot of open questions about, for example, whether hurricanes become more intense as you have a warmer world." What there's no question about, she says, is that when climate changes, people will be affected.

Heavy rainfalls, warm spells and heat waves will all very likely become more common than they are today, the IPCC reports say. Heat waves can be deadly, especially for the very young or very old. The heat wave that struck Europe in 2003, for example, killed thousands of people.

Global warming also affects sea levels. As temperatures climb, glaciers and portions of the polar ice sheets start to melt. The glaciers' melting will swell the size of Earth's oceans, increasing their depth. Moreover, as ocean water warms, it expands, which makes it take up even more space.

Melting ice and expanding seawater are already making sea levels climb about 3 millimeters (one-eighth of an inch) each year, according to the IPCC reports. If sea levels continue to rise, coastal cities and small island nations will be in trouble. Some areas could become submerged. Remaining low-lying regions could be at risk of flooding during storms or a scouring away by waves along the coasts.

The environment could also suffer dramatically. Plants, insects, birds and other animals could lose their homes or sources of food. And, Solomon says, "There's evidence that changes in temperature and other climate variables can cause extinction."

The loss of Arctic sea ice will affect more than wildlife, says Meier. "The climate system is all interconnected," he notes, "so you're going to see changes in ocean currents, in winds and in weather patterns." People throughout the world, but especially in the Northern Hemisphere, should expect to experience some impacts, he warns.

Disappearing sea ice will also add to the warming trend, Meier says. Because snow and ice are white, the Arctic acts like a big mirror-it reflects a lot of the sun's rays. When you remove the ice through melting, you expose more ocean. Because the water's very dark, almost black, it reflects less of the sun's energy, and absorbs more of it. This leads to still more warming, which leads to still more ice melting, and so on.

So once this process gets underway, "you have the potential for the loss of sea ice to accelerate and for this to contribute even more to global warming," Meier says. A warmer ocean can transfer its heat, he adds, further warming the atmosphere.
What to do
Global warming is a serious issue affecting the entire planet. But people working together can find answers to environmental problems. The IPCC reports offer recommendations for government leaders on ways to reduce fossil-fuel use, thereby reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. One way: begin substituting alternative energy sources, such as solar, wind, tidal and wave power for the burning of oil, gas and coal.

Solomon says that it's important "to get involved in the issue, understand the issue and express your opinions, and get your family to express their opinions to [government leaders]" in Washington D.C. and elsewhere.

Even kids can have an impact, prompting changes within their families.

Transportation-cars, trucks and airplanes-contribute a large share of carbon dioxide into the air, Solomon says. So one way to limit those emissions would be to encourage your family to walk or ride a bike for simple trips. You might also encourage your parents to buy a car that sips gasoline, not a vehicle that guzzles it. And remind your family that running several errands at one time will result in fewer car trips and less greenhouse-gas pollution.

Anything kids can do to conserve energy and avoid releasing extra carbon dioxide helps, Meier adds. This includes everything from installing energy-efficient compact-fluorescent light bulbs to turning down the thermostat (put on an extra sweater to stay warm). "If you get enough people working together, then you definitely start making a difference," he says.

Keep in mind, Solomon points out, that what people do today could "affect the lives of their children and of their children's children and the children of their children's children."

Overall, Solomon concludes, if countries around the world don't reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, "the world will get a lot warmer in the next hundred or even maybe several hundred years. We have to decide whether we want to live in that world."
Global Warming and the Greenhouse Effect
Earth's atmosphere works something like a giant glass greenhouse. As the sun's rays enter our atmosphere, most continue right down to the planet's surface. As they hit the soil and surface waters, those rays release much of their energy as heat. Some of the heat then radiates back out into space.

However, certain gases in our atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor, work like a blanket to retain much of that heat. This helps to warm our atmosphere. The gases do this by absorbing the heat and radiating it back to Earth's surface. These gases are nicknamed "greenhouse gases" because of their heat-trapping effect. Without the "greenhouse effect," Earth would be too cold to support most forms of life.

But you can have too much of a good thing. Carbon dioxide is released when we use fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas. We burn these fuels, made from the ancient remains of plants and animals, to run electricity-generating plants that power factories, homes and schools. Products of these fossil fuels, such as gasoline and diesel fuel, power most of the engines that drive cars, airplanes and ships.

By examining air bubbles in ice cores taken from Antarctica, scientists can go back and calculate what the concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have been throughout the last 650,000 years. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has been climbing to where today it is 30 percent greater than 650,000 years ago. That rise in carbon dioxide "is essentially entirely due to the burning of fuels," Susan Solomon says. She's a senior scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, in Boulder, Colo., and studies factors that affect climate.

Humans have further increased the levels of greenhouse gases in the air by changing the landscape. Plants take up carbon dioxide to make food in a process called photosynthesis. Once cut down, they can no longer take in carbon dioxide, and this gas begins building up in the air instead of fueling the growth of plants. So by cutting down trees and forests for farmland and other human uses, more carbon dioxide is also added into the atmosphere.

"We've always had some greenhouse gases in the atmosphere," Solomon says. "But because we've burned a lot of fossil fuels and deforested parts of the planet, we've increased the amount of greenhouse gases, and as a result have changed the temperature of the planet."
Last week: Part 1: Polar ice feels the heat, a sign of global warming Power Words
All definitions from the American Heritage Student Science Dictionary, except as noted.

atmosphere The mixture of gases that surrounds the Earth or some other celestial body. It is held by the force of gravity and forms various layers at different heights, including the troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere. Earth's atmosphere, called air, is rich in nitrogen and oxygen; that of Venus is mainly carbon dioxide.

carbon dioxide (CO ₂) A colorless, odorless gas that is present in the atmosphere and is formed when any fuel containing carbon is burned. It is breathed out of an animal's lungs during respiration, produced by the decay of organic matter and used by plants in photosynthesis.

climate The general or average weather conditions of a certain region, including temperature, rainfall and wind: Caribbean islands have a year-round climate of warm breezes and sunshine.

deforestation The cutting down and removal of all or most of the trees in a forested area. Deforestation can damage the environment by causing erosion of soils, and it decreases biodiversity by destroying the habitats needed for different organisms.

ecosystem An ecological community made up of plants, animals and microorganisms together with their environment. Pond or rain forests are examples of complex ecosystems.

fossil fuels Petroleum, coal and natural gas, which are derived from the accumulated remains of ancient plants and animals.

glacier A large mass of ice flowing very slowly through a valley or spreading outward from a center. Glaciers form over many years from packed snow in areas where snow accumulates faster than it melts. A glacier is always moving, but when its forward edge melts faster than the ice behind it advances, the glacier as a whole shrinks backward.

global warming An increase in the average temperature of the earth's atmosphere, especially a sustained increase great enough to cause changes in the global climate. Many scientists believe that the Earth has been in a period of global warming for the past century or more, due in part to the increased production of greenhouses gases related to human activity.

greenhouse effect The trapping of the sun's radiation in the Earth's atmosphere because of the presence of greenhouse gases.

greenhouse gas Any of the atmospheric gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane and nitrous oxide.

habitat The area or natural environment in which an animal or plant normally lives, such as a desert, coral reef or freshwater lake. A habitat can be home to many different organisms.

photosynthesis The process by which green plants, algae and certain forms of bacteria make carbohydrates from carbon dioxide and water in the presence of chlorophyll, using light as energy. Photosynthesis normally releases oxygen as a byproduct.

weather The state of the atmosphere at a particular time and place. Weather is described by variable conditions such as temperature, humidity, wind velocity, precipitation and barometric pressure.

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The debate about global warming appears to be pretty much over. A majority of climate scientists now agree that it's occurring and there seems no end to the

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This explainer was updated by Umair Irfan in December 2018 and draws heavily from a written by Brad Plumer in 2015. Brian Resnick contributed the section on the Paris climate accord in 2017.
There's a vast and growing gap between the urgency to fight climate change and the policies needed to combat it.

In 2018, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that it is possible to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius this century, but the world may have as little as 12 years left to act. The US government's National Climate Assessment, with input from NASA, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Pentagon, also reported that the consequences of climate change are already here, ranging from nuisance flooding to the spread of mosquito-borne viruses into what were once colder climates. Left unchecked, warming will cost the US economy hundreds of billions of dollars.

However, these facts have failed to register with the Trump administration, which is actively pushing policies that will increase the emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Ever since he took office, President Donald Trump has rejected or undermined President Barack Obama's signature climate achievements: the Paris climate agreement; the Clean Power Plan, the main domestic policy for limiting greenhouse gas emissions; and fuel economy standards, which target transportation, the largest US source of greenhouse gases.

Trump has also appointed climate change skeptics to key positions. Quietly, officials at these and other science agencies have been removing the words "climate change" from government websites and press releases.

The big questions now are how these ongoing changes in the climate will reverberate throughout the rest of the world, and what we should do about them. The answers bridge decades of research across geology, economics, and social science, which have been confounded by uncertainty and obscured by jargon. That's why it can be a bit daunting to join the discussion for the first time, or to revisit the conversation after a hiatus.

To help, we've provided answers to some fundamental questions about climate change you may have been afraid to ask.

1) What is global warming?

In short: The world is getting hotter, and humans are responsible.

Yes, the planet's temperature has changed before, but it's the rise in average temperature of the Earth's climate system since the late 19th century, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, that's important here. Temperatures over land and ocean have gone up 0.8° to 1° Celsius (1.4° to 1.8° Fahrenheit), on average, in that span:

Many people use the term "climate change" to describe this rise in temperatures and the associated effects on the Earth's climate.(The shift from the term "global warming" to "climate change" was also part of a deliberate messaging effort by a Republican pollster to undermine support for environmental regulations.)

Global warming also refers to what scientists think will happen in the future if humans keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Many experts consider 2°C of warming to be unacceptably high, increasing the risk of deadly heat waves, droughts, flooding, and extinctions. Rising temperatures will drive up global sea levels as the world's glaciers and ice sheets melt. Further global warming could affect everything from our ability to grow food to the spread of disease.

That's why the IPCC put out another report in 2018 comparing 2°C of warming to a scenario with 1.5°C of warming. The researchers found that this half-degree difference is actually pretty important, since every bit of warming matters. Between the two outlooks, less warming means fewer people will have to move from coastal areas, natural weather events will be less severe, and economies will take a smaller hit.

However, limiting warming would likely require a complete overhaul of our energy system. Fossil fuels currently provide just over 80 percent of the world's energy. To zero out emissions this century, we'd have to replace most of that with low-carbon sources like wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, or carbon capture.

Beyond that, we may have to electrify everything that uses energy and start pulling greenhouse gases straight from the air. And to get on track for 1.5°C of warming, the world would have to halve greenhouse gas emissions from current levels by 2030.

That's a staggering task, and there are huge technological and political hurdles standing in the way. As such, the world's nations have been slow to act on global warming - many of the existing targets for curbing greenhouse gas emissions are too weak, yet many countries are falling short of even these modest goals.

2) How do we know global warming is real?

But that's not the only clue. Scientists have also noted that glaciers and ice sheets around the world are melting. Satellite observations since the 1970s have shown warming in the lower atmosphere. There's more heat in the ocean, causing water to expand and sea levels to rise. Plants are flowering earlier in many parts of the world. There's more humidity in the atmosphere. Here's a summary from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration:

These are all signs that the Earth really is getting warmer - and that it's not just a glitch in the thermometers. That explains why climate scientists say things like, "Warming in the climate system is unequivocal." They're really confident about this one.

3) How do we know humans are causing global warming?

Climate scientists say they are more than 95 percent certainthat human influence has been the dominant cause of global warming since 1950. They're about as sure of this as they are that cigarette smoke causes cancer.

Why are they so confident? In part because they have a good grasp of how greenhouse gases can warm the planet, in part because the theory fits the available evidence, and in part because alternate theories have been ruled out. Let's break it down in six steps:

1) Scientists have long known that greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - such as carbon dioxide, methane, or water vapor - absorb certain frequencies of infrared radiation and scatter them back toward the Earth. These gases essentially prevent heat from escaping too quickly back into space, trapping that radiation at the surface and keeping the planet warm.

2) Climate scientists also know that concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have grown significantly since the Industrial Revolution. Carbon dioxide has risen 45 percent. Methane has risen more than 200 percent. Through some relatively straightforward chemistry and physics, scientists can trace these increases to human activities like burning oil, gas, and coal.

3) So it stands to reason that more greenhouse gases would lead to more heat. And indeed, satellite measurements have shown that less infrared radiation is escaping out into space over time and instead returning to the Earth's surface. That's strong evidence that the greenhouse effect is increasing.

4) There are other human fingerprints that suggest increased greenhouse gases are warming the planet. For instance, back in the 1960s, simple climate models predicted that global warming caused by more carbon dioxide would lead to cooling in the upper atmosphere (because the heat is getting trapped at the surface). Later satellite measurements confirmed exactly that. Here are a few other similar predictions that have also been confirmed.

5) Meanwhile, climate scientists have ruled out other explanations for the rise in average temperatures over the past century. To take one example: Solar activity can shift from year to year, affecting the Earth's climate. But satellite data shows that total solar irradiance has declined slightly in the past 35 years, even as the Earth has warmed.

6) More recent calculations have shown that it's impossible to explain the temperature rise we've seen in the past century without taking the increase in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into account. Natural causes, like the sun or volcanoes, have an influence, but they're not sufficient by themselves.

