Once Upon a College: climate change

Monday, June 9, 2008

National climate change summary

In case you've been looking for an easy-to-read summary about climate change and its effects in the U.S., here you go:
http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/scientific-assessment/6-SA-FAQ-LO-RES.pdf
It's got short sentences, bullet points, boxes, and pictures, only four pages! The fact sheet is put together by the US Climate Change Science Program Office; it's not just an international issue, it's a national one!
The report is mostly about the effects of climate change, not the technicalities of it. If you want more on "what is climate change?" or "what's making climate change happen?" then feel free to email me questions, I'd love to help!Get more information and the full report here: http://www.climatescience.gov/Library/scientific-assessment/

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Addressing Climate Change...skeptics

I'm putting together an article for those thoughtful skeptics of climate change, whether they range from not accepting in warming average global temps to those who understand climate change but don't agree that we should change our behavior for the future.

Please help in this endeavor. Let's share our phrases, sentences, paragraphs, whatever you have, that you use when trying to address climate change skeptics. Thanks.

What this is about

A long time ago, in an educational universe far away and almost certain never to return, the professors of a certain small college experimented with experiential learning and taught their students not just to "read, write, think, and figure", but also to do practical things with that learning. Educational theory and research results from Kurt Hahn to modern scholars suggests strongly that experiential learning works better, particularly for active young people. It also matters greatly that young people have the physical and mental confidence to do something positive with their learning, particularly to make social and environmental change, in other words, to lead. This kind of confidence comes with physical challenge and being made to defend your ideas out loud, among other things. The small college was built around these ideas, deliberately, by a group of determined and innovative educators. With this success, along came the inevitable bean-counters who believed such a valuable education was way too expensive for those students. Wanting to keep more of the students' money (to pay their six figure salaries, of course), they cut the programs the first chance they got and went all-online where the teaching help is way cheaper and less demanding of budgets for tools and materials. I happen to think it was well worth the investment for any student who really engaged with the opportunity, but... bean counters gonna count beans. So the college is, for all useful purposes, gone, or at least changed beyond all recognition and not any good at teaching anyone anything practical at all. But the memories remain. And, despite the best efforts of the new administrators to erase them, so does quite a bit of open-source computer data to remind us of those memories, in the form of this and several other blogs and video pages online. In the case of this blog, the blog data were mine, not the college's, all along, even though they tried many times to get their cold dead bean-counter hands on them. So fuck 'em. Oh, and yes, this particular professor cusses more now that I don't have to worry about pointy-headed supervisors. Fuck them too. Enjoy. And remember, llegitimi non carborundum. If you're one of our former students and looking for stories you wrote or photographs or records of projects you worked on, just use the keyword search function or the chronological record to find your projects. They're all still here. Drop me a line using the comments section. I'd love to hear from you.

Once Upon a College

Monday, June 9, 2008

National climate change summary

Thursday, April 24, 2008

Addressing Climate Change...skeptics

What this is about

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