You may have already observed outcomes of global climate change in your region, whether in falling butterfly populations, rising inner-city temperatures, or increasingly intense hurricanes. ASTC’s Communicating Climate Change project is part of our International Action on Global Warming (IGLO) initiative. Communicating Climate Change fosters innovative partnerships between research centers, the media, and science centers, and showcases science centers’ central role in educating the general public about global climate change.
Our project works with science centers and partnering scientific research sites to develop local indicators of climate change in 12 different ecoregions across the United States. Many participating science centers recruit the general public to volunteer as “citizen scientists.” These project participants learn about global warming by observing and monitoring local indicators of climate change such as disrupted bird migration patterns in Philadelphia or the failing health of pine forests in Arizona. In addition, project science centers are developing numerous, workshops, science days, and other activities.
NOAA has announced funding opportunities for informal/nonformal science education projects through their Environmental Literacy Grants (ELG) Program. A previous recipient of ELG funding, The Ocean Project, recently released a report called America, the Ocean, and Climate Change: New Research Insights for Conservation, Awareness, and Action. Their summary of key findings offers some insight into the type of project funded by this program as well as useful information for C3 partners addressing ocean issues. More information below (and on NOAA’s website), but note the following deadlines:
Informational Telecon
An informational teleconference with the program officers will occur on January 21, 2010 at3:30 PM EST. Interested applicants are required to register and will receive the call-in information by contacting oed.grants@noaa.gov and include in the Subject line of the email: “Interested in FFO Teleconference – Need Details.” Please provide the interested parties’ names, institutions and telephone numbers in the body of the message.
Deadlines
Letters of Intent are required. The deadline for letters of intent is 5:00 PM EST February 16, 2010.
The deadline for full applications is 5:00 PM EDT on April 6, 2010.
Additional Information on Funding Opportunity
NOAA’s Office of Education (OEd) has issued a request for applications for informal/nonformal science education projects that engage the public in activities that utilize emerging and/or advanced technologies and leverage NOAA assets to improve understanding and stewardship of the local and global environment. There is specific interest in projects that use emerging and/or advanced technologies to (1) facilitate outdoor experiences involving scientific inquiry and exploration of the natural world apart from formal K-12 curricula and (2) visualize, display, and interpret data to improve understanding and provide a systems perspective of Earth’s dynamic processes. All projects must focus on one or more of the following informal/nonformal science education activities:
Technologically facilitated outdoor experiential learning for youth and adults;
Public participation in science related to one or more of NOAA’s mission goals;
Exhibitions and online programs allowing the visualization and exploration of data supporting the interpretation of ocean, coastal, Great Lakes, weather and climate sciences for public audiences;
Spherical display system (including NOAA’s Science On a Sphere) installations and programming; and
Professional development programs and training programs for informal/nonformal education staff.
The essence of the piece isn’t anything you haven’t already heard from Rick and Jennifer, but I thought this passaged described rather nicely why citizen science is such an important component of this project:
Involvement of the public in the act of science would shape the kind of science being done, perhaps increasing the impact of science on daily life. Community involvement in the act of research would also make science more understandable, and perhaps more familiar, to the public, because people would be engaged in its framing and communication. What better way to increase scientific literacy, make the benefits of science clear, and quell myths and spread facts than to give all people a stake in the act of discovering science? Maybe the way the world sees some currently controversial topics–stem cells, climate change, energy sources–would be different if more people engaged in the act of testing hypotheses and examining data. Community participation in science would also be enormously personally enriching, providing exercise in thinking and problem solving (something that is useful in all problem domains, throughout life) and empowering people to contribute directly to the betterment of society in a broadly impactful way.
If you’re wondering why it’s been unusually cold outside this week, this post from DotEarth’s Andy Revkin explains that it’s the Arctic Oscillation making life unpleasant for folks in places across the northern hemisphere.
It could be a good resource if you’re getting questions from skeptical visitors or program participants about why, if global warming is real, it’s so cold outside.
The Clim’Way* event at COP15 was a success, with participants from Museum of Science, Boston; COSI, Columbus, Ohio; Cap-Sciences, Bordeaux, France; and Experimentarium, Hellerup, Denmark and panelists Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, Vice-Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; Ned Gardiner, Data Visualization Expert at NOAA; Eric Gorman, Cap-Sciences; David Noble, 2DegreesC; Bjørn Bedsted, Danish Board of Technology; and Hans Gubbels, President of the Ecsite Executive Committee.
Walter Staveloz, Director of International Relations at ASTC served as moderator.
We’re working on getting the video up, but in the meantime, here are a few photos from the event, courtesy of Ned Gardiner, NOAA. The first is Walter Staveloz and Jean-Pascal van Ypersele; the others are of our panel.
*This is the new less catchy, more legal name of Clim’City.