Ultimately, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that most of the warming since 1951 has been due to human activities. The Earth's climate can certainly fluctuate from year to year due to natural forces (including oscillations in the Pacific Ocean, such as El Niño). But greenhouse gases are driving the larger upward trend in temperatures.

And as the Climate Science Special Report, released by 13 US federal agencies in November 2017, put it, "For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing alternative explanation supported by the extent of the observational evidence."

More: This chart breaks down all the different factors affecting the Earth's average temperature. And there's much more detail in the IPCC's report, particularly this section and this one.

4) How has global warming affected the world so far?

Here's a list of ongoing changes that climate scientists have concluded are likely linked to global warming, as detailed by the IPCC here and here.

Higher temperatures: Every continent has warmed substantially since the 1950s. There are more hot days and fewer cold days, on average, and the hot days are hotter.

Heavier storms and floods: The world's atmosphere can hold more moisture as it warms. As a result, the overall number of heavier storms has increased since the mid-20th century, particularly in North America and Europe (though there's plenty of regional variation). Scientists reported in December that at least 18 percent of Hurricane Harvey's record-setting rainfall over Houston in August was due to climate change.

Heat waves: Heat waves have become longer and more frequent around the world over the past 50 years, particularly in Europe, Asia, and Australia.

Shrinking sea ice: The extent of sea ice in the Arctic, always at its maximum in winter, has shrunk since 1979, by 3.3 percent per decade. Summer sea ice has dwindled even more rapidly, by 13.2 percent per decade. Antarctica has seen recent years with record growth in sea ice, but it's a very different environment than the Arctic, and the losses in the north far exceed any gains at the South Pole, so total global sea ice is on the decline:

Shrinking glaciers and ice sheets: Glaciers around the world have, on average, been losing ice since the 1970s. In some areas, that is reducing the amount of available freshwater. The ice sheet on Greenland, which would raise global sea levels by 25 feet if it all melted, is declining, with some sections experiencing a sudden surge in the melt rate. The Antarctic ice sheet is also getting smaller, but at a much slower rate.

Sea level rise: Global sea levels rose 9.8 inches (25 centimeters) in the 19th and 20th centuries, after 2,000 years of relatively little change, and the pace is speeding up. Sea level rise is caused by both the thermal expansion of the oceans - as water warms up, it expands - and the melting of glaciers and ice sheets (but not sea ice).

Food supply: A hotter climate can be both good for crops (it lengthens the growing season, and more carbon dioxide can increase photosynthesis) and bad for crops (excess heat can damage plants). The IPCC found that global warming was currently benefiting crops in some high-latitude areas but that negative effects are becoming increasingly common worldwide. In areas like California, crop yields are estimated to decline 40 percent by 2050.

Shifting species: Many land and marine species have had to shift their geographic ranges in response to warmer temperatures. So far, several extinctions have been linked to global warming, such as certain frog species in Central America.

Warmer winters: In general, winters are warming faster than summers. Average low temperatures are rising all over the world. In some cases, these temperatures are climbing above the freezing point of water. We're already seeing massive declines in snow accumulation in the United States, which can paradoxically increase flood, drought, and wildfire risk - as water that would ordinarily dispatch slowly over the course of a season instead flows through a region all at once.

Debated impacts

Here are a few other ways the Earth's climate has been changing - but scientists are still debating whether and how they're linked to global warming:

Droughts have become more frequent and more intense in some parts of the world - such as the American Southwest, Mediterranean Europe, and West Africa - though it's hard to identify a clear global trend. In other parts of the world, such as the Midwestern United States and Northwestern Australia, droughts appear to have become less frequent. A recent study shows that, globally, the time between droughts is shrinking and more areas are affected by drought and taking longer to recover from them.

5) What impacts will global warming have in the future?

It depends on how much the planet actually heats up. The changes associated with 4° Celsius (or 7.2° Fahrenheit) of warming are expected to be more dramatic than the changes associated with 2°C of warming.

Here's a basic rundown of big impacts we can expect if global warming continues, via the IPCC (here and here).

Hotter temperatures: If emissions keep rising unchecked, then global average surface temperatures will be at least 2°C higher (3.6°F) than preindustrial levels by 2100 - and possibly 3°C or 4°C or more.

Higher sea level rise: The expert consensus is that global sea levels will rise somewhere between 0.2 and 2 meters by the end of the century if global warming continues unchecked (that's between 0.6 and 6.6 feet). That's a wide range, reflecting some of the uncertainties scientists have in how ice will melt. In specific regions like the Eastern United States, sea level rise could be even higher, and around the world, the rate of rise is accelerating.

Heat waves: A hotter planet will mean more frequent and severe heat waves.

Droughts and floods: Across the globe, wet seasons are expected to become wetter, and dry seasons drier. As the IPCC puts it, the world will see "more intense downpours, leading to more floods, yet longer dry periods between rain events, leading to more drought."

Hurricanes: It's not yet clear what impact global warming will have on tropical cyclones. The IPCC said it was likely that tropical cyclones would get stronger as the oceans heat up, with faster winds and heavier rainfall. But the overall number of hurricanes in many regions was likely to "either decrease or remain essentially unchanged."

Heavier storm surges: Higher sea levels will increase the risk of storm surges and flooding when storms do hit.

Agriculture: In many parts of the world, the mix of increased heat and drought is expected to make food production more difficult. The IPCC concluded that global warming of 1°C or more could start hurting crop yields for wheat, corn, and rice by the 2030s, especially in the tropics. (This wouldn't be uniform, however; some crops may benefit from mild warming, such as winter wheat in the United States.)

Extinctions: As the world warms, many plant and animal species will need to shift habitats at a rapid rate to maintain their current conditions. Some species will be able to keep up; others likely won't. The Great Barrier Reef, for instance, may not be able to recover from major recent bleaching events linked to climate change. The National Research Council has estimated that a mass extinction event "could conceivably occur before the year 2100."

Long-term changes: Most of the projected changes above will occur in the 21st century. But temperatures will keep rising after that if greenhouse gas levels aren't stabilized. That increases the risk of more drastic longer-term shifts. One example: If West Antarctica's ice sheet started crumbling, that could push sea levels up significantly. The National Research Council in 2013 deemed many of these rapid climate surprises unlikely this century but a real possibility further into the future.

6) What happens if the world heats up more drastically - say, 4°C?

The risks of climate change would rise considerably if temperatures rose 4° Celsius (7.2° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels - something that's possible if greenhouse gas emissions keep rising at their current rate.

The IPCC says 4°C of global warming could lead to "substantial species extinctions," "large risks to global and regional food security," and the risk of irreversibly destabilizing Greenland's massive ice sheet.

One huge concern is food production: A growing number of studiessuggest it would become significantly more difficult for the world to grow food with 3°C or 4°C of global warming. Countries like Bangladesh, Egypt, Vietnam, and parts of Africa could see large tracts of farmland turn unusable due to rising seas. Scientists are also concerned about crops getting less nutritious due to rising CO2.

Humans could struggle to adapt to these conditions. Many people might think the impacts of 4°C of warming will simply be twice as bad as those of 2°C. But as a 2013 World Bank report argued, that's not necessarily true. Impacts may interact with each other in unpredictable ways. Current agriculture models, for instance, don't have a good sense of what will happen to crops if increased heat waves, droughts, new pests and diseases, and other changes all start to combine.

"Given that uncertainty remains about the full nature and scale of impacts," the World Bank report said, "there is also no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible." Its conclusion was blunt: "The projected 4°C warming simply must not be allowed to occur."

That depends on your faith in humanity.

Climate models depend on not only complicated physics but the intricacies of human behavior over the entire planet.

Generally, the more greenhouse gases humanity pumps into the atmosphere, the warmer it will get. But scientists aren't certain how sensitive the global climate system is to increases in greenhouse gases. And just how much we might emit over the coming decades remains an open question, depending on advances in technology and international efforts to cut emissions.

The IPCC groups these scenarios into four categories of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations known as Representative Concentration Pathways. They serve as standard benchmarks for evaluating climate models, but they also have some assumptions baked in.

RCP 2.6, also called RCP 3PD, is the scenario with very low greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. It bets on declining oil use, a population of 9 billion by 2100, increasing energy efficiency, and emissions holding steady until 2020, at which point they'll decline and even go negative by 2100. This is, to put it mildly, very optimistic.

The next tier up is RCP 4.5, which still banks on ambitious reductions in emissions but anticipates an inflection point in the emissions rate around 2040. RCP 6 expects emissions to increase 75 percent above today's levels before peaking and declining around 2060 as the world continues to rely heavily on fossil fuels.

The highest tier, RCP 8.5, is the pessimistic business-as-usual scenario, anticipating no policy changes nor any technological advances. It expects a global population of 12 billion and triple the rate of carbon dioxide emissions compared to today by 2100.

Here's how greenhouse gas emissions under each scenario stack up next to each other:

And here's what that means for global average temperatures, assuming that a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere leads to 3°C of warming:

As you can see, RCP 3PD is the only trajectory that keeps the planet below 2°C of warming. Recall what it would take to keep emissions in line with this pathway and you'll understand the enormity of the challenge of meeting this goal.

8) How do we stop global warming?

The world's nations would need to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by a lot. And even that wouldn't stop all global warming.

For example, let's say we wanted to limit global warming to below 2°C. To do that, the IPCC has calculated that annual greenhouse gas emissions would need to drop at least 40 to 70 percent by midcentury.

Emissions would then have to keep falling until humans were hardly emitting any extra greenhouse gases by the end of the century. We'd also have to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Cutting emissions that sharply is a daunting task. Right now, the world gets 87 percent of its primary energy from fossil fuels: oil, gas, and coal. By contrast, just 13 percent of the world's primary energy is "low carbon": a little bit of wind and solar power, some nuclear power plants, a bunch of hydroelectric dams. That's one reason global emissions keep rising each year.

To stay below 2°C, that would all need to change radically. By 2050, the IPCC notes, the world would need to triple or even quadruple the share of clean energy it uses - and keep scaling it up thereafter. Second, we'd have to get dramatically more efficient at using energy in our homes, buildings, and cars. And stop cutting down forests. And reduce emissions from agriculture and from industrial processes like cement manufacturing.

The IPCC also notes that this task becomes even more difficult the longer we put it off, because carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases will keep piling up in the atmosphere in the meantime, and the cuts necessary to stay below the 2°C limit become more severe.

9) What are we actually doing to fight climate change?

A global problem requires global action, but with climate change, there is a yawning gap between ambition and action.

The main international effort is the 2015 Paris climate accord, of which the United States is the only country in the world that wants out. The deal was hammered out over weeks of tense negotiations and weighs in at 31 pages. What it does is actually pretty simple.

The backbone is the global target of keeping global average temperatures from rising 2°C (compared to temperatures before the Industrial Revolution) by the end of the century. Beyond 2 degrees, we risk dramatically higher seas, changes in weather patterns, food and water crises, and an overall more hostile world.
Paris is voluntary
Critics have argued that the 2-degree mark is arbitrary, or even too low, to make a difference. But it's a starting point, a goal that, before Paris, the world was on track to wildly miss.

To accomplish this 2-degree goal, the accord states that countries should strive to reach peak emissions "as soon as possible." (Currently, we're on track to hit peak emissions around 2030 or later, which will likely be too late.)

But the agreement doesn't detail exactly how these countries should do that. Instead, it provides a framework for getting momentum going on greenhouse gas reduction, with some oversight and accountability. For the US, the pledge involves 26 to 28 percent reductions by 2025. (Under Trump's current policies, that goal is impossible.)

There's also no defined punishment for breaking it. The idea is to create a culture of accountability (and maybe some peer pressure) to get countries to step up their climate game.

In 2020, delegates are supposed to reconvene and provide updates about their emission pledges and report on how they're becoming more aggressive on accomplishing the 2-degree goal.
Paris asks richer countries to help out poorer countries
However, many countries are already falling behind on their climate change commitments, and some, like Germany, are giving up on their near-term targets.

There's a fundamental inequality when it comes to global emissions. Rich countries have plundered and burned huge amounts of fossil fuels and gotten rich from them. Poor countries seeking to grow their economies are now being admonished for using the same fuels. Many low-lying poor countries also will be among the first to bear the worst impacts of climate change.
The agreement matters because we absolutely need momentum on this issue
The main vehicle for rectifying this is the Green Climate Fund, via which richer countries, like the US, are supposed to send $100 billion a year in aid and financing by 2020 to the poorer countries. The United States' share was $3 billion, but with President Trump's decision to withdraw from the Paris accord, this goal is unlikely to be met.

The Paris agreement is largely symbolic, and it will live oneven though Trump is aiming to pull the US out. But, as Jim Tankersley wrote for Vox, "the accord will be weakened, and, much more importantly, so will the fragile international coalition" around climate change.
But the Paris accord isn't the only international climate policy game in town
We're already seeing the Paris agreement lose steam. At a follow-up climate meeting this year in Katowice, Poland, negotiators forged an agreement on measuring and verifying their progress in cutting greenhouse gases, but left many critical questions of how to achieve these reductions unanswered.

