“The Tantrum that Saved the World” is a new children’s book about Climate Change, by renowned climate scientist Michael Mann and children’s storyteller Megan Herbert. It’s not available quite yet because it’s still in a Kickstarter Campaign.
Climate Change is not an easy topic to teach to little children. Why is this book so special?
It’s carbon neutral.
It’s a story book, a science book, and an action plan.
It gives kids practical advice, empowering them.
The protagonist struggles through adversity and solves her own problems.
It teaches kids that there is strength in numbers and power in cooperative effort.
Learn more and view some of the pages at the link above.
Love it! I was just talking about climate change with my kids the other day and longing for a resource like this.
My kid’s teacher (whom I mentioned on the other thread as not being terrifically scientifically literate) had said something about how smog would make a hole in the atmosphere and the air would leak out. I said that her teacher didn’t understand gravity or the difference between modern climate change science and 1990s data on ozone layer depletion. I told my daughter that it’s just a bit worse than losing bits of our atmosphere… we’re likely at the cusp of the sixth mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Global populations of vertebrates – mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish – have declined by 58 percent between 1970 and 2012, states a new report. Animals living in the world’s lakes, rivers, and freshwater systems have experienced the most dramatic population declines, at 81 percent. Because of human activity, the report states that without immediate intervention global wildlife populations could drop two-thirds by 2020.
There was a children’s movie about weather that explained that releasing too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere would cause the ice caps to melt, submerging coastal cities… The Unchained Goddess was released in … 1958! Yes, we’ve known about this for a long time.
That looks very interesting, thanks for sharing. I grew up with a fair amount of anti-environmentalist teaching, so I’ve been trying to find a more balanced approach lately.
I hope, like they say, the information is communicated in a way that does not lead to kids feeling overwhelmed. Sometimes the whole “save the world” narrative rubs me the wrong way for that reason, but I would still be very interested to see how they pull it off here.
I don’t think it will overwhelm children at all. It gives them simple, practical steps they can follow. And when we look at books that children love best (the Harry Potter books, the Narnia books, A Wrinkle in Time) we see children who are initially overwhelmed by terrible situations, but then find hidden strength to overcome all kinds of adversity. (In the case of climate change, the danger is very real.)
In this example, the water represents heat and the bucket represents the Earth. If you create a smaller opening for the water to escape from you have to raise the level of water to create more flow until you reach an equilibrium. This is exactly what happens when you add CO2 to the atmosphere, you restrict the amount of heat that can escape into space. In order to reach equilibrium you have to put more heat into the atmosphere in order to get a balance between heat coming in and heat leaving.
To illustrate this point you could even make your own experiment with a buckets and hoses. Kids love this type of stuff, especially if it involves splashing water all over the place.
Another interesting historical footnote: If you follow your link and jump to the 50 min. mark, that is where the climate change information starts. Continue watching, and the narrator ends up quoting the book of Job and referring to God’s gift of curiosity so that man may learn to live in harmony with nature. This was shown in public schools across the country. You could never get away with that today. Worth checking out just for historical context. @TedDavis might have a thought about it.
Oh, the Bell Labs science films were amazing and so innovative for their time! We saw some of them in elementary school. As well as scriptures as you mentioned, this one had music by Beethoven and Richard Wagner.
This conflict regarding climate change keeps coming up, and is a good example where science is drowned in the bluster of political conflict.
It is an indisputable fact that concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere have steadily increased since the industrial revolution, and the Greenhouse phenomena is well understood.
It is also the case that quantifying the impact of CO2 concentrations on global climate is tenuous and extremely complicated. Predictions of the supposed increase in global temperature have been in error, and even more so the timing predicted when a “tipping point” is reached have been revised.
It seems that conflict is more desired by some than working towards a practical solution which does not place a greater burden on the poor and vulnerable.
The question is centred on quantifying the impact of increasing CO2 levels, and a practical solution to this. The politics has made this very difficult, and these politics are from both sides of the debate. Huge subsidies for solar and wind have caused very substantial increases in the price of power, which makes life difficult for the poor. Political turmoil has also caused “flaky” attempts to created low emissions fossil fuelled power generation, while the need for secure supply has kept old dirty plant profitable and necessary.
Truly the worst possible outcome, and the same politics has become more intense and irrational.
Where did @jpm’s comment go? You think doing something about climate change will hurt the poor, but ignoring climate change will hurt them much more. For example, hurricanes are made more powerful by warm, water. Maybe you saw what hurricane Maria did in Puerto Rico. (And the darling of the evangelicals “helped” by tossing paper towels at them.)
BioLogos itself has championed the idea of taking climate change seriously, with this post written by Katherine Hayhoe more than a year ago, and other posts as well. .
Even the U.S. military sees climate change as a threat to national security, with the potential to cause natural disasters, food shortages, and other problems which could lead to terrorism and a worse refugee crisis.
I’ve not commented on this thread. Like Ted, have nothing to add. We are skirting the line at getting into politics with this topic, so need to take care to keep to the science and since on the homeschool forum, keep related to how children are taught.
Reading it however has made me think about tribalism and how it relates to behavior and positions taken by groups, both political and religious. But that is another topic.
I think you are confusing acceptance of increasing CO2 and the impact of this via the Greenhouse effect on the climate, with the practical matters needed to reverse this trend.
My comment is to show that dealing with these matters requires a practical approach. The current politicising of GHG has had the reverse outcome - instead of providing the economic framework for closing down old dirty stations with new higher efficiency plant, that reduces emissions by up to 40%, the current situation has allowed old plant to provide baseload power with emissions at 1200-1400 kgCO2/MWh. This can be reduced to about 800kg CO2/MWh while providing a secure supply, by replacing the old plant with new.
Can you see that this means the source of large emissions continues as it has, while the silly propaganda of renewables as economically acceptable, continues to be politically supported.
