About this blog
Mark McCaffrey helped develop Climate Literacy: The Essential Principles of Climate Science which has been reviewed and endorsed by the US Global Change Science Program. Designed to aid teachers, policy makers, and the general public in understanding the intricacies of the climate system, the Climate Literacy principles present information about Earth's climate, the impacts of climate change, and approaches to preparedness and mitigation. More details ...
Mark is a co-founder of the Climate Literacy Network and attended the Inspiring Climate Education (ICE09) conference in Copenhagen to share insights about climate literacy efforts with colleagues from around the world. He is involved with the NASA funded Inspiring Climate Education Excellence (ICEE) project and the Climate LIteracy Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN), which is an NSF National Science Digital Library Pathway.
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Monthly Archives: March 2010
Improving Predictions of Climate Change and its Impacts
A recent webinar from the National Science Foundation announced a new “New interagency program to generate high-resolution tools for addressing climate change.” With NSF Director Dr. Arden L. Bement, Jr. of NSF, Dr. Roger Beachy of USDA and Dr. William … Continue reading
Buttressing Civic Science Literacy
We clearly need to have effective frames and messaging that might boil down to “it’s still real, it’s still happening… and it’s serious” and we need to do everything we can to make a major leap in our collective civic science literacy. What if we were able to improve our nation’s science literacy another ten points in the coming decade. We have a good baseline and understand many of the challenges/barriers to making headway in that arena. Continue reading
Climate Justice: From Eden, to Babel, to Apocalypse, to Jubilee
As an integrating, interdisciplinary complex theme for education, it’s hard to imagine a better one than climate. To fully wrestle with and prepare ourselves and future generations, it’s imperative to go beyond science, and beyond mathematics, technology and engineering, the traditional STEM disciplines, examining historical, cultural and psychological roots of our relationship to nature and climate in general and human induced climate change in particular. That’s what it will take to widen the scope and discussion of what it means to be “climate literate.” Continue reading
Painting the Deck Chairs Green
Even if sea level rise is a fraction of what the experts predict, even if temperatures are only half of what seems to be in the pipeline, even if we haven’t yet crossed a tipping point releasing methane and further amplifying the warming, we need to prepare this generation and those to follow to minimize the impacts and maximize our preparedness. Continue reading
Trusted Sources
Front page articles on climate topics two days in a row in the New York Times, this time, Darwin Foes Add Warming to Targets: Critics of the teaching of evolution in the nation’s classrooms are gaining ground in some states by … Continue reading
Amplified Warming
A contemporary of Charles Darwin, John Tyndall, curious why the Earth was warmer than his calculations of the balance of incoming and outgoing energy allowed for, set up a mini-atmosphere laboratory in the basement of the Royal Institute in the … Continue reading
The Lost Years: Five Decades of Flawed Climate Communications
As environmental and social scientists, educators, communicators, journalists and citizens, we clearly have our work cut out for us if we are going to be able to make any headway in minimizing our impact on the climate system, decarbonizing the global economy, and preparing our communities for changes that are already well underway. Let’s get to work. Continue reading
What If It’s A Big Hoax?
http://mediagallery.usatoday.com/Editorial-Cartoons/G373,S81137