There are regional international climate efforts like the European Union's Emissions Trading System. However, the most effective global policy at keeping warming in check to date doesn't have to do with climate change, at least on the surface.
Avoiding catastrophic climate change isn't impossible yet. Just incredibly hard. Reckoning with climate change will demand ugly tradeoffs from environmentalists - and everyone else Show this cartoon to anyone who doubts we need huge action on climate change It's time to start talking about "negative" carbon dioxide emissions
The 1987 Montreal Protocol, which was convened by countries to halt the destruction of the ozone layer, had a major side effect of averting warming. In fact, it's been the single most effective effort humanity has undertaken to fight climate change. Since many of the substances that eat away at the ozone layer are potent heat-trappers, limiting emissions of gases like chlorofluorocarbons has an outsize effect.
Scientists made a detailed "roadmap" for meeting the Paris climate goals. It's eye-opening.
And the Trump administration doesn't appear as hostile to Montreal as it does to Paris. The White House may send the 2016 Kigali Amendment to the Montreal Protocol to the Senate for ratification, giving the new regulations the force of law. If implemented, the amendment would avert 0.5°C of warming by 2100.

Regardless of what path we choose, the key thing to remember is that we are going to pay for climate change one way or another. We have the opportunity now to address warming on our own terms, with investments in clean energy, moving people away from disaster-prone areas, and regulating greenhouse gas emissions. Otherwise, we'll pay through diminished crop harvests, inundated coastlines, destroyed homes, lost lives, and an increasingly unlivable planet. Ignoring or stalling on climate change chooses the latter option by default. Our choices do matter, but we're running out of time to make them.

A history of the 2°C global warming target

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9 questions about climate change you were too embarrassed to ask

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Basic answers to basic questions about global warming and the future climate.

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6 Easy Ways to Fight Climate Change Every Day

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11 Gross Things that Can Happen when you Don't Wash Your Hands Enough

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11 Gross Things that Can Happen when you Don't Wash Your Hands Enough

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Even though it isn't guaranteed to cause health problems, there are quite a few gross things that can happen when you don't wash your hands. Because, as we all know, germs are everywhere. And it often doesn't take much to pick them up throughout the day, or pass them along to others.

Thankfully, the immune system usually steps in before bacteria and viruses can do any real damage. But if you aren't washing your hands regularly, you may be unnecessarily putting yourself at risk. After all, "the number one way to prevent disease is hand washing," Dr. Elizabeth Trattner, tells Bustle. So even though it can be easy to put it off, it's much healthier to pop off to the bathroom and give your mitts a quick scrub, especially after coming in contact with dirty surfaces or if you happen to be sick.

"The best hand washing technique is to rinse hands under warm water, then lather with soap for 20 to 30 seconds, getting all areas of the hands," Brianne Bell, registered dietician and food service supervisor, tells Bustle. "Rinse under warm water and dry with a clean towel." That should help reduce the risk of all the gross things below, which may be more likely to happen if you don't wash your hands.

1. You Might Catch More Colds

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 80 percent of infectious disease is spread by touch. And really, all it takes is the simple act of grabbing a germ-riddled doorknob and then touching your nose, in order to get infected. So let this serve as motivation to whip out the soap on a more regular basis, not only for your own sake, but for everyone else's health as well.

Of course, that doesn't mean you need to become paranoid. Most of the time your body protect you from germs, especially if your immune system is strong. But even still, washing up whenever you've been around someone with a cold is always a good idea.

2. Fecal Matter Can End Up In Your Food

It's a gross truth, but fecal matter is lurking in more places than you might think - including your hands. And rather disgustingly, those particles can get into food and make you sick, according to the CDC.

It may not be something you want to imagine. But as long as you're washing your hands after using the bathroom, changing a diaper, walking your dog, or even using public transportation, you should be able to lower your risk.

3. You Could Get Or Spread Food Poisoning

There are many ways to come down with a case of food poisoning, including eating undercooked meats, or food that has gone bad. You can also get pretty darn sick by preparing meals with dirty hands. (See above information about fecal matter).

According to the CDC, a large percentage of food-borne disease outbreaks are spread by contaminated hands. But appropriate hand washing practices can reduce the risk of food-borne illness and other infections. So do yourself, and everyone else, a huge favor by washing before you handle food.

4. You're Infecting Everyone You Touch

Sure, it's polite to cover your sneeze with your hand than it is to let if fly. And yet, how often do you really wash up after doing so? It's easy to forget, or to touch a few surfaces first - and just like that the germs spread.

Again, hand washing is the best way to prevent the transfer of disease, which is why "this is one of the first things you learn in medical school or in any health profession," Dr. Trattner says.

In a pinch, using hand sanitizer can cut back on the transfer of germs, Bell says. But nothing beats a good ol' scrub when it comes to reducing the amount of bacteria and viruses on your hands.

5. You Can Get Pink Eye

Pink eye, also known as conjunctivitis, is an eye infection many people catch in elementary school, mostly because it's highly contagious and thus spreads like wildfire among kids. But adults can get it, too.

In fact, often all it takes is a quick moment of hand-to-eye contact when you have an infected person's secretions on your hand, according to the American Academy of Ophthalmology, before the typical symptoms of redness, itchiness, and pus in the eyes will begin.

6. Your Snacks Can Get Contaminated

Think of all the times you've plunged a dirty hand into a bag of chips, box of crackers, or bowl of popcorn. If you aren't washing your hands, it's so easy to contaminate these shared foods with germs, according to the New York State Department of Health.

This is also why you may not want to share food or utensils with someone who is sick, especially if they have the norovirus. According to the CDC, if you get the norovirus illness, you can shed billions of norovirus particles that you can't see without a microscope, and it only takes a few of these particles to make people sick.

7. You Might Pick Up Hepatitis A

Not washing your hands can also lead to hepatitis A. "This is a serious liver virus that spreads when people do not wash their hands before making food and drinks," Dr. Tania Elliott, board-certified allergist/immunologist at NYU Langone Health, tells Bustle. "It also spreads through sexual contact with people who have hepatitis A, and by eating foods contaminated with the virus."

You can, however, make it less likely to happen. As Dr. Elliott says, "Washing your hands with soap and warm water after using the bathroom, changing a diaper, or before making food and drinks can help stop the spread of hepatitis A."

8. Diarrhea May Become A Frequent Visitor

Not washing your hands regularly can increase your chances of catching an illness that leads to diarrhea. One of these might be shigellosis, a bacterial infection with symptoms that include watery diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and fever, according to the CDC.

There is good news, though, in that simply washing your hands - especially after coming in contact with germ-y surfaces - can prevent about 30 percent of diarrhea-related sicknesses, the CDC says.

9. You Might Catch The Epstein-Barr Virus

We talked about poop in your food. Now what about urine, or saliva? Turns out, these are carriers of diseases like typhoid, cytomegalovirus, and Epstein-Barr virus, which are spread by contaminated hands, according to the CDC.

Epstein-Barr is the virus that causes mononucleosis, AKA the "kissing disease," which can lead to fever, weakness, swollen neck glands, and fatigue that lasts for weeks. "This is spread through saliva, so kissing, sharing food or beverages, or touching something with saliva on it are all ways in which it can be transmitted," Dr. Elliott says. "Hand washing, especially after touching the face and mouth [...] can help prevent the spread."

10. It Could Contribute To Antibiotic Resistance

According to the CDC, reducing the number of infections people get by washing your hands can help prevent the overuse of antibiotics, which is the single most important factor leading to antibiotic resistance around the world.

"Antibiotics are often overused when someone has a viral infection (remember, antibiotics only fight bacterial infections, not viruses)," Dr. Elliott says. "So, the fewer viral infections (by proper hand washing and other sanitary measures), the less use of unnecessary antibiotics."

In fact, hand washing can also prevent people from getting sick with germs that are already resistant to antibiotics and that can be difficult to treat, according to the CDC. So help out everyone on the planet, and wash your those hands!

11. Acne Can Crop Up

Not washing your hands can also increase the chances of an acne breakout, all thanks to the way bacteria can transfer from your hands to your face.

"Touching, rubbing, and picking [at the] face are common causes for more acne," Dr. Yoram Harth, board-certified dermatologist and medical director of MDacne, tells Bustle. "When the hands are not washed, the bacteria on the skin of our hands spread to the face and can cause more acne."

Germs truly are lurking around every corner. And they can obviously cause and spread all sorts of diseases, from the common cold, to the norovirus, and even hepatitis A. But by getting into the habit of washing your hands regularly - especially before touching food - you may be able to enjoy a more germ-free life.
This post was originally published on 4/12/2016. It was updated on 6/7/2019.

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11 Gross Things That Can Happen When You Don't Wash Your Hands Enough

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Even though it isn't guaranteed to cause health problems, there are quite a few gross things that can happen when you don't wash your hands. Because, as we all know, germs are everywhere. And it often doesn't take much to pick them up throughout the...

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Show Me the Science: How to Wash Your Hands

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Show Me the Science: How to Wash Your Hands

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How to Wash Your Hands – Read the Science Behind the Recommendations

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CDC recommends washing your hands in a specific way to avoid getting sick and spreading germs. Learn why each of the 5 handwashing steps – wet, lather, scrub, rinse, and dry – is important.

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Keeping Space Missions From Infecting Earth and Other Worlds

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Keeping Space Missions From Infecting Earth and Other Worlds

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alien A non-native organism. (in astronomy) Life on or from a distant world.

annual Adjective for something that happens in every year.

astronaut Someone trained to travel into space for research and exploration.

constant Continuous or uninterrupted.

Enceladus The sixth largest of Saturn's more than 50 moons. Enceladus is bright white and covered with a thick shell of ice. Deep beneath that ice sits what appears to be a global ocean of salty liquid water. Enceladus is a round sphere, 500 kilometers (310 miles) across. It is a little less than one-third the width of Earth's moon.

environment The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or some device and the condition those things create for that organism or device. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature, humidity and placement of components in some electronics system or product.

Europa One of the moons of Jupiter and the sixth-closest satellite to the planet. Europa, 1,951 miles across, has a network of dark lines on a bright, icy surface.

extraterrestrial (ET) Anything of or from regions beyond Earth.

extremophile A microorganism that lives in conditions of extreme temperature, acidity, alkalinity or concentrations of chemicals.

germ Any one-celled microorganism, such as a bacterium, fungal species or virus particle. Some germs cause disease. Others can promote the health of higher-order organisms, including birds and mammals. The health effects of most germs, however, remain unknown.

geyser A vent (opening) in Earth's surface that intermittently sends up a tall spray of steam or hot water. The sometimes explosive discharge of water and steam is propelled by the geothermal heating of water below ground.

Jupiter (in astronomy) The solar system's largest planet, it has the shortest day length (10 hours). A gas giant, its low density indicates that this planet is composed of light elements, such as hydrogen and helium. This planet also releases more heat than it receives from the sun as gravity compresses its mass (and slowly shrinks the planet).

lander A special, small vehicle designed to ferry humans or scientific equipment between a spacecraft and the celestial body they will explore.

Mars The fourth planet from the sun, just one planet out from Earth. Like Earth, it has seasons and moisture. But its diameter is only about half as big as Earth's.

microbe Short for microorganism. A living thing that is too small to see with the unaided eye, including bacteria, some fungi and many other organisms such as amoebas. Most consist of a single cell.

NASA Short for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Created in 1958, this U.S. agency has become a leader in space research and in stimulating public interest in space exploration. It was through NASA that the United States sent people into orbit and ultimately to the moon. It also has sent research craft to study planets and other celestial objects in our solar system.

orbiter A spacecraft designed to go into orbit, especially one not intended to land.

organism Any living thing, from elephants and plants to bacteria and other types of single-celled life.

planet A celestial object that orbits a star, is big enough for gravity to have squashed it into a roundish ball and has cleared other objects out of the way in its orbital neighborhood. To accomplish the third feat, the object must be big enough to have pulled neighboring objects into the planet itself or to have slung them around the planet and off into outer space. Astronomers of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) created this three-part scientific definition of a planet in August 2006 to determine Pluto's status. Based on that definition, IAU ruled that Pluto did not qualify. The solar system now includes eight planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

robot A machine that can sense its environment, process information and respond with specific actions. Some robots can act without any human input, while others are guided by a human.

satellite A moon orbiting a planet or a vehicle or other manufactured object that orbits some celestial body in space.

Saturn The sixth planet out from the sun in our solar system. One of the four gas giants, this planet takes 10.7 hours to rotate (completing a day) and 29 Earth years to complete one orbit of the sun. It has at least 53 known moons and 9 more candidates awaiting confirmation. But what most distinguishes this planet is the broad and flat plane of seven rings that orbit it.

science fiction A field of literary or filmed stories that take place against a backdrop of fantasy, usually based on speculations about how science and engineering will direct developments in the distant future. The plots in many of these stories focus on space travel, exaggerated changes attributed to evolution or life in (or on) alien worlds.

terrestrial Having to do with planet Earth, especially its land. Terra is Latin for Earth.

viable Able to live and survive. (in biology) Able to survive and/or live a normal lifespan.

weed (in botany) A plant growing wild in, around - and sometimes smothering over - valued plants, such as crops or landscape species (including lawn grasses, flowers and shrubs). Often a plant becomes such a botanical bully when it enters a new environment with no natural predators or controlling conditions, such as hard frosts. (in biology, generally) Any organism may be referred to as a "weed" if it enters an environment and begins to overwhelm the local ecosystem.

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Keeping space missions from infecting Earth and other worlds

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Scientists are always looking for ways to stop Earthly microbes from polluting other planets. The same goes for bringing bits of other planets back to Earth.

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Plague is best known as the killer disease that wiped out nearly half of Europe during the 1300s. But the germ infected people up to 3,000 years earlier than that, DNA from ancient teeth now show.

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History is dotted with epidemics and plagues, but a certain number of them stand out as unique for their severity and impact on future generations. This is a list of the worst plagues in man's recorded history.

