Quantifying climate change is an interesting mathematical challenge, since weather and climate are such complicated systems. There are a number of interesting quantities we can consider, however, to assign quantitative measure to detrimental changes in the Earth's ecosystem. The rates of species extinction and deforestation, as well as the amount of water and food that will continue to be available are interesting metrics to help us quantify the problems we are facing.
Perhaps the most talked about number regarding climate change is a person or organization's Carbon Footprint, or the amount of CO-2 they emit based on their lifestyle. That is what we will consider using the Berkeley Institute of the Environment's Carbon Calculator.
The video below is (I believe) part of the 25 million dollar Virgin Earth challenge, which calls for teams to suggest strategies to specifically remove CO-2 from the atmosphere.
The Berkeley Institute of the Environment has developed a very interesting tool called the CoolClimate Carbon Footprint Calculator which enables a user to enter information related to their lifestyle, and determine how much carbon dioxide they are emitting compared to the national and international averages. There are a number of interesting ways to teach high school level mathematical concepts through this interactive environment.
Some ideas:
(1) Have students use the Carbon Calculator to enter values related to their household. This will likely require them to talk to their parents about their household's monthly utility bills, miles driven and the square footage of their house. This seems like a good way to help promote awareness of issues like home and auto ownership for the students, and facilitate discussion between them and their parents.
(2) Once a student uses the Calculator to determine their household's CO2 emissions, this number will appear in the upper right corner of the carbon calculator. With this number, ask them to compute the size of a building it would take to store all of the carbon they will emit this year. This is an opportunity to discuss the notion of density and volume, how to determine the weight of a molecule (i.e. CO2) using its chemical formula, and converting from units of linear measure (inches, meters, etc.) to units of cubic measure (cubic inches, cubic meters, etc.). To give a standard of measure, you might ask a student to measure the volume of their bedroom, the volume of their school and the volume of a sports stadium given its dimensions. Once they do this, they can compare this to the volume of CO2 they emit.
(3) The calculator also gives bar graphs to indicate how much CO2 is emitted by an individual compared to national averages and international averages. These quantities can be used to discuss percentages and percent increases. A question might be as simple as having them calculate what percentage of these other averages is their emission footprint? What is the percent increase of their footprint compared to the other averages??
(4) Given the average carbon footprint of a US household and that of an international household, ask a student to calculate how much total carbon is emitted by humans in the world, and what percentage of that is emitted by the US?? This would involve them doing some independent research on population sizes, and to realize that they need to know those values to get to the answer.
(5) The interactivity of the Carbon Calculator enables us to explore the underlying functions being used by the BIE to generate these estimates. The equations are given in a document here, for the purposes of helping students check their answer. What I might ask them is to calculate the functions for metric tons of C02 vs. amount of money spent on furniture, food, square footage of their house, etc. This would require them to change those values and see what the resultant change is by the calculator. Since exact values aren't given, and no decimal significant digits are kept for the tons of CO2 emitted, this would require them to make big changes in a value (say 100$ on furniture, 1000$ on furniture, $5000 on furniture) and use these big jumps to estimate a slope of character to the graph they obtain.
(6) An interesting feature in calculating carbon footprint based on your utility supplier (at least for California) could lead to an interesting research project by students to understand what kinds of energy sources are used for the power grid, which utility companies are more progressive in pursuing "green" and non-polluting alternatives, and how where you live and the choices made by your public utilities and local government affect your carbon footprint regardless of your personal efforts of conservation.
(7) Ask students to use the calculator to determine what lifestyle changes they and their family would have to undertake to get to the international average. Are these changes possible? What are some alternative means to reduce our individual impact or community's impact? How many trees would they need to plant to offset their carbon footprint? Do the indirect costs of such efforts override the apparent benefits?
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment