By Joe R on December 16th, 2009
There’s a subtle difference between predicting “Who did it?” in a mystery novel and “Who did it and how does it affect me?” in the real world. I used to especially love teaching middle school students because they were growing out of that cute but academically awkward little kid stage where they simply learned about new ideas, and into that stage where they started to apply, with various degrees of success, what they learned and molded it into their own opinion.
As I read daily about the ongoing COP 15 Copenhagen conference on climate change my mind races to keep up with the plethora of ideas, agreements and disagreements, and the seemingly never ending weaving of some sort of agreement on what to do about climate change. All that is good and well and should support healthy discussion-not diatribes nor pettiness-about what to do to stop global warming. Read more…
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Keywords: carbon emissions, Copenhagen Conference, earth, education, environment, global warming, greenhouse gas, Ozone Hole, pollution
By Joe R on November 11th, 2009
Recently a G-20 economic summit was hosted by the United States of America in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to discuss, among other things, the global economy, a growing global credit crisis, and ideas to stimulate the global economy to turn itself around. The G-20 is a group of 19 industrialized nations plus the European Union; considered to be the world’s wealthiest and most influential governments. Typically, I don’t follow the G-20 or its progression from what used to be the G-6, the G-7, the G7 plus 1, and so on. But there was one event at the September, 2009 meeting that I found fascinating and it had nothing to do with finance…on the face of it. However, it had to do with the real possibility of a sovereign nation simply disappearing off the face of the Earth.
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Keywords: co2, conservation, coral reefs, earth, education, environment, G-20, global warming, greenhouse gas, responsibility, rising sea levels, water
By Katrina on May 12th, 2009
News is starting to percolate that the sun is currently the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest its been in a hundred years. For hundreds of years now, scientists have used the number of sunspots to trace the sun’s cycle of activity. One cycle is 11-years. Sunspots can be visible without a telescope and are dark areas that indicate intense magnetic activity on the surface of the sun. Such solar storms send bursts of charged particles hurtling toward Earth that can spark auroras, disrupt satellites, and even knock out electrical grids. In looking at the 11-year cycle, 2008 was suppose to be the low point in sunspot recordings with 2009 beginning the climb back upward. But so far, 78 out of 90 days have been sunspot free. Read more…
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Keywords: glaciers, greenhouse gas, ice age, Maunder Minimum, solar, solar activity, sun