SEE ALSO: 10 Of Human History's Most Atrocious Plagues

The first signs of plague in Moscow appeared in late 1770, which would turn into a major epidemic in the spring of 1771. The measures undertaken by the authorities, such as creation of forced quarantines, destruction of contaminated property without compensation or control, closing of public baths, etc., caused fear and anger among the citizens. The city's economy was mostly paralyzed because many factories, markets, stores, and administrative buildings had been closed down. All of this was followed by acute food shortages, causing deterioration of living conditions for the majority of the Muscovites. Dvoryane (Russian nobility) and well-off city dwellers left Moscow due to the plague outbreak. On the morning of September 17, 1771, around 1,000 people gathered at the Spasskiye gates again, demanding the release of captured rebels and elimination of quarantines. The army managed to disperse the crowd yet again and finally suppressed the riot. Some 300 people were brought to trial. A government commission headed by Grigory Orlov was sent to Moscow on September 26 to restore order. It took some measures against the plague and provided citizens with work and food, which would finally pacify the people of Moscow.

The Great Plague of Marseille was one of the most significant European outbreaks of bubonic plague in the early 18th century. Arriving in Marseille, France in 1720, the disease killed 100,000 people in the city and the surrounding provinces. However, Marseille recovered quickly from the plague outbreak. Economic activity took only a few years to recover, as trade expanded to the West Indies and Latin America. By 1765, the growing population was back at its pre-1720 level. This epidemic was not a recurrence of the European Black Death, the devastating episodes of bubonic plague which began in the fourteenth century. Attempts to stop the spread of plague included an Act of Parliament of Aix that levied the death penalty for any communication between Marseille and the rest of Provence. To enforce this separation, a plague wall, the Mur de la Peste, was erected across the countryside (pictured above).

The Antonine Plague (also known as the Plague of Galen, who described it), was an ancient pandemic, of either smallpox or measles, brought back to the Roman Empire by troops returning from campaigns in the Near East. The epidemic claimed the lives of two Roman emperors - Lucius Verus, who died in 169, and his co-regent who ruled until 180, Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, whose family name, Antoninus, was given to the epidemic. The disease broke out again nine years later, according to the Roman historian Dio Cassius, and caused up to 2,000 deaths a day at Rome, one quarter of those infected. Total deaths have been estimated at five million. The disease killed as much as one-third of the population in some areas, and decimated the Roman army. The epidemic had drastic social and political effects throughout the Roman Empire, particularly in literature and art. (Pictured above is a plague pit containing the remains of people who died in the Antonine Plague.)

The Plague of Athens was a devastating epidemic which hit the city-state of Athens in ancient Greece during the second year of the Peloponnesian War (430 BC), when an Athenian victory still seemed within reach. It is believed to have entered Athens through Piraeus, the city's port and sole source of food and supplies. The city-state of Sparta, and much of the eastern Mediterranean, was also struck by the disease. The plague returned twice more, in 429 BC and in the winter of 427/6 BC. Modern historians disagree on whether the plague was a critical factor in the loss of the war. However, it is generally agreed that the loss of this war may have paved the way for the success of the Macedonians and, ultimately, the Romans. The disease has traditionally been considered an outbreak of the bubonic plague in its many forms, but re-considerations of the reported symptoms and epidemiology have led scholars to advance alternative explanations. These include typhus, smallpox, measles, and toxic shock syndrome.

The Italian Plague of 1629-1631 was a series of outbreaks of bubonic plague which occurred from 1629 through 1631 in northern Italy. This epidemic, often referred to as Great Plague of Milan, claimed the lives of approximately 280,000 people, with the cities of Lombardy and Venice experiencing particularly high death rates. This episode is considered one of the last outbreaks of the centuries-long pandemic of bubonic plague which began with the Black Death. German and French troops carried the plague to the city of Mantua in 1629, as a result of troop movements associated with the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). Venetian troops infected with the disease retreated into northern and central Italy, spreading the infection. Overall, Milan suffered approximately 60,000 fatalities out of a total population of 130,000.
SEE ALSO: 10 Twisted Facts About The Dancing Plagues
Before the European arrival, the Americas had been largely isolated from the Eurasian-African landmass. First large-scale contacts between Europeans and native people of the American continents brought overwhelming pandemics of measles and smallpox, as well as other Eurasian diseases. These diseases spread rapidly among native peoples, often ahead of actual contact with Europeans, and led to a drastic drop in population and the collapse of native American cultures. Smallpox and other diseases invaded and crippled the Aztec and Inca civilizations in Central and South America in the 16th century. This disease, with loss of population and death of military and social leaders, contributed to the downfall of both American empires and the subjugation of American peoples to Europeans. Diseases, however, passed in both directions; syphilis was carried back from the Americas and swept through the European population, decimating large numbers.

The Great Plague (1665-1666) was a massive outbreak of disease in England that killed 75,000 to 100,000 people, up to a fifth of London's population. The disease was historically identified as bubonic plague, an infection by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, transmitted through fleas. The 1665-1666 epidemic was on a far smaller scale than the earlier "Black Death" pandemic, a virulent outbreak of disease in Europe between 1347 and 1353. The Bubonic Plague was only remembered afterwards as the "great" plague because it was one of the last widespread outbreaks in England. Although the disease causing the epidemic has historically been identified as bubonic plague and its variants, no direct evidence of plague has ever been uncovered. Some modern scholars suggest that the symptoms and incubation period indicate that the causal agent may have been a disease similar to a viral hemorrhagic fever. (Pictured above is a list of mortalities from the time of the plague.)

The Plague of Justinian was a pandemic that afflicted the Byzantine Empire, including its capital Constantinople, in the years 541-542 AD. The most commonly accepted cause of the pandemic is bubonic plague, which later became infamous for either causing or contributing to the Black Death of the 14th century. Its social and cultural impact is comparable to that of the Black Death. In the views of 6th century Western historians, it was nearly worldwide in scope, striking central and south Asia, North Africa and Arabia, and Europe as far north as Denmark and as far west as Ireland. The plague would return with each generation throughout the Mediterranean basin until about 750. The plague would also have a major impact on the future course of European history. Modern historians named it after the Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, who was in power at the time and himself contracted the disease. Modern scholars believe that the plague killed up to 5,000 people per day in Constantinople at the peak of the pandemic. It ultimately killed perhaps 40 percent of the city's inhabitants. The initial plague went on to destroy up to a quarter of the human population of the eastern Mediterranean.

The "Third Pandemic" is the name given to a major plague pandemic that began in the Yunnan province (pictured above) in China in 1855. This episode of bubonic plague spread to all inhabited continents, and ultimately killed more than 12 million people in India and China alone. According to the World Health Organization, the pandemic was considered active until 1959, when worldwide casualties dropped to 200 per year. The bubonic plague was endemic in populations of infected ground rodents in central Asia, and was a known cause of death among migrant and established human populations in that region for centuries; however, an influx of new people due to political conflicts and global trade led to the distribution of this disease throughout the world. New research suggests Black Death is lying dormant.

The Black Death (also known as The Black Plague or Bubonic Plague), was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history, widely thought to have been caused by a bacterium named Yersinia pestis (Plague), but recently attributed by some to other diseases. The origins of the plague are disputed among scholars. Some historians believe the pandemic began in China or Central Asia in the late 1320s or 1330s, and during the next years merchants and soldiers carried it over the caravan routes until in 1346 it reached the Crimea in southern Russia. Other scholars believe the plague was endemic in southern Russia. In either case, from Crimea the plague spread to Western Europe and North Africa during the 1340s. The total number of deaths worldwide is estimated at 75 million people, approximately 25 to 50 million of which occurred in Europe. The plague is thought to have returned every generation with varying virulence and mortalities until the 1700s. During this period, more than 100 plague epidemics swept across Europe.

(This article is licensed under the GFDL because it contains quotations from Wikipedia.)

SEE ALSO: 8 Fascinating Facts About Plague Doctors

Jamie is the founder of Listverse. When he's not doing research for new lists or collecting historical oddities, he can be found in the comments or on Facebook where he approves all friends requests!

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Top 10 Worst Plagues In History - Listverse

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History is dotted with epidemics and plagues, but a certain number of them stand out as unique for their severity and impact on future generations. This

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Plague was one of history's deadliest diseases, then we found a cure

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Plague was one of history's deadliest diseases, then we found a cure

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Plague is one of the deadliest diseases in human history, second only to smallpox. A bacterial infection found mainly in rodents and associated fleas, plague readily leaps to humans in close contact. Plague outbreaks are the most notorious epidemics in history, inciting fears of plague's use as a biological weapon.

Today, plague cases still pop up sporadically around the world-including in the United States or China, where a suspected case was recently reported in the Inner Mongolia region. But the disease is no longer as deadly as it can be treated with antibiotics when available.

Here's what you need to know about the plague, including how it spreads, the difference between bubonic and pneumonic plague, the most infamous plague pandemics in history, and why it's not all that unusual to see modern cases of the disease.

Stages of plague

For hundreds of years, what caused plague outbreaks remained mysterious, and shrouded in superstitions. But keen observations and advances in microscopes eventually helped unveil the true culprit. In 1894, Alexandre Yersin discovered the bacterium responsible for causing plague: Yersinia pestis.

Y. pestis is an extraordinarily virulent, rod-shaped bacterium. Y. pestis disables the immune system of its host by injecting toxins into defense cells, such as macrophages, that are tasked with detecting bacterial infections. Once these cells are knocked out, the bacteria can multiply unhindered.

Many small mammals act as hosts to the bacteria, including rats, mice, chipmunks, prairie dogs, rabbits, and squirrels. During an enzootic cycle, Y. pestis can circulate at low rates within populations of rodents, mostly undetected because it doesn't produce an outbreak. When the bacteria pass to other species, during an epizootic cycle, humans face a greater risk for becoming infected with plague bacteria.

Rats have long been thought to be the main vector of plague outbreaks, because of their intimate connection with humans in urban areas. Scientists have more recently discovered that a flea that lives on rats, Xenopsylla cheopis, primarily causes human cases of plague. When rodents die from the plague, fleas jump to a new host, biting them and transmitting Y. pestis. Transmission also occurs by handling tissue or blood from a plague-infected animal, or inhalation of infected droplets.

Bubonic plague, the disease's most common form, refers to telltale buboes-painfully swollen lymph nodes-that appear around the groin, armpit, or neck. The skin sores become black, leading to its nickname during pandemics as "Black Death." Initial symptoms of this early stage include vomiting, nausea, and fever.

Pneumonic plague, the most infectious type, is an advanced stage of plague that moves into the lungs. During this stage, the disease is passed directly, person to person, through airborne particles coughed from an infected person's lungs.

If untreated, bubonic and pneumonic plague can progress to septicemic plague, infecting the bloodstream. If left untreated, pneumonic and septicemic plague kills almost 100 percent of those it infects.

Infamous plagues

Three particularly well-known pandemics occurred before the cause of plague was discovered. The first well-documented crisis was the Plague of Justinian, which began in 542 A.D. Named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, the pandemic killed up to 10,000 people a day in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul, Turkey), according to ancient historians. Modern estimates indicate half of Europe's population-almost 100 million deaths-was wiped out before the plague subsided in the 700s.

Arguably the most infamous plague outbreak was the so-called Black Death, a multi-century pandemic that swept through Asia and Europe. It was believed to start in China in 1334, spreading along trade routes and reaching Europe via Sicilian ports in the late 1340s. The plague killed an estimated 25 million people, almost a third of the continent's population. The Black Death lingered on for centuries, particularly in cities. Outbreaks included the Great Plague of London (1665-66), in which 70,000 residents died.

The cause of plague wasn't discovered until the most recent global outbreak, which started in China in 1860 and didn't officially end until 1959. The pandemic caused roughly 10 million deaths. The plague was brought to North America in the early 1900s by ships, and thereafter spread to small mammals throughout the United States.

The high rate of fatality during these pandemics meant that the dead were often buried in quickly dug mass graves. From teeth of these plague victims, scientists have pieced together a family tree of Y. pestis, discovering that the strain from the Justinian Plague was related to, but distinct from, other strains of the plague. ( Read how modern plague strains descended from a strain that arose during the Black Death pandemic.)

Plague in modern society

Plague still exists in various parts of the world, popping up sporadically and followed actively by the World Health Organization and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Most cases have appeared in Africa since the 1990s.

Between 2004 to 2014, the Democratic Republic of the Congo reported the majority of plague cases worldwide, with 4,630 human cases and 349 deaths. Scientists link the prevalence of plague in the Democratic Republic of Congo to the ecosystem-primarily mountain tropical climate. More recently, plague broke out in Madagascar in 2017, causing more than 2,300 cases.

The United States, China, India, Vietnam, and Mongolia are among the other countries that have had confirmed human plague cases in recent years. Within the U.S., on average seven human cases of plague appear each year, emerging primarily in California and the Southwest.

Today, most people survive plague with rapid diagnosis and antibiotic treatment. Good sanitation practices and pest control minimize contact with infected fleas and rodents to help prevent plague pandemics.

Plague is classified as a Category A pathogen, because it readily passes between people and could result in high mortality rates if untreated. This classification has helped stoke fears that Y. pestis could be used as a biological weapon if distributed in aerosol form. As a small airborne particle it would cause pneumonic plague, the most lethal and contagious form.

