Categories
Climate Change CPD

5 Climate Change Websites to Keep an Eye on

Here are 5(ish) websites which anyone teaching about climate change may find useful: 

The IPCC website for the latest reports. 

Carbon Brief for current articles covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy. 

Gridwatch for live statistics showing UK energy production. 

The Global Carbon Atlas  to explore and visualize the most up-to-date data on carbon fluxes resulting from human activities and natural processes.

The Climate Action Tracker tracks international government climate action and measures it against the globally agreed Paris Agreement aim of “holding warming well below 2°C, and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.”

NOAA monthly reports on global climate/ extreme weather events. 

Other sources of climate data:

Copernicus maps and time-series of all sorts of climate data sources (CMIP5/6, reanalyses, regional climate models, etc.) for several variables. With the possibility of customizing the plots and exporting the data.

The IPCC interactive atlas

CRU data

 

Categories
Careers

Careers Day

Do you have students considering a career in weather, climate or climate change? They may be choosing which A level or Higher subjects to take, or starting to look at undergraduate courses. In this free, online careers day on Saturday, 17th June, we’ll be asking people from UK Universities, the Met Office and other employers of meteorologists to tell you a bit about their current work and how they got there, and we’ll explore the best routes into meteorology.

In the course of the event, you’ll hear short talks from a broad range of presenters and have an opportunity to ask them questions.

Potential attendees are encouraged to register as soon as possible to help us gauge numbers. 

All talks will be recorded and will be made available after the event for those who can’t make it. 

Categories
Careers

Met Office Work Experience 2023

The Met Office is running a virtual work experience programme for 13-18-year-olds this year, enabling young people to gain a broad understanding of what they do, develop employability skills and learn more about available career pathways.

Through a series of modules, interactive sessions and project completion, their virtual work experience programme offers a glimpse of what it is like to work for the Met Office, a large, world-leading organisation.  It is also designed to help inform career plans and shows how knowledge and skills developed through formal education can be applied in the workplace.

The summer 2023 programme runs from 3 to 21 July 2023 and can be completed within one week or across any period of time during the 3-week window.

Registration is now open at: Met Office Careers: Forecasting Your Future.

The Met Office is revising its opportunities for in-person work experience.  To be eligible to apply,  the virtual work experience programme should have been completed. 

Also, don’t forget about our own careers day in June 2023 – see the link below. 

Categories
Climate Change Schools

Maths for Planet Earth

Empowering the next generation of climate critical thinkers

Over the past year, The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS) has been working with the Environmental Change Institute at the University of Oxford and MEI (Maths, Education, Innovation) to provide free maths teaching and learning resources. Having targeted resources for different school subjects will help integrate the knowledge of climate change into the broader school curriculum.

This work follows new research published last year by the Royal Meteorological Society in partnership with Ipsos, showing an opportunity for better climate education in schools in Great Britain. Just over half of pupils in their final academic year (aged 15 to 16 years old) could recall being taught about climate change in the past year, with one in five (20%) believing that they either have never been taught about it or couldn’t recall when they were taught about it. This upcoming generation have signalled that they need (and evidence in the media that they want) to be better informed on how they can help be part of the solution of one of the most important challenges our planet will ever face, and scientists alone can’t fix the problem. It requires a whole range of skills and expertise, which is why it is important to look at existing opportunities to incorporate climate change in the current curriculum across all subjects. Learning maths can help raise critical thinkers, which is an essential tool for anyone interested in climate issues, whether they are producing the solutions or consuming the information.

Prof Sylvia Knight, Head of Education at the Royal Meteorological Society, said:
“Maths is key to the climate literacy of school leavers – not just for those considering a career in meteorology. We are delighted that, through working with MEI and the University of Oxford, we can support teachers in demonstrating to their students the relevance of the numeracy and data literacy skills they have learned. Incorporating these resources into lesson plans can help inform the decisions students will have to make in their personal and professional lives about mitigating and adapting to climate change. It will also help with the skills they need for green jobs and their understanding of the messages they see in the media about climate change.”

