Middle and High School … from a Montessori Point of View
The St. Louis Zoo is hosting a couple interesting presentations that should be relevant to my Environmental Science class. One, by Andrew Hurle from the University of Missouri, St. Louis, is on environmental history and environmental justice issues in the St. Louis (6pm on Wednesday).
The second is by the sustainability Director in the City of St. Louis Mayor’s Office, Catherine L. Werner.
Despite choosing to traipse through the prairie while geocaching, my students’ only encounters with fauna were along and on the side of the road.
Now, I tend to be terrible at identifying animals, but only last week I ran into an eastern garter snake so I actually knew something about this meter-long specimen that was stepped on by one of my students while she was running back to the Audubon Center. I convinced the group to leave it alone since these snakes do bite — even though they’re not poisonous — and release a bad-smelling odor when threatened. And this guy was somewhat traumatized.
As for the student. She was somewhat traumatized too, but got over it soon enough. I think she was more put out by the fact that when she told her mom about it that night, her mom’s first response was, “That poor snake.”
Just a few days after the devastation of Hurricane Sandy, New York mayor Michael Bloomberg considered the role of climate change:
… The floods and fires that swept through our city left a path of destruction that will require years of recovery and rebuilding work. And in the short term, our subway system remains partially shut down, and many city residents and businesses still have no power. In just 14 months, two hurricanes have forced us to evacuate neighborhoods – something our city government had never done before. If this is a trend, it is simply not sustainable.
Our climate is changing. And while the increase in extreme weather we have experienced in New York City and around the world may or may not be the result of it, the risk that it might be – given this week’s devastation – should compel all elected leaders to take immediate action.
Here in New York, our comprehensive sustainability plan – PlaNYC – has helped allow us to cut our carbon footprint by 16 percent in just five years, which is the equivalent of eliminating the carbon footprint of a city twice the size of Seattle. Through the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group – a partnership among many of the world’s largest cities – local governments are taking action where national governments are not.
But we can’t do it alone. We need leadership from the White House – and over the past four years, President Barack Obama has taken major steps to reduce our carbon consumption, including setting higher fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks. His administration also has adopted tighter controls on mercury emissions, which will help to close the dirtiest coal power plants (an effort I have supported through my philanthropy), which are estimated to kill 13,000 Americans a year.
Mitt Romney, too, has a history of tackling climate change. As governor of Massachusetts, he signed on to a regional cap- and-trade plan designed to reduce carbon emissions 10 percent below 1990 levels. “The benefits (of that plan) will be long- lasting and enormous – benefits to our health, our economy, our quality of life, our very landscape. These are actions we can and must take now, if we are to have ‘no regrets’ when we transfer our temporary stewardship of this Earth to the next generation,” he wrote at the time.
— Michael R. Bloomberg, 2012: A Vote for a President to Lead on Climate Change in Bloomberg.com.
While NPR has an article on a proposed, multi-billion dollar, offshore barrier to prevent the storm surge.
Since we’re talking about environmental economics at the moment, I played the interview, had my students read the Bloomberg excerpt, and then provoked a discussion of the value of human life with the question, “If the proposed $10 billion project could save 50 lives, would it be worth it?”
To keep the discussion focused I asked them to ignore all the other possible benefits of the barrier.
It’s a really tricky issue to deal with, but we ended up talking about how the U.S. government estimates the monetary value of human life. According to a recent New York Times article, values range from $6.1 million (Dept. of Transportation) to $9.1 million (EPA).
The business community historically has pushed for regulators to put a dollar value on life, part of a broader campaign to make agencies prove that the benefits of proposed regulations exceed the costs.
But some business groups are reconsidering the effectiveness of cost-benefit analysis as a check on regulations. The United States Chamber of Commerce is now campaigning for Congress to assert greater control over the rule-making process, reflecting a judgment that formulas may offer less reliable protection than politicians.
Some consumer groups, meanwhile, find themselves cheering the government’s results but reluctant to embrace the method. Advocates for increased regulation have long argued that cost-benefit analysis understates both the value of life and the benefits of government oversight.
— Appelbaum (2011): As U.S. Agencies Put More Value on a Life, Businesses Fret in the New York Times.
The size of the reddish-brown band on wooly bear caterpillars, Pyrrharctia isabella, is supposed to predict the severity of the winter. A wider band the milder the winter.
This specimen, rescued off the road next to the Audubon Center on the road to Confluence State Park, seems to suggest a mild winter.
I asked my students to take pictures of the curves they found while on our field trip to the scrap metal playground that is the City Museum. The plan is to see if we can determine what functions best fit the curves. To do so, we need to transfer the curves from the images to a co-ordinate system. Since I’m primarily interested in what type of functions might best fit the data, the scale of the co-ordinates does not matter that much.
Feet, inches, meters, centimeters, pixels, or any other units can be used. In fact, I use a purely arbitrary set of coordinates in the image above. All I require is that the grid be evenly spaced (although the vertical and horizontal spacing don’t have to be the same, it’s more straightforward if they are).
Now we take a set of points that lie on our shape and try to match them to some sort of curve using a spreadsheet, and, if we’re able, least squares regression.
There were lots of shapes to choose from.
Shrimps are not for Wimps
by Abby ReynoldsOne day I walked into the science class,
I was preoccupied as I looked into the looking glass.
For Dr. Urbano had cooked up a surprise,
And after I wished I was at the car rental Enterprise.
Then I would be able to drive away,
From the disgusting horrors I saw that day.
It started with a metal tray,
With icky rubber a sickly gray.
He brought the probe and scalpel too,
My o my, Sydney turned blue!
Then a smelly smell filled the room,
Making us cough and gag all too soon.
When I saw the shrimp my stomach did flip-flop,
For the color was like that of a caramel lollipop.
I inhaled through my mouth to calm my brain,
Trying not to think how the shrimp was slain.
It helped somewhat until I saw Sydney,
Who was slicing and dicing at a kidney.
She looked up and grinned a big grin,
A smear of blood dripping down her chin.
I will kindly spare you the rest of the story,
For I fear that it gets MUCH too gory!
And there I was thinking that the shrimp dissection had gone rather well.
Our middle and high school students tried their hands at geocaching on our visit to the Audubon Center at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.
They got their GPS units and instructions on how to use them: basically just choose the right waypoint and follow the arrow. They were told that they wouldn’t need to walk through the prairie.
But the arrow pointed toward the prairie.
The results were scratched legs and quite a number of boarders.
Afterwards, our guide pointed out that they could have found all the caches by using the paths.
There’s a lot of organic matter frozen into the arctic permafrost. As the arctic has been warming much faster than the rest of the planet, the permafrost soils are thawing out quite quickly. As they unfreeze, they set up a positive-feedback loop. The warming organic matter starts to decay releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, exacerbating the warming.
To generate the estimates, scientists studied how permafrost-affected soils, known as Gelisols, thaw under various climate scenarios. They found that all Gelisols are not alike: some Gelisols have soil materials that are very peaty, with lots of decaying organic matter that burns easily – these will impart newly thawed nitrogen into the ecosystem and atmosphere. Other Gelisols have materials that are very nutrient rich – these will impart a lot of nitrogen into the ecosystem. All Gelisols will contribute carbon dioxide and likely some methane into the atmosphere as a result of decomposition once the permafrost thaws – and these gases will contribute to warming. What was frozen for thousands of years will enter our ecosystems and atmosphere as a new contributor.
— Harden and Lausten (2012): Not-So-Permanent Permafrost via USGS Newsroom.