Of conservation concern, federally endangered black-footed ferrets contract another form of the plague, sylvatic plague, from nearby prairie dogs. Plague can decimate prairie dog populations, which are a critical food source for black-footed ferrets. Scientists have started to administer a vaccine to prevent plague outbreaks in prairie dogs and black-footed ferrets.

This story has been updated. It was originally published on August 20, 2019.

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Plague (Black Death) bacterial infection information and facts

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Known as the Black Death, the much feared disease spread quickly for centuries, killing millions. The bacterial infection still occurs but can be treated with antibiotics.

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Medieval Human Plague Still Lurking in Western US States

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Medieval Human Plague Still Lurking in Western US States

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Flea bite is likely cause of Oregon teen's bubonic plague

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Flea bite is likely cause of Oregon teen's bubonic plague

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Bacteria and other microbes can make us sick. But there's a lurking danger with some germs that's far more frightening than a bout of food poisoning or an infected wound. Today, drugs exist to fight most of these germs. They're called antibiotics. Before these medicines came along, common infections frequently killed people. And that's where the danger lies: What will happen if antibiotics no longer kill germs?

Already some antibiotics have lost their superpowers. Many others are beginning to lose theirs. Biologists describe this problem as resistance. Across the globe, germs are becoming resistant to antibiotic medicines. In a sense, these "superbugs" have begun to laugh at those former wonder drugs.

But resistance is no laughing matter. As germs toughen up against drugs that are supposed to slay them, treatable conditions such as TB - tuberculosis - can spread. And surgeries that rely on antibiotics could turn from life-saving to life-threatening.

The threat is huge

"Alarming levels" of drug-resistant bacteria already exist in many parts of the world. That's the conclusion of a 257-page report published in April. It was issued by the World Health Organization (WHO).

This United Nations agency, based in Geneva, Switzerland, recently reviewed how well these germ slayers perform in 114 countries. In some places, it found, antibiotics no longer work for half of all people being treated against common diseases. Those diseases include pneumonia and gonorrhea.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), based in Atlanta, Ga., also has been investigating the problem . It estimates that in the United States alone, antibiotic-resistant infections now sicken some two million people each year. At least 23,000 of them die.

But even antibiotic-resistant germs that don't kill can be a problem. Their infections become harder to treat - and more expensive. Consider one estimate - $233 million - published May 20 in the journal Antimicrobial Resistance and Infection Control. That's how much researchers calculated that it costs the United States each year to deal with just one resistant superbug. That germ causes a lung disease known as pneumonia.

Drug-immune bugs that flourish in the human gut can enter the environment with every flush of the toilet. Researchers discovered how big this problem is when they analyzed wastewater from 11 sites in one French city. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria tainted 96 percent of their samples. A May 1 paper in Clinical Infectious Diseases describes the disturbing details.

Some scientists have scouted for such germs in the environment. They collected superbugs at hospitals. Then they probed the germs, identifying parts of their genes that appear to make them resistant to antibiotics. Next, the researchers looked in the outdoor environment for that same genetic fingerprint of superbugs. And they turned up that superbug DNA in 71 places - from the soil and sea water to human wastes. The researchers reported their findings May 8 in Current Biology.

Why it's happening

Drug designers have created antibiotics to kill bacteria, as well as some fungi and other germs. But sometimes, a few treated germs survive. They survive because they're stronger. Or they may have certain genetic mutations that allow them to break down the drug. They might even have evolved a way to keep the drugs from harming their operational machinery. Over time, all germs susceptible to a drug will die off. That will leave behind only superbugs - those microbes that medicines can't kill.

This is not surprising. In fact, it's quite natural. Part of evolution, it's known as survival of the fittest.

Scientists stumbled onto the first antibiotic, penicillin, around 1930. Since then, research has produced a medicine cabinet full of additional ones. It appeared that these would make many of the worst bacterial infections ever more manageable. So, during the 1970s, drug developers began focusing on noninfectious health problems, such as cancer and heart disease. As a result, in the past 30 years, no new types of antibiotics have been developed.

Right now, bacteria are outsmarting antibiotics faster than developers can make new ones. And there are no signs things will change, says Stewart Cole. He directs the Global Health Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

Writing in the May 12 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, he argues that the "golden age" of antibiotic development "is a distant memory, and the likelihood of there being another seems slim." This lack of new types of germ killers, he says, has been allowing superbugs to morph and thrive.

One of the most famous of them is known as MRSA (pronounced MER-sah). The letters stand for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus . Methicillin is a widely used antibiotic. And Staph aureus is a germ that can cause boils, food poisoning, toxic-shock syndrome and more. These bacteria sicken (and sometimes kill) by releasing potent natural poisons - called toxins - into the body.

Despite its name, MRSA is resistant to far more antibiotics than just methicillin. That makes this superbug particularly nasty in hospitals and prisons. These are places where people often have open wounds or weak immune systems. Both increase a person's chance of picking up an infection.

Too much of a good thing

Drug resistance can develop at any time. But its likelihood climbs as the use of an antibiotic increases. And this is especially true when an antibiotic is overused. That's when a doctor prescribes it for infections it has no hope of curing.

For instance, doctors sometimes prescribe antibiotics to treat an infection before they learn if the disease is caused by bacteria. If viruses are responsible, then antibiotics will be useless. The reason: Antibiotic medicines do not kill viruses. Yet by giving an antibiotic to someone with a viral infection, that drug will reach good bacteria living in our bodies. And over time, some of these bacteria will become resistant to the drug.

Last year, the CDC reported that up to half of the antibiotics that U.S. doctors prescribed went to people who didn't actually need them.

Take, for example, someone who visits a doctor for a lingering cough. Viral infections cause most coughs. So a viral cough won't be helped by drugs and will tend to go away on its own. Yet 71 percent of the time, doctors will still prescribe antibiotics for patients coming in with a common cough, a May 21 study finds.

"I think there's this perception among both doctors and patients that coughs don't go away without antibiotic treatment," Jeffrey Linder told Science News for Students . Linder, who coauthored the new report, is a doctor at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston, Mass. He and Michael Barnett, also from the hospital, tracked the drugs that doctors prescribed during more than 3,000 U.S. clinic visits between 1996 and 2010. They reported their findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association .

A small number of people who visit a doctor with a cough turn out to have bacterial pneumonia. These cases do require antibiotic treatment. But Linder says doctors should easily be able to recognize these few from the hordes of people coming in with a routine, viral cough.

Perilous profit

Antibiotic overuse also has become a problem on farms. In the United States, animals - not people - receive about 80 percent of all antibiotics. Sometimes the drugs are used to save an infected animal or prevent disease from spreading through a herd. More often, though, feed suppliers put small amounts of these drugs into the food that will be given to healthy animals. These antibiotics help speed the animals' growth. And this has boosted farmers' profits.

But using antibiotics just to beef up livestock is "a direct threat to human health," argues Kellogg Schwab. He's an environmental microbiologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. Earlier, he and his coworkers detected bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics in the exhaust air blowing out of farm buildings. That suggests these superbugs can spread through the air from animals to people.

SteveOehlenschlager / iStockphoto

Germs that are immune to antibiotics also can hitch a ride into your body through ground beef or the chicken breast on your cutting board. Biologists have found that much of the fresh beef, pork and poultry sold in grocery stores contains bacteria resistant to antibiotics.

Even if those germs don't sicken us or cause other immediate harm, they can offload their resistance genes into other bacteria that normally live inside our bodies. Sometimes, like with the MRSA superbug, resistance is carried on circular pieces of DNA called plasmids. These plasmids can slip easily from one bacterial cell into another.

In this way, our gut microbes can become "a reservoir of resistance," says Sharon Peacock. She's a microbiologist at the University of Cambridge in England. Later, "when we actually get sick and need an antibiotic, we may already carry a resistance gene" that may keep that drug from working, she says.

In the United States, farmers have fought against banning antibiotics as growth promoters. They say it will reduce their profits because more animals will get sick, slowing their growth. But that's not been the experience in other countries.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration, or FDA, has proposed banning antibiotic use in healthy animals. But for more than 30 years, the livestock industry and Congress have fought such action. Recently, the FDA stepped up its efforts to end this practice.

In December 2013, FDA laid out a plan to phase out within three years the use of antibiotics on farms to boost livestock growth. Its stated reason: concern that farm use of these drugs has made more germs immune to the antibiotics needed to fight life-threatening infections in people. And that's a worry because the same germs that sicken animals often sicken people.

Antibiotic resistance is a complex and growing problem. Many microbiologists worry that the time when antibacterial medicines no longer work could be coming. Thankfully, doctors and many patients are becoming more aware of the problem. Researchers also are hard at work creating new tools to keep superbugs from taking over.
Next: How scientists are trying to tackle the problem
Power Words

antibiotic A germ-killing substance prescribed as a medicine (or sometimes as a feed additive to promote the growth of livestock). It does not work against viruses.

bacterium (plural bacteria) A single-celled organism forming one of the three domains of life. These dwell nearly everywhere on Earth, from the bottom of the sea to inside animals.

boils (in medicine) A skin infection that starts as a hard, red, painful lump. Eventually, it gets bigger, softens and fills with pus. A common source of these is a bacterium known as Staphylococcus aureus.

bioengineer A researcher who applies technology for the beneficial manipulation of living things. Bioengineers use the principles of biology and the techniques of engineering to design organisms or products that can mimic, replace or augment the chemical or physical processes present in existing organisms. This field includes researchers who genetically modify organisms, including microbes. It also includes researchers who design medical devices such as artificial hearts and artificial limbs.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC An agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC is charged with protecting public health and safety by working to control and prevent disease, injury and disabilities. It does this by investigating disease outbreaks, tracking exposures by Americans to infections and toxic chemicals, and regularly surveying diet and other habits among a representative cross-section of all Americans.

cholera A bacterial disease that infects the small intestine, causing sever diarrhea, vomiting and dehydration. It is spread by germs from feces that contaminate water or food.

DNA (short for deoxyribonucleic acid) A long, spiral-shaped molecule inside most living cells that carries genetic instructions. In all living things, from plants and animals to microbes, these instructions tell cells which molecules to make.

evolution A process by which species undergo changes over time, usually through genetic variation and natural selection, that leave a new type of organism better suited for its environment than the earlier type. The newer type is not necessarily more "advanced," just better adapted to the conditions in which it developed.

fungus (plural: fungi) Any of a group of unicellular or multicellular, spore-producing organisms that feed on organic matter, both living and decaying. Molds, yeast and mushrooms are all types of fungi.

gene A segment of DNA that codes, or holds instructions, for producing a protein. Offspring inherit genes from their parents. Genes influence how an organism looks and behaves.

germ Any one-celled microorganism, such as a bacterium, fungal species or virus particle. Some germs cause disease. Others can promote the health of higher-order organisms, including birds and mammals. The health effects of most germs, however, remain unknown.

gonorrhea A serious disease that can infect the genitals, rectum and throat. This sexually transmitted disease is very common, especially among people between the ages of 15 and 24. Untreated, it can cause infertility or death. "Untreated gonorrhea may also increase your chances of getting or giving HIV - the virus that causes AIDS," according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

growth promoter (in livestock agriculture) A medicine, usually an antibiotic, added in small doses to the feed given to animals raised for meat. Used as a preventive medicine, it can reduce the risk that animals will become sick, which would slow their growth. And that would decrease a farmer's profits.

immune system The collection of cells and their responses that help the body fight off infection.

infection A disease that can be transmitted between organisms.

influenza (or flu) A highly contagious viral infection of the respiratory passages causing fever and severe aching. It often occurs as an epidemic.

livestock Animals raised for meat or dairy products, including cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, chickens and geese.

microbe Short formicroorganism. A living thing that is too small to see with the unaided eye, including bacteria, some fungi and many other organisms such as amoebas. Most consist of a single cell.

microbiology The study of microorganisms, principally bacteria, fungi and viruses. Scientists who study microbes and the infections they can cause or ways that they can interact with their environment are known as microbiologists.

mutation Some change that occurs to a gene in an organism's DNA. Some mutations occur naturally. Others can be triggered by outside factors, such as pollution, radiation, medicines or something in the diet. A gene with this change is referred to as a mutant.

plasmid A small circular loop of DNA that is separate from the main chromosomal DNA of bacteria.

pneumonia A lung disease in which infection by a virus or bacterium causes inflammation and tissue damage. Sometimes the lungs fill with fluid or mucus. Symptoms include fever, chills, cough and trouble breathing.

resistance (as in drug resistance) The reduction in the effectiveness of a drug to cure a disease, usually a microbial infection. (as in disease resistance) The ability of an organism to fight off disease.

superbug A popular term for a disease-causing germ that can withstand medicines.

toxic shock syndrome A rare and potentially deadly bacterial infection caused by Staphylococcus aureus. This bacterium release toxins - natural poisons - into the body of its host. Symptoms include a sudden high fever, muscle aches, vomiting, diarrhea, a rash and sometimes seizures.

toxin A poison produced by living organisms, such as germs, bees, spiders, poison ivy and snakes.

tuberculosis A bacterial disease that causes unusual growths in the lungs or other tissues. Untreated, it can kill. The infection usually spreads when a sick individual coughs (or talks, sings or sneezes), spewing germs into the air.

virus Tiny infectious particles consisting of RNA or DNA surrounded by protein. Viruses can reproduce only by injecting their genetic material into the cells of living creatures. Although scientists frequently refer to viruses as live or dead, in fact no virus is truly alive. It doesn't eat like animals do, or make its own food the way plants do. It must hijack the cellular machinery of a living cell in order to survive.