The existing ’Maths for Planet Earth’ resources from the University of Oxford will now be housed alongside other weather and climate educational materials on the RMetS education website MetLink. All the questions in these resources have taken existing and previous GCSE and A-Level exam questions but adapted the context to a climate change theme. The same skills are needed to solve the example problems, enabling teachers to integrate climate change into the school curriculum beyond the usual subjects.

Sitting alongside these on MetLink is a set of new resources developed with MEI to engage young people with climate issues and show the relevance of maths to climate change and meteorology. The resources aim to empower students to understand information and data and to highlight how maths skills can be used to examine and evaluate issues and draw evidence-based conclusions. Different versions have been developed for Key Stage 3 and Core Maths lessons. The Core Maths versions are also suitable for the SQA’s Applications of Mathematics qualification. Each set of resources contains session notes, presentations, and printable sheets for students.

The Trees for Net Zero resources are designed to be delivered over one or two lessons, looking at the topic in depth using skills of estimation as well as interpreting and plotting data in context.

The Trees and Carbon Capture resources are standalone activities that can be delivered as part of a lesson, a filtered version of the Trees for Net Zero sets.

The dynamic Extreme Weather activities use Desmos tools to investigate connections between global warming and extreme cold weather by calculating probabilities. This activity can form part of a lesson.

The EVolution of Vehicle Sales resources explores vehicle registration data with links to proportional reasoning and estimation/modelling. These can be delivered as part of a lesson.

All resources embed the development of analysis and comparison techniques, as well as opportunities to make conjectures and present conclusions.

Categories
Schools Science Secondary

Isaac Physics Resources

Isaac Physics logo

Over the course of 2022 we produced questions for Isaac Physics, an online study tool developed by the University of Cambridge. Isaac Physics questions are self marking practice questions for secondary school and undergraduate scientists. 

They cover a diverse range of applications of physics in weather and climate, including sea level rise, radar frequencies,  aerosols, oceanic circulation, tidal barrages etc. 

These questions are now live and fully searchable on the Isaac Physics website. 

Categories
Climate Change Schools

COP27 Bulletin for Schools

Monday 7th November – Bulletin now available – sorry for the slight delay. 

COP27 logo

We estimate that over 50,000 young people saw our daily bulletins from COP26, aimed at putting the negotiations and the media and social media messages from them into a relevant context. 

We’re not able to do the same from COP27, but RMetS Chief Executive Liz Bentley will be there and will record one bulletin prior to the start of the event. It should be on our YouTube channel in time for school on the morning of Monday 7th November. 

Categories
Climate Change Geography Secondary Teaching

New IPCC linked teaching resources

 
We are delighted to have worked with the Royal Geographical Society to produce more climate change teaching resources for A Level geography. These are based on the IPCC Working Group II (Impact, Adaptation and Vulnerability) and WGIII (Mitigation) reports. 
 

Energy Security in Africa

  • The focus of these resources are to explore climate change and energy security in Africa.
  • Hydro electric power has been identified as a more sustainable way for Africa to achieve energy security in the future.
  • Throughout the continent of Africa there are already many hydroelectric power stations, with many more planned over the coming decades.
  • Climate change could potentially impact upon these plans. These resources focus upon that relationship.
 Lesson and Homework Resources

Climate Change in Africa

Africa is one of the lowest contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions, yet key development sectors are already experiencing widespread losses and damages attributed to human-induced climate change.

Students complete a knowledge organiser. 

Extreme Heat in Urban Africa

Climate change has increased heat waves (high confidence) and drought (medium confidence) on land, and doubled the probability of marine heatwaves around most of Africa.

Heat waves on land, in lakes and in the ocean will increase considerably in magnitude and duration with increasing global warming.

Most African countries will enter unprecedented high temperature climates earlier in this century than generally wealthier, higher latitude countries, emphasising the urgency of adaptation measures in Africa.