During the planning phase of last week’s transatlantic conference between the Museum of Science, Boston, and Cité des Sciences et de L’Industrie, Paris, organizers struggled over how (and whether) to address the “ClimateGate” scandal (the email accounts of researchers at the University of East Anglia were hacked and posted online; excerpts from these emails have been used by skeptics to “bolster” their denial of anthropogenic climate change).
If you’re also struggling with questions about this, these two articles might be worth reading:
“A fair reading of the e-mails reveals nothing to support the denialists’ conspiracy theories. In one of the more controversial exchanges, UEA scientists sharply criticized the quality of two papers that question the uniqueness of recent global warming… and vowed to keep at least the first paper out of the upcoming Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Whatever the e-mail authors may have said to one another in (supposed) privacy, however, what matters is how they acted. And the fact is that, in the end, neither they nor the IPCC suppressed anything: when the assessment report was published in 2007 it referenced and discussed both papers.”
It’s worth reading the entire article, particularly if your audience tends toward skeptical. And, if you’re interested in what IPCC Chairman Rajenda Pachauri and UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon had to say on the matter, check out this IPCC post from last week.
If you find all the goings on in Copenhagen to be a little confusing, you should take heart that you’re not the only one. As BBC Environmental Reporter Richard Black points out on his COP15 blog, there’s an often overwhelming flurry of activity (and acronyms) surrounding the negotiations. If you’re looking to make sense of it without spending hours studying up on the UN or climate science, Black’s blog is enormously helpful and updated daily.
Sunday is a pretty slow day at COP15 (the main site at the Bella Center is shut down until Monday) but Saturday was packed, with representatives from the 937 observer organizations here this weekend lined up for hours to pick up credentials for the NGO exhibition and side events.
cc photo by Matthew McDermott
These included organizations most of you are familiar with and some of you have worked with before – like ICLEI and 350.org – and large universities like Stanford. But because the booths were assigned free of charge to the first 200 NGOs to request one, it was a great opportunity to hear about some smaller projects, like the Ithaca College Public Opinion Poll.
A group of students from Ithaca College turned their class project into a public opinion website, with participation from nearly 1000 individuals from around the world. Among other questions, the group asked whether the conference would produce a meaningful treaty (54% were optimistic that it would) and if allowing carbon emissions to rise above 350 ppm was dangerous (though a strong majority said yes, check out this Gallup poll to see how views on the dangers of climate change vary around the world).
If the students you work with are looking for organizations to partner with or maybe just for a good example of young people doing relatively high profile work, you might encourage them to explore some of the other pages on the site, which also highlights other youth-oriented organizations participating in the conference and working on environmental issues.
Just as a reminder, you can watch the Clim’City event we’ve organized with NOAA online starting Monday at 8:15AM EST.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for the Environment sends out weekly Science for Environment Policy news alerts that are also available on its website. You can find this week’s climate change-focused alert on-line, but there were a few points I wanted to make special mention of.
Three of the six short pieces highlighted in the alert (one on uncertainty, one on framing, and one on the effect of fearful imagery) speak directly to C3’s goal of engaging the public on climate change, and largely reinforce the project’s underlying philosophy that global effects of climate change should be tied to local changes. They emphasize some of the same points as Tony Leiserowitz’s Six Americas study, suggesting that “information should be tailored to different public groups according to their beliefs and attitudes.”
“Fear is not the answer to communicating climate change” includes some advice that might be useful to those of you thinking about how to build on the powerpoint presentation Jennifer Shirk gave in Fort Worth, particularly when selecting images:
“However, [images of large and extreme impacts such as melting icesheets, visions of rising sea levels and intense heat and droughts] also tend to enhance the sense that climate change happens somewhere else, to somebody else. Some individuals react to such images with a fatalistic attitude, feeling they are unable to do anything to help. Others deny climate change, rather than experience the discomfort of its reality.
“While the dramatic images were judged to be the most personally important, they were also considered the most disempowering. Enabling imagery… were seen as least personally important, yet made people feel more able to do something about climate change.”
The article was based on work presented in the Paper “Fear Won’t Do It”: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations by O’Neill and Nicholson-Cole, which doesn’t seem to be freely available online, but you can read the abstract and, if you’re so inclined, buy the entire thing here.
Katie Levedahl of Sciencenter, Ithaca, New York, organized an activity and demonstration session at this year’s ASTC Conference, and the activities she and a handful of other C3 partners presented are now available online.
You can find all of the handouts on SlideShare, but here’s a quick look at “Climate Change Food Station”, shared by Leon Geschwind from the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii:
Results are in from the Danish Board of Technology’s World Wide Views global focus group project, in which both Museum of Science, Boston and Cité des Sciences et de L’Industrie, Paris participated. They’ve set up a pretty easy-to-use tool that lets site visitors look at results by country or region, control for economic output, and create basic crosstabs.
Also, via Colin Johnson, retired CEO of TechniQuest in Cardiff, South Wales, several climate change resources from the Met, the UK’s national weather office:
This project was partially supported by the National Science Foundation, Arctic Science Section, Office of Polar Program, NOAA Education Office, and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
