The purpose of this weeks lecture and tutorials was to explore climate change. In the lecture, we learned that the definition of climate is an average weather given at a point and time of year, over a long period (typically 30 years). What I didnt know what that we expect the weather to change a lot from day to day but we expect the climate to remain relatively constant. I thought that our every day weather was our climate and could change daily. When our climate does change and doesn’t remain constant – we call this climate change. Within climate change we discussed the debate about whether it is man made or natural. Personally, I am still unsure about my stance on this, but I do know that now, the effects of climate change are greatly due to human activity.
We also learned about how a climate change is detected and some examples of this are weather recordings, ice cores, rocks and fossils and analysis of pollen and trees. We then discussed the effects and impacts of climate change on the world and I realised how distressing these can be to our environment. One example which really shocked me was agriculture. Through climate change, deserts and areas of land can become completely unstable through desertification. In addition to this, costal land becomes at risk, sea defences become under stress and crops are wiped out due to flooding. Because of all of the huge effects climate change has on us as people and the environment, it really relayed to me how important it is to teach the next generations about how they can help these situations.
For our first tutorial, we went back to the science labs with Andrew to learn about biomes. Biomes are a large area of land and vary from grassland, rainforest and tundra.
We were then given a biome – desert- and were asked to fill in a worksheet on how we would survive on a desert if there was a plane crash and we were stranded there. This helped me understand the biome in much more depth and when we were thinking about ways to survive, we had to consider the climate and resources that a desert posses.
After this, we moved round stations to further explore climate change. One of the stations was exploring temperature. There was a large tank of room temperature water. We then filled up two cups with water – one with hot water and one with cold. We identified the temperatures by using red and blue food colourings. When we dropped both cups in the tank, we seen that all of the hot water raised to the top of the tank, whilst the cold water sank to the bottom. This activity – although it has a deeper meaning – allows children to visually and interactively see the hot water rising and cold water sinking,
The second tutorial took a political stance on climate change and discussed the links between them. We were given some government policies, and discussed their effectiveness. We were then given a location and role and as a government, had to discuss the methods to help this individual. My groups situation was a single mother living in Queensland. Upon research we found that due to rising temperatures, there are a lot of forest fires in Queensland, and to stop this, an idea we had was to invest more in our fire prevention and brigade services.
I never thought that learning about climate change would affect me as much as it has. I never knew that our actions could have such an impact on the wider world. As a future educator, I will make sure to educate children on this issue through fun, creative ways like we have experienced in university.