World Health Organization An agency of the United Nations, established in 1948, to promote health and to control communicable diseases. It is based in Geneva, Switzerland. The United Nations relies on the WHO for providing international leadership on global health matters. This organization also helps shape the research agenda for health issues and sets standards for pollutants and other things that could pose a risk to health. WHO also regularly reviews data to set policies for maintaining health and a healthy environment.

Citations

E. Landhuis. " The war on superbugs." Science News for Students. July 16, 2014.

B. Harder. " Joining the Resistance: Drug-immune microbes waft over hogs." Science News. Jan. 1, 2005.

A.L. Mascarelli. " Infectious animals." Science News for Students. April 17, 2013.

J. Raloff. " Antibiotics afield." Science News. Nov. 26, 2005.

J. Raloff. " Growth-promoting antibiotics: On the way out?" Science News. March 23, 2012.

J. Raloff. " Retail meats host drug-resistant bacteria." Science News. Oct. 20, 2001.

N. Seppa. " Danes keeping drugs out of livestock." Science News. April 8, 2003.

Original Journal Source: M. Barnett and J. Linder. Antibiotic prescribing for adults with acute bronchitis in the United States, 1996-2010. Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Published May 21, 2014. doi: 10.1001/jama.2013.286141.

Original Journal Source: J. Nesme et al. Large-scale metagenomic-based study of antibiotic resistance in the environment. Current Biology. Published May 8, 2014. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.03.036.

Original Journal Source: S. Peacock. Health care: Bring microbial sequencing to hospitals. Nature. Published May 29, 2014. doi:10.1038/509557a.

Original Journal Source: B. Spellberg, J. Bartlett and D. Gilbert. The future of antibiotics and resistance. New England Journal of Medicine. Published Jan. 24, 2013. doi: 10.1056/NEJMp1215093.

Original Journal Source: S. Cole. Who will develop new antibacterial agents? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. Published May 12, 2014. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2013.0430.

Original Journal Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Antibiotic-resistant threats in the United States, 2013.

Original Report Source: World Health Organization. Antimicrobial resistance global report on surveillance, 2014.

Teachers' questions: Superbugs: A silent health emergency

Esther Landhuis is a freelance journalist in the San Francisco Bay Area. She worked on her high school newspaper and spent a decade studying biology before discovering a career that combines writing and science.

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Have antibiotics become too popular? Overusing these medicines fuels resistant germs that pose a global health threat.

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(Abbas Dulleh / Associated Press)

Just over 13 months since Liberia's first case of Ebola, the West African nation Saturday was declared free of the deadly disease, 42 days after the burial of the last fatal victim on March 28.

In the world's worst outbreak since Ebola's discovery in 1976, more people were killed in Liberia than any other nation, as the disease swept through densely populated neighborhoods of the capital city, Monrovia.

Amid the celebration Saturday, there was a note of caution from the World Health Organization because neighbors Sierra Leone and Guinea continue to struggle with the disease..

"While WHO is confident that Liberia has interrupted transmission, outbreaks persist in neighboring Guinea and Sierra Leone, creating a high risk that infected people may cross into Liberia over the region's exceptionally porous borders," the organization said in a statement Saturday.

After the first case in Liberia was reported in late March of 2014, the outbreak was at first limited and appeared contained. But by June, the contagious disease had hit Monrovia, the first time it ever spread to a densely populated African city. Thousands would die, and health experts feared the disease would spin out of control, and become endemic -- an awful new part of everyday life in Liberia -- before the number of infections finally began to decline in October.

Confirmed and probable deaths from Ebola have surpassed 11,000 in West Africa, including more than 4,700 in Liberia.

Guinea has seen 2,387 deaths attributed to Ebola, while Sierra Leone has seen more than 3,900, according to WHO figures.

Ebola first appeared in Guinea in December 2013, spread to Sierra Leone and then skipped across the border into Liberia. One reason the virus spread so rapidly was because of the large volume of cross-border traffic and the persistence of unsafe burial practices, with the touching of the dead an important part of the region's culture. People traveled across borders to attend funerals and returned home with the illness, infecting family members and neighbors.

Many of those who died were health workers, community nurses and faith healers, who treated people without protection, particularly in the early stages of the epidemic. In Liberia, 375 health workers were infected and 189 died. More than 500 health workers died in the region and more than 860 were infected.

The WHO said Liberia's eradication of the virus was "a monumental achievement" in dealing with the most complex outbreak of the disease ever seen.

The incubation period for the virus is 21 days, and a country can only be declared free of Ebola after twice the incubation period, or 42 days, has passed.

As of May 6, the total number of suspected cases during the outbreak was close to 27,000. As the disease peaked in Liberia in August and September, the number of cases was increasing rapidly, by 300 to 400 cases a week.

Patients often mistook their symptoms for typhoid or malaria and tragically delayed seeking treatment, infecting members of their families. Treatment facilities were swamped with cases, and patients often died in terrible circumstances at the gates of treatment centers because there was no room to treat them safely inside.

Taxis ferrying sick passengers for treatment may also have spread the disease.

Entire families were wiped out. Some orphans were left as sole survivors in their families.

To help stop the spread of the virus, schools were closed and public gatherings were banned. Ambulances struggled to reach patients on time. In some cases community members left bodies in the streets; in others family members carried their loved ones to the hospital in wheelbarrows.

Survivors of the disease told horror stories of the conditions inside treatment units, with people suffering and dying next to them, or mothers dying, leaving sick children behind. Other patients often stepped in to help when children were left alone in treatment centers.

As late as September, the world's response had lagged disastrously behind, and the lack of sufficient beds in treatment units resulted in a failure to avert thousands of deaths.

"At one point, virtually no treatment beds for Ebola patients were available anywhere in the country. With infectious cases and corpses remaining in homes and communities, almost guaranteeing further infections, some expressed concern that the virus might become endemic in Liberia, adding another -- and especially severe -- permanent threat to health," the World Health Organization said in its statement.

"It is a tribute to the government and people of Liberia that determination to defeat Ebola never wavered, courage never faltered. Doctors and nurses continued to treat patients, even when supplies of personal protective equipment and training in its safe use were inadequate.

"Local volunteers, who worked in treatment centers, on burial teams, or as ambulance drivers, were driven by a sense of community responsibility and patriotic duty to end Ebola and bring hope back to the country's people," the WHO statement said.

Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said for many in the country, it will take a generation before the pain and grief heal. She referred to the slow response of the international community when she told the Associated Press that the epidemic was a "scar on the conscience of the world."

A White House statement urged vigilance to prevent the return of the disease to Liberia.

"We must not let down our guard until the entire region reaches and stays at zero Ebola cases," the statement said.

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Liberia declared Ebola free, though risks remain, WHO warns

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Just over 13 months since Liberia's first case of Ebola, the West African nation Saturday was declared free of the deadly disease, 42 days after the burial of the last fatal victim on March 28.

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It's not like anybody believes their shopping carts are clean. Most supermarkets place a dispenser of sanitizing wipes nearby, as if to hint at the exact opposite.

But in case you were on the fence, yes, they're gross.

A study of 85 random shopping carts conducted by Dr. Charles P. Gerba found that 50 percent carried E. coli, while 72 percent contained coliform bacteria. "The exceptionally high level of coliform bacteria suggests that fecal material may be involved in cart contamination," the report further stated.

In other words, your cart most likely harbors bathroom germs.

According to Donna Duberg, an assistant professor of clinical laboratory science at Saint Louis University, these pathogens find their way into our carriages through a number of avenues. "Certainly children can be a source of the germs," she explains, as toddlers often ride in carts when accompanying their parents, but Duberg doesn't downplay the role of the consumers either. "We may bring in germs with our hands," she adds.

Depending on our immune systems, many of these pathogens have the potential to make us sick, too. "Especially the fecal coliforms," notes Elizabeth Scott, an assistant professor of biology at Simmons University in Boston. "The concern is that we can pick up pathogens from the cart that can be transmitted directly to our mouths or to other foodstuffs."

Is this really that big of a concern, though? Germs are everywhere, from to They're always going to be present, so how bad could a shopping cart be?

Duberg cites Gerba's findings for the answer: "[There are] 138,00 total bacteria per square inch of a shopping cart - an amount which exceeds the number of bacteria in the average public restroom," she says. "These are fecal bacteria capable of causing illness."

Unfortunately, fecal germs aren't the only bacteria to be wary of. "There are bacteria capable of causing food-borne illnesses such as Salmonella, Shigella, Listeria, and, of course, E. coli O157H7 that may be hiding in the food we are purchasing, especially the fruits and vegetables and raw meats," says Duberg. "You can tell by doing a quick scan of food recalls," such as these online safety alerts posted by the FDA, she adds.

Taking both fecal and food-borne pathogens into account, it's no wonder there are disinfecting wipes in almost every supermarket. But as it turns out, they may not be as effective as we think.

"In theory, it's a good idea, but rather hard to achieve," explains Scott. "Where do you apply the disinfectant? How effective is the disinfectant? It's much better to practice careful hand hygiene and use alcohol hand sanitizer and hand washing."

Duberg adds that most of the wipes are utilizing benzalkonium chloride - and not bleach or alcohol - a disinfecting agent. This means that in order to sanitize, shoppers should be thoroughly wetting the surface areas (handles, grates, coffee cup holders) with the wipes. But if a shopper wanted to disinfect, Duberg says most brands of benzalkonium chloride recommend you leave the surfaces wet for up to four minutes.

The good news, she adds, is that if you thoroughly wet the surfaces with a benzalkonium chloride wipe, "you're going to get way over 99 percent" of the germs.

Or, if you'd rather skip that step, you can just grab a hand-held basket instead. Baskets might contain the same pathogenic bacteria as a cart, but as Scott says, "If it's baskets vs. carts, at least baskets aren't used to carry kids."

But just to be safe, you should probably make time to wipe down the basket, too.

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Maybe a bit grosser than you initially thought.

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Common Plant Could Help Fight Zika Virus

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Common Plant Could Help Fight Zika Virus

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Aedes aegypti A species of mosquito that can transmit the viruses responsible for several tropical diseases, including dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya and West Nile disease.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC An agency of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, CDC is charged with protecting public health and safety by working to control and prevent disease, injury and disabilities. It does this by investigating disease outbreaks, tracking exposures by Americans to infections and toxic chemicals, and regularly surveying diet and other habits among a representative cross-section of all Americans.

chikungunya A tropical disease that has been crippling large numbers of people in Africa and Asia. It's caused by a virus that is spread by mosquitoes. It recently has been spreading widely throughout warm nations. More than 3 million people have suffered through its initial flu-like symptoms. A large share may also go on to develop intense pain in their muscles and joints that can last months to years. There is no cure or vaccine.

dengue fever A potentially lethal infectious disease transmitted by mosquitoes. No vaccine yet exists to prevent infection with the virus responsible for the disease, which causes high fevers, severe headache, joint pain, pain behind the eyes, rash, bone pain and sometimes mild bleeding. A more severe form of the disease, known as dengue hemorrhagic fever can cause uncontrolled bleeding if not treated right away.

extract (v.) To separate one chemical (or component of something) from a complex mix. (noun) A substance, often in concentrated form, that has been removed from its natural source. Extracts are often taken from plants (such as spearmint or lavender), flowers and buds (such as roses and cloves), fruit (such as lemons and oranges) or seeds and nuts (such as almonds and pistachios). Such extracts, sometimes used in cooking, often have very strong scents or flavors.

larva (plural: larvae) An immature life stage of an insect, which often has a distinctly different form as an adult. (Sometimes used to describe such a stage in the development of fish, frogs and other animals.)

perennial (in botany) A plant that lives for many years. Some may die back in harsh weather (extreme heat or cold), but then come back months later when conditions improve.

Society for Science and the Public (or SSP) A nonprofit organization created in 1921 and based in Washington, D.C. Since its founding, SSP has been not only promoting public engagement in scientific research but also the public understanding of science. It created and continues to run three renowned science competitions: The Intel Science Talent Search (begun in 1942), the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (initially launched in 1950) and Broadcom MASTERS (created in 2010). SSP also publishes award-winning journalism: in Science News (launched in 1922) and Science News for Students (created in 2003). Those magazines also host a series of blogs (including Eureka! Lab).

toxic Poisonous or able to harm or kill cells, tissues or whole organisms. The measure of risk posed by such a poison is its toxicity.

tropics The region near Earth's equator. Temperatures here are generally warm to hot, year-round.

subtropics A geographic region that reaches to the beginning of the temperate climate zone (around 40° North and 40° South latitudes) from the edges of tropics, that band of hot climate spanning the outer belly of the planet. The tropics reach out to the Tropic of Cancer (around 23.5° north latitude) and Tropic of Capricorn (around 23.5° south latitude). The subtropics tend to be reliably warmer than temperate climates, but may experience brief periods of frost that would be unexpected in the true tropics.

temperate In geography, referring to areas that are cooler than the tropics but warmer than polar regions.

virus Tiny infectious particles consisting of RNA or DNA surrounded by protein. Viruses can reproduce only by injecting their genetic material into the cells of living creatures. Although scientists frequently refer to viruses as live or dead, in fact no virus is truly alive. It doesn't eat like animals do, or make its own food the way plants do. It must hijack the cellular machinery of a living cell in order to survive.

Zika virus A virus that can be transmitted to humans via mosquitoes. About 20 percent of infected people get sick. Symptoms include a slight fever, rash and pinkeye and usually fade quickly. A growing body of evidence suggests that the virus could also cause a devastating birth defect - microcephaly. Evidence suggests it may also cause neurological conditions such as Guillain-Barré syndrome.