Lesson and Homework resources

Wildfire

Wildfire is a natural and essential part of many forest, woodland and grassland ecosystems, killing pests, releasing plant seeds to sprout, thinning out small trees and serving other functions essential for ecosystem health. Excessive wildfire, however, can kill people, the smoke can cause breathing illnesses, destroy homes and damage ecosystems.

Students complete a knowledge organiser. 

Categories
Books Secondary

Book Review: Weather, Camera, Action!

Weather, camera, action
 
Weather, Camera, Action

A Meteorologist’s Guide to the Sky

Author:Liam Dutton, Geordano Poloni (illustrator)
Year: 2022
Publisher: Templar books
Suggested age range: 9-12
Price: £16.99

 

Liam Dutton’s new 77 page book is a vibrant weather guide aimed at ‘budding weather presenters and meteorologists’. Rosie, aged 10, wrote:

“I enjoyed reading the Weather, Camera, Action book. I particularly liked learning about different air masses and how wind can bring different weathers to the UK.

If you want to learn about the weather and you are interested in it then I would definitely recommend this book to you, there are some great descriptions and facts in it. It explains climate change and pollution, teaches you about wavelengths and gas molecules and it also taught me that weather can be dangerous such as heat waves, dust storms and tornadoes.

Some younger children may find it difficult to understand because of the hard vocabulary but there are lots of great pictures and diagrams to help them access the book and the text is broken up into chunks, so overall I would recommend this book to older primary school children.”

Although it has an introductory ‘meet the author’ this is not a personal narrative about the weather Liam has experienced and reported. Rather, it takes a fairly standard reference book approach of breaking the book up into 34 two-page topics with a glossary at the end. Topics cover atmospheric features such as the jet stream, clouds, tornadoes, air pollution and sting jets as well as weather charts, forecasts and presenters. So, to be honest, the ‘camera, action!’ bit of the books title is a little lost.

As you’d expect from a book written by a meteorologist, the content is accurate and current with case studies ranging from the historical 1952 smog and 1987 storm to the 2019 European heat wave.

The format is visually appealing, content-rich and accessible without being cluttered or confusing.

It could be argued that, for a generation that is very unlikely to access weather forecasts on the TV, the book is missing information about using online and social media sources of information – there’s little in this book which couldn’t have been written 20 years ago. On a related note, the book takes the now fairly dated approach of tacking climate change on to the end as a bit of an afterthought –weather, climate and climate change are inexorably linked and I would have been happier seeing it integrated into the rest of the book.

This book should appeal to many young people and would be a good, solid addition to any primary school library.

This review has also been published in Weather

Categories
Climate Change Teaching

Teachers Needed: Curriculum Mapping

Earlier this year, we asked climate change experts from a wide range of subject disciplines to look for opportunities to teach about climate change in the current English GCSE specifications and KS3 curriculum. 

Over 100 people responded, and between them reviewed well over a hundred documents. 

Teachers! Now we need your input – which of the suggestions they made would actually work in a secondary classroom? Do you have any more suggestions to add?

What are the easiest ways for teachers to show their students the relevance of the current curriculum to climate change? 

If you think you have a few minutes to be able to help, by looking at the suggested opportunities in your subject area, please contact education@rmets.org and tell us which subjects you teach. 

We plan to ask similar questions of young people, and to share the information we collect with a diverse range of other organisations as well as use it ourselves to improve the support we offer to teachers.

We also plan to extend the project to Wales, Scotland and N. Ireland.

 

Categories
Climate Change Geography Science Teaching

Resources for COP27

We have produced some curriculum linked resources for schools to use in the build up to and during COP27 this year.

For geography teachers: a 11-14(+) resources looking at population growth, pyramids, urbanisation and the climate impacts of construction.

For maths teachers: an 11-14 or possibly Core maths resource applying Pythagoras’ theorem to the problem of efficient road construction.

For science (physics) teachers: a 13-16 resource looking at energy transfer and electricity production in the Benban solar farm.