Climate change

The challenge

Read the pdf document below to find out what the Eco Family had to do in October:

Measuring and climate change challenge (pdf)

Eco Family diary

"My challenge for this month was all about climate change and looking at what this meant to me and my family through a ‘mini’ research project, which I did throughout the month.

It was very interesting to talk to various people that included close friends, family and one of my daughter’s class teacher’s to ask them what they thought or perceived the term ‘climate change’ to be. Before I discussed this or searched in more detail, I took some time to think about how I personally perceived climate change to be. For me, this merely was different weather changes over a period of time. In contrast this is correct and matched up with what I found out during my information gathering, although I wasn’t aware of how serious and important climate change is or will be in the years to come. For example floods have some indication of climate change, which affects everyone even if it doesn’t directly affect us. The challenge was interesting for me because I managed to find out interesting information on climate change.

I enjoyed this month’s challenge as I learned some interesting facts about the topic. I didn’t find it too stressful as I was briefed on creating my own work with great ideas for getting me started.

My presentation of climate change showed what climate change is all about, in terms of understanding why climate change is important. Initially my challenge was to produce a collage of some kind of what I perceived climate change to be. There was lots of information out there for me on the internet, magazines, speaking to close friends and family, which enabled me to find out some interesting information, which most importantly showed that climate change is a continuing problem in our world today, what we are doing to prevent this right now and in the long-term. It showed what climate change is all about in terms of first understanding why climate change is important not only directly, but indirectly to everyone. Without this, I felt that it would be difficult in establishing why each and every individual has to play there part in contributing to reducing climate change.

In order to understand I showed that:-

Warmer
Temperatures
↓
Less Snow & Ice
↓
More Sunlight Absorbed
By Land & Sea

Basically this information is showing that because of the way we are polluting our atmosphere through emission waste, current lifestyles etc, we therefore have warmer temperatures in our atmosphere, which in terms produces less snow and ice for our Glaciers, which therefore causes more of the sun’s sunlight to absorb the land and sea. The consequences is that we have erratic weather conditions such as floodings, earthquakes and Tsunamis.

This is imperative information as some useful statistics showed that worldwide 10 of the hottest years on record have occurred since 1990, since records began in 1861.

I also found that climate change is very scientific in terms of a bigger ‘picture’ and is only a small part of our Glaciers and there is a more wider problem to climate change.

The presentation also showed what we should be doing in terms of trying to help ‘reduce’ problems associated with climate change such as acting on our CO2 footprint (reducing emissions) and doing things that would help dramatically lessen this by turning off or using energy efficient light bulbs and cycling instead of using the car as driving gives off so much pollution which goes back to causing warmer temperatures, which has an effect on our Glaciers which allows more sunlight to be absorbed by land and sea which gives off erratic weather conditions. This is just a small part of the contribution we should be doing to stop climate change. It is also something that will take years and years to sustain and put right again and something that not only our generation, but our children’s generation will have an effect on if we don’t do something about it and treat it extremely serious.

I also did my first measuring of electricity/gas and weighing of rubbish (including recycling) which I do on a monthly basis for electricity/gas and frequent basis for the rubbish and recycling. This was not a problem as I participate in recycling in the home. Taking measurements of gas/electricity was fine as it was easy to access the reading meters, so weighing and measuring on the whole did not have a burden on me.

We are looking forward to starting the Energy project next month!"

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