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Common plant could help fight Zika virus

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A teen discovered that extracts from leaves of the San Francisco plant (Codiaeum variegatum) kill larvae of the mosquito that helps spread the Zika and dengue fever viruses.

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This sounds gross, but scientists believe worms will help with allergies

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This sounds gross, but scientists believe worms will help with allergies

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Newsela | Instructional Content Platform

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Newsela is an Instructional Content Platform that supercharges reading engagement and learning in every subject.

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*The Rüppell's griffon vulture is believed to be the world's highest-flying bird, with confirmed sightings at more than 35,000 feet (10,668 meters).

* Turkey vultures have such a good sense of smell that they've helped natural gas companies detect gas leaks. The gas contains the same chemical found in a dead animal, which attracts the vultures to the leak.

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Vultures may be gross, but they play an important role in the ecosystem.

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Can you think of some possible risks of growing plants that contain genes from other organisms? Let's examine our earlier examples: the beetle-resistant tomato, the vaccination banana, and the saltwater rice plant. We've already covered the potential advantages of these plants, but what are the concerns?

Cross-breeding with wild populations. For all of these examples, a primary concern is preventing genetically modified versions from mixing with the naturally existing populations of plants from which they're derived. Plants rely on the transfer of pollen, via insects or the air, to breed and produce offspring, and it's difficult to control how they cross-breed in the wild.

In most cases, it's not yet clear how introduction of the non-native gene would affect wild populations. Critics of genetically modified plant technology cite the need to learn more about the potential long-term impacts of genetically modified plants on the environment before mass-producing them.

Toxicity or allergic reactions. Many people suffer from allergies to various food items, including nuts, wheat, eggs, or dairy products. There is concern that the protein products of introduced genes may be toxic or allergenic to certain individuals.

When farmers start growing genetically modified crops, they stop growing the old varieties. These old varieties are important sources of diverse genes that give plants other desirable characteristics. For example, a new pest or disease could come along and destroy the genetically modified rice. If one of the old rice varieties has a gene that makes it resistant, it could be cross-bred to make the saltwater rice resistant as well. If we lose the old varieties, we also lose their useful genes.

It has been estimated that 70% of all processed foods in the United States contain at least one genetically modified ingredient-usually a product of soy plants. There are initiatives afoot to require food manufacturers to provide clear labeling on processed food products that contain genetically modified ingredients. This would make it easier for people with allergies to avoid foods that might pose a danger to them, and it would allow those who oppose genetically modified foods to opt out of buying them.

Unlike countries such as Australia and Japan, the United States currently has no laws requiring companies to label products containing genetically modified ingredients.

Despite the controversy surrounding them, genetically modified plants have taken root in our world. As with any new technology, members of society have the responsibility to become informed about genetically modified plants, in order to make decisions about their responsible use and regulation.

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Can you think of some possible risks of growing plants that contain genes from other organisms? Let's examine our earlier examples: the beetle-resistant tomato, the vaccination banana, and the saltwater rice plant. We've already covered the potential advantages of these plants, but what are the concerns? Cross-breeding with wild populations.

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Rabies is caused by a virus. A virus is a very tiny germ. You can only see that germ if you have a special microscope. Here´s a picture of the rabies virus:

Scientists have discovered more than 300 viruses in animals. Some won´t hurt you. Others cause disease. The common cold and measles are caused by viruses. So are the flu, chickenpox, and AIDS.

Viruses cannot eat food or grow on their own, but they can make more of themselves if they live inside the cells of other organisms, called "hosts".

The viruses attack those host cells and make more of themselves. Then the viruses move on to other host cells and do it all over again.

The rabies virus wants to make its home in a nerve cell, the smallest part of our central nervous system. The central nervous system is made up of our brain and spinal cord and all the other parts of our bodies that control everything we do from breathing to walking.

When there´s a bite from an animal with rabies, the virus attaches to a healthy nerve cell. Then the virus multiplies, making a lot more viruses like itself. Those viruses move on and attach to other nerve cells until eventually they get to the brain. There the virus can cause the brain to swell, and the person with rabies may go into a coma and die.

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Rabies is caused by a virus. A virus is a very tiny germ. You can only see that germ if you have a special microscope. Here´s a picture of the rabies virus: Scientists have discovered more than 300 viruses in animals. Some won´t hurt you. Others cause disease.

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Mental Health in Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions of Students

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Mental Health in Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions of Students

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Part One in an NPR Ed series on mental health in schools.
You might call it a silent epidemic.

Up to one in five kids living in the U.S. shows signs or symptoms of a mental health disorder in a given year.

So in a school classroom of 25 students, five of them may be struggling with the same issues many adults deal with: depression, anxiety, substance abuse.

And yet most children - nearly 80 percent - who need mental health services won't get them.

Whether treated or not, the children do go to school. And the problems they face can tie into major problems found in schools: chronic absence, low achievement, disruptive behavior and dropping out.

Experts say schools could play a role in identifying students with problems and helping them succeed. Yet it's a role many schools are not prepared for.

Educators face the simple fact that, often because of a lack of resources, there just aren't enough people to tackle the job. And the ones who are working on it are often drowning in huge caseloads. Kids in need can fall through the cracks.
"No one ever asked me"
Katie is one of those kids.

She's 18 now. Back when she was 8, she had to transfer to a different school in Prince George's County, Md., in the middle of the year.

"At recess, I didn't have friends to play with," she recalls. "I would make an excuse to stay inside with the teachers and finish extra work or do extra credit."

We're not using Katie's last name to protect her privacy. She's been diagnosed with bulimia and depression.

She says that in the span of a few months, she went from honor roll to failing. She put on weight; other kids called her "fat." She began cutting herself with a razor every day. And she missed a ton of school.

"I felt like every single day was a bad day," she says. "I felt like nobody wanted to help me."

Katie says teachers acted like she didn't care about her schoolwork. "I was so invisible to them."

Every year of high school, she says, was "horrible." She told her therapist she wanted to die and was admitted into the hospital.

During all this time, she says, not a single principal or teacher or counselor ever asked her one simple question: "What's wrong?"

If someone had asked, she says, she would have told them.
Who should have asked?
We talked to educators, advocates, teachers and parents across the country. Here's what they say a comprehensive approach to mental health and education would look like.
The family
The role: The first place to spot trouble is in the home, whether that trouble is substance abuse, slipping grades or a child who sleeps too much. Adults at home - parents, siblings, other relatives - are often the first to notice something going on.

The reality: Many families do not know what to look for. Sometimes a serious problem can be overlooked as "just a phase." But it's those sudden changes - angry outbursts, declining grades, changes in sleeping or eating - that can signal problems. When something unusual crops up, families can keep in close touch with the school.
The teacher
The role: During the week, many students see their teachers even more than their own families. Teachers are in a prime spot to notice changes in behavior. They read essays, see how students relate with other kids and notice when they aren't paying attention.

The reality: Teachers already have a ton on their plates. They're pressured to get test scores up, on top of preparing lessons and grading assignments. Plus, many teachers receive minimal training in mental health issues. But when they do see something concerning, they can raise a flag.
The social worker
The role: Social workers act like a bridge. If teachers come to them with a concern - maybe a child is acting withdrawn - one of the first things they'll do is call home. They see each child through the lens of their family, school and community. They might learn that a family is going through a divorce or homelessness.

The reality: There aren't enough of them. According to one model, every school should have one social worker for every 250 students. The reality is that in some schools, social workers are responsible for many more.
The counselor
The role: In some schools, counselors focus solely on academics: helping students pick classes and apply to college. But in others, they also act a lot like social workers, serving as a link to families and working with students who need support.

The reality: Like school social workers, there just aren't enough counselors. On average nationwide, each counselor is responsible for nearly 500 students. The American School Counselor Association recommends a caseload nearly half that size.
The special education teacher
The Role: Special education teachers may start working with students when a mental health problem affects the ability to do school work. They are primarily responsible for working on academic skills.

The reality: Again, there aren't enough of them. Nearly every state has reported a shortage of special education teachers. Half of all school districts say they have trouble recruiting highly qualified candidates.
The school psychologist
The Role: Here's one job that, on paper, is truly dedicated to student mental health. School psychologists are key players when it comes to crisis intervention and can refer students to outside help, such as a psychiatrist.

The reality: If you sense a pattern here, you're right. In the U.S., there is just one school psychologist for every 1,400 students, according to the most recent data available from the National Association of School Psychologists.
The school nurse
The role: Most any school nurse will tell you, physical and mental health are tough to separate. That puts nurses in a prime spot to catch problems early. For example: A kid who comes into the nurse's office a lot, complaining of headaches or stomach problems? That could be a sign of anxiety, a strategy to avoid a bully, or a sign of troubles at home.

The reality: The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services recommends at least one nurse for every 750 students, but the actual ratio across the country can be much higher.
The principal
The role: As the top dogs in schools, principals make the big decisions about priorities. They can bring in social-emotional, anti-bullying and suicide-prevention programs.

The reality: Principals also have a lot on their plates: the day-to-day management of student behavior, school culture and teacher support.
Getting help, and "excited for life"
Katie says things started to turn around for her when she met a nurse at the Children's National Health System in Washington, D.C., who finally showed interest in what was wrong.

Now, she's begun college and wants to be a pediatric nurse.

"I'm doing a lot better now" she says. " Obviously, I mean, I'm a lot happier. I'm excited for school. I'm excited to graduate. I'm excited for life."

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Mental Health In Schools: A Hidden Crisis Affecting Millions Of Students

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An estimated 20 percent of children show signs or symptoms of a mental health problem. It's a destructive force in schools, but most educators don't have the training or resources to help.

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One out of five children may have mental illness, and schools often don't help

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One out of five children may have mental illness, and schools often don't help

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SPARTANBURG, S.C. - On a hot summer day last month, Sydney, 15, and Laney, 8, were enjoying their last two weeks of freedom before school started. The sisters tried to do flips over a high bar at a local playground.

"You've got to pull your hips into the bar, like you've got to kick up like that," explained their mother, Selena.

"I tried to kick! I did this - you told me not to stick out," said Laney indignantly.

Both girls have been diagnosed with mental illnesses - Sydney with bipolar disorder and Laney with a similar illness called disruptive mood dysregulation disorder. The family asked that their last name not be used to protect the girls' privacy.

School has been a real challenge for them. That's not unusual for the 1 in 5 children with a mental illness. They often suffer anxiety, difficulty focusing and social challenges. Half of them drop out of high school, in part because many schools don't manage to meet their needs.

Selena has spent the past eight years trying to get the girls the resources to help them succeed. Like a lot of parents of kids with mental health issues, she's had to be her children's biggest advocate.

"It's definitely a journey. It wasn't easy," she said, even though she's a school guidance counselor herself.

"I used to cry the night before, because I didn't want to go to school."

Sydney describes class as "boring, distracting. It's hard to pay attention. It's overwhelming." She struggles to focus or process information, which makes her so anxious and depressed that she often has to leave school in the middle of the day.

She wants to be a rock star like Courtney Love. Every so often she pretends to take drag from a bubble gum cigarette. But she's an extremely sensitive kid, and school has been a painful experience.

"I used to cry the night before, because I didn't want to go to school," she said.

Laney on the other hand is a ball of chaotic energy. At school, she often gets frustrated and acts out. Sometimes, she is sent home.

Schools do not all screen students for mental health issues, and the practice varies widely across states. Even if students are successfully identified, many areas lack the community-based mental health treatment options that would be needed to help them. Just 38 percent of youth with a mood disorder such as depression or bipolar disorder receive treatment services. In 2014, the federal government announced $48 million in new grants to support teachers, schools and communities in recognizing and responding to mental health issues. Still, many students' mental health problems continue to go unidentified and untreated.

When Selena first noticed the girls were having problems, she took them to the doctor. Sydney started taking medication at the age of 7 and Laney at just 4, but it wasn't a quick fix.

"The brain is complex," said Selena. "It's not like you just take a medicine and it fixes it." It took years to get the girls' diagnoses and prescriptions right.

Selena said she needed to educate teachers about her daughters' illnesses. "I really tried to do my homework. I did a lot of research. Obviously I talked to parents online in a support group," she said.

Schools are starting to better recognize that mental health is key to academic and social success, said Darcy Gruttadaro, director of advocacy at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a grassroots organization headquartered outside Washington, D.C.

"Kids spend six hours a day in school, and mental health is essential to learning.

"Kids spend six hours a day in school, and mental health is essential to learning. So schools that are very data-driven understand that in order for some kids to succeed, their mental health needs must be met," she said.

Nonetheless, schools vary greatly in the degree to which they are willing and able to accommodate mental health issues. "Some are doing a lot and training teachers on how to recognize warning signs and talk to families. And others are doing very little to understand the needs of students and how to work with families," said Gruttadaro.

Sydney's and Laney's public schools were willing to make accommodations - but the girls' struggles continued. So, Selena transferred both to a smaller charter school called High Point Academy.

Principal John Hurley said he's seen a growing number of students coming in with mental health diagnoses. The school wants to help - but teachers are not well prepared to handle these issues.

"My training in mental health was one chapter in a book that we covered in one day," recalled Hurley. Many teachers have experience with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, he said, but they don't have the tools to draw on when dealing with mood disorders.

"Because we're left in the dark, we have to fumble around to figure out what works best."

"Because we're left in the dark, we have to fumble around to figure out what works best," explained Hurley. "Sometimes you can be wildly successful, and sometimes you can fail miserably and you could have done the exact same thing for two different students."

That's a pretty good description of what happened with Laney and Sydney.

Laney started High Point in the second grade and, by October, had already begun acting out.

"A lot of the times she didn't like to write, so ... she'd get frustrated and she might tear up her paper just depending on how she was feeling," said her second grade teacher, Erica Smith. Occasionally, Laney would also tear up other students' assignments.

Selena was thrilled when Smith reached out and asked for advice. They started communicating almost daily, sharing tips about how best to reach Laney. They developed an individualized education plan, and Smith had a "safe spot" in the classroom where Laney could go to cool down until she could rejoin the class.

At the same time, Laney's doctor adjusted her medications to help balance her mood. The solutions worked - pretty soon Laney was thriving. But Selena knew from experience that what works with one kid doesn't always work with the other.

Selena helped get Sydney an individualized education plan that gave her extra time on tests, fewer assignments and two periods a day with special education teacher Pam Smith, who has a background in mental health.

"I really feel we had everything we could have had that was available to us to meet her needs," said Pam Smith. "I really feel that we went over and above sometimes."

"I started realizing it just wasn't working. I can't send my child somewhere every day and ignore the fact that it's having a negative impact on her mental health."

But nothing seemed to work. Sydney had trouble making friends and often shut down in class. She kept falling further behind.

"I started realizing it just wasn't working. I can't send my child somewhere every day and ignore the fact that it's having a negative impact on her mental health," said Selena.

So in March, she pulled Sydney out of High Point and home-schooled her for the rest of the year.

She looked for a therapeutic school for Sydney to attend this year, but she couldn't find one in her area. So this year, Sydney is attending an online school from home, while Selena works and Laney goes to the third grade at High Point. It's not an ideal solution. Selena wanted Sydney to be in a brick and mortar school with other kids, but she said she's had to learn to be flexible.

"You think as a parent you're supposed to just say, 'Get up and go back to school' the next day. And so you really have to sometimes stop and take stock of what's going on and maybe change the path," she said.

As for Sydney, she said she was looking forward to studying from home. For the first time in years, she said she hadn't been crying ahead of the first day of school.

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One out of five children have mental illness, and schools often don't help

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School has been a real challenge for them. That's not unusual for the 1 in 5 children with a mental illness. They often suffer anxiety, difficulty focusing and social challenges.

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Hunting the mysterious source of a global illness

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Hunting the mysterious source of a global illness

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aerosol A group of tiny particles suspended in air or gas. Aerosols can be natural, such as fog or gas from volcanic eruptions, or artificial, such as smoke from burning fossil fuels.

agent A compound or activating form of energy (such as light or other types of radiation) that has a role to play in getting something done.

air masses Large volumes of air, sometimes covering many hundreds or thousands of square kilometers (square miles), that typically have a consistent temperature or water-vapor content. Air masses are often classified by their source, such as continental, arctic or tropical. Air masses and other weather systems are steered across Earth's surface by jet streams and by differences in atmospheric pressure.

CandidaA genus of yeasts that are ubiquitous across the globe. More than 20 species have been linked to disease in people and animals.

cell The smallest structural and functional unit of an organism. Typically too small to see with the naked eye, it consists of watery fluid surrounded by a membrane or wall.

chemistry The field of science that deals with the composition, structure and properties of substances and how they interact with one another. Chemists use this knowledge to study unfamiliar substances, to reproduce large quantities of useful substances or to design and create new and useful substances.

climate The weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a long period.

clot (in medicine) A collection of blood cells (platelets) and chemicals that collect in a small region, stopping the flow of blood.

computer model A program that runs on a computer that creates a model, or simulation, of a real-world feature, phenomenon or event.

current A fluid body - such as of water or air - that moves in a recognizable direction.

DNA (short for deoxyribonucleic acid) A long, double-stranded and spiral-shaped molecule inside most living cells that carries genetic instructions. In all living things, from plants and animals to microbes, these instructions tell cells which molecules to make.

environment The sum of all of the things that exist around some organism or the process and the condition those things create for that organism or process. Environment may refer to the weather and ecosystem in which some animal lives, or, perhaps, the temperature, humidity and placement of components in some electronics system or product.

epidemic A widespread outbreak of an infectious disease that sickens many people (or other organisms) in a community at the same time. The term also may be applied to non-infectious diseases or conditions that have spread in a similar way.

fungus (plural: fungi) One of a group of single- or multiple-celled organisms that reproduce via spores and feed on living or decaying organic matter. Examples include mold, yeasts and mushrooms.

haze Fine liquid or solid particles scattered through the atmosphere that make it hard to see. Haze can be caused by harmful substances such as air pollutants or by water vapor.

heart attack Permanent damage to the heart muscle that occurs when one or more regions of it become starved of oxygen, usually due to a temporary blockage in blood flow.

infection A disease that can spread from one organism to another. It's usually caused by some sort of germ.

nucleus Plural is nuclei. (in biology) A dense structure present in many cells. Typically a single rounded structure encased within a membrane, the nucleus contains the genetic information.

organ (in biology) Various parts of an organism that perform one or more particular functions. For instance, an ovary is an organ that makes eggs, the brain is an organ that interprets nerve signals and a plant's roots are organs that take in nutrients and moisture.

outbreak The sudden emergence of disease in a population of people or animals. The term may also be applied to the sudden emergence of devastating natural phenomena, such as earthquakes or tornadoes.

Pacific The largest of the world's five oceans. It separates Asia and Australia to the west from North and South America to the east.

particle A minute amount of something.

pathologist Someone who studies disease and how it affects people or other infected organisms.

pediatrics A field of medicine that has to do with children and especially child health. A doctor who works in this field is known as a pediatrician.

physics The scientific study of the nature and properties of matter and energy. Classical physics is an explanation of the nature and properties of matter and energy that relies on descriptions such as Newton's laws of motion

red blood cell Colored red by hemoglobin, these cells move oxygen from the lungs to all tissues of the body. Red blood cells are too small to be seen by the naked eye.

tissue Any of the distinct types of material, comprised of cells, which make up animals, plants or fungi. Cells within a tissue work as a unit to perform a particular function in living organisms. Different organs of the human body, for instance, often are made from many different types of tissues. And brain tissue will be very different from bone or heart tissue.

toxin A poison produced by living organisms, such as germs, bees, spiders, poison ivy and snakes.

vaccine A biological mixture that resembles a disease-causing agent. It is given to help the body create immunity to a particular disease. The injections used to administer most vaccines are known as vaccinations.

virus Tiny infectious particles consisting of RNA or DNA surrounded by protein. Viruses can reproduce only by injecting their genetic material into the cells of living creatures. Although scientists frequently refer to viruses as live or dead, in fact no virus is truly alive. It doesn't eat like animals do, or make its own food the way plants do. It must hijack the cellular machinery of a living cell in order to survive.

weather Conditions in the atmosphere at a localized place and a particular time. It is usually described in terms of particular features, such as air pressure, humidity, moisture, any precipitation (rain, snow or ice), temperature and wind speed. Weather constitutes the actual conditions that occur at any time and place. It's different from climate, which is a description of the conditions that tend to occur in some general region during a particular month or season.

yeast One-celled fungi that can ferment carbohydrates (like sugars), producing carbon dioxide and alcohol. They also play a pivotal role in making many baked products rise.

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Hunting the mysterious source of a global illness

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Doctors and scientists around the world are scouring the environment for the elusive cause of Kawasaki disease, a harmful childhood illness.

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When she was 9 years old, Ann Albright went to the doctor with odd flulike symptoms. She was exhausted. She had to go to the bathroom frequently in the middle of the night. She was always thirsty. Even her vision was blurry.

After a few tests, the doctor pulled Albright's mother aside.

"I still remember it very vividly," says Ann Albright, now more than 40 years later. "My mom left the room with the doctor and came back in with tears running down her cheeks."

The verdict: diabetes, a disease that affects the way people process food.

At the time, the 1960s, the diagnosis meant that young Ann would never have the carefree childhood her mother wanted for her. For the rest of her life, she would have to give herself shots several times a day. She would need to be very careful about what she ate. And she might not realize all of her dreams in life.

"In the era I was diagnosed, most people were told they'd have a shorter life span," Albright says. "As a little girl with diabetes moving into adulthood, I wondered would I be able to have kids? Would I be able to have a life?"

Science has come a long way since then, says Albright, partly as a result of her own efforts: She's now a doctor and diabetes researcher at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Since her diagnosis, researchers have developed better technologies, more effective medicines and a sharper understanding of how diabetes works.

Despite the advances, though, scientists still can't answer a lot of basic questions about what causes diabetes. There still is no cure. And living with the disease remains difficult.

"Everything changes" after a diabetes diagnosis, says Ali Reed, a pediatric endocrine fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. "Life becomes more complicated."

What's more, diabetes is on the rise - in both adults and kids. One version of the disease, called type 2 diabetes, is increasing at an especially alarming rate.

Scientists have linked type 2 diabetes with obesity. So now, more than ever, doctors are urging young people to start developing healthy habits as early as possible.
Breakdown
Diabetes refers to a group of diseases, but there are two main kinds: type 1 and type 2. In both types, the trouble begins with the body's ability to deal with sugar.

Sugar is the body's main fuel source. When you eat, your digestive system breaks down your food into basic parts, including proteins, fats and a simple sugar called glucose. Glucose gets absorbed through the intestines. From there, it enters the bloodstream. Circulating blood delivers glucose to all the cells, which convert it into energy.

At least, that's what's supposed to happen. In people with diabetes, however, sugar can't get from the bloodstream into the cells. A hormone, or messenger molecule, called insulin is normally responsible for that transfer. But in diabetics, insulin doesn't do its job.

As a result, sugar builds up in the bloodstream. When levels of sugar in the blood stay high, the condition is called chronic. And for reasons scientists don't yet understand, chronically high blood sugar can lead to blindness, kidney damage, limb amputations, heart attacks and more.

"It's not a death sentence, but it's a very serious disease," Albright says.
Two types
Exactly how diabetes affects a patient's life depends in part on which type of diabetes a person has. There are important differences between the two main types.

Type 1 diabetes is the kind Albright has. In this version of the disease, the body stops producing insulin. Symptoms usually begin in kids or teenagers.

After they're diagnosed and for the rest of their lives, type 1 diabetics need to regularly test their blood sugar levels with a pinching tool that draws a little blood. They also have to give themselves shots of insulin several times a day to control blood sugar levels. So far, scientists don't know how to prevent type 1 diabetes.

Type 2 diabetics make insulin, but their bodies don't use the hormone properly. Type 2 diabetes is far more common than type 1, and most people who have type 2 are adults. These days, though, more and more kids are coming to their doctors with symptoms of type 2 diabetes.

Doctors already know that adults who develop type 2 diabetes tend to be overweight or obese. And as kids have become increasingly overweight, the disease has started appearing at younger and younger ages.

Shorrocks/iStockphoto

As recently as a decade ago, type 2 diabetes was called "adult-onset" because kids just didn't get it.

"When this disease we used to only see in adults started happening in adolescents, it was just shocking to people," Albright says. "Pediatricians just didn't know what to do."
Healthy living
Doctors already knew that adults who develop type 2 diabetes tend to be overweight or obese. (Scientists can't yet explain why.) And as kids have become increasingly overweight, the disease has started appearing at younger and younger ages.

In the United States, two out of three adults are now overweight, according to the CDC. Nineteen percent of kids between the ages of 6 and 11 are overweight, compared with 7 percent just 20 years ago. Over the same period, the proportion of overweight teens rose from 5 percent to 17 percent.

(You can find out whether you are overweight by plugging numbers into a calculator at an online site. Also, see the sidebar "Understanding Body Mass Index" at the bottom of this article.)

Like their type 1 peers, type 2 diabetics have to monitor blood sugar levels. But they often rely on drugs instead of insulin shots. Frequently, they can get the disease under control by simply exercising more and eating reasonable portions of healthy foods.

"We now know that we can prevent or postpone type 2 diabetes by having [adults] at very high risk lose 5 to 7 percent of their body weight," Albright says.

Scientists don't yet know whether the same is true for overweight kids. The trend is so new that CDC researchers are still working to gather basic information about how the disease works in young people.

But it can't hurt to play soccer instead of video games, and to choose fruits and vegetables over junk food.

"There's no harm in having healthier lifestyle habits," Albright says. "Get to know what's going into your body. Make it fun."
Seeking answers
Weighing more than you should doesn't mean you're doomed to develop diabetes. The disease is far more complex than that. And while research has come a long way, plenty of questions remain.

Doctors don't know, for example, why certain ethnic groups have particularly high rates of diabetes, including American Indians, Hispanics and African Americans. Nor can doctors say for sure why the chances of getting diabetes go up if your parents or siblings have it.

Both relationships suggest that genes play a role in setting people up for diabetes. But something in the environment has to push those genes into action, and scientists aren't sure what those triggers are. It's also not clear which genes are involved.

"People spend their whole careers trying to understand this stuff," Albright says.

If you learn you have diabetes, don't despair. There's plenty you can do to live a long and healthy life. Also, know you're not alone.

Reed encourages all newly diagnosed kids to go to one of the nation's many diabetes camps. It can be hugely reassuring, she says, to be surrounded by other kids who feel like you do.

"It's really amazing," Reed says. "It's a very supportive and tolerating environment for kids who are often the only ones at their school with diabetes. At diabetes camp, everyone is going through it together."
Going Deeper:

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