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Straight ahead on "Our World," educating students and the public about climate change ... illuminating the dangers of light pollution ... and saving endangered languages -- and a website that might help ...
WELCHER: "This could be used for the development of language teaching or language learning materials as well, and it just could provide a tremendous amount of information to reconstruct the language."
Those stories, maintaining your surgical chops by video gaming, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
Last week at this time I was in San Francisco, at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS, as its known, is the world's largest general science society. This year's theme was "science and technology for sustainable well-being."
Although the annual AAAS meeting covers a lot of ground, climate change was a common theme. The meeting came two weeks after the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that most global warming is "very likely" the result of human activity.
AAAS president John Holdren, himself an environmental scientist, stressed the importance of education in facing the challenges of climate change, as did Susan Solomon, who presented the U.N. climate change report earlier this month.
SOLOMON: "Yeah, I think it's extremely important to educate young people. It's also something that they're very interested in because, of course, it's something they can blame their parents for, and it's a fair question then to ask what kind of world they're going to live in and what they're being handed by their parents. So, certainly, education of young people is a high priority in my book."
In some places, it's easy to teach about climate change. In Shishmaref, a remote island community in western Alaska, students can see the effects of global warming first-hand.
BARR: "Hello, my name is Jamie Barr, and I live in Shishmaref. Living in the village, the ice is very important to us for hunting bearded seals and walrus. During the spring breakup, my uncles, brothers and other men travel on the ice, and now the ice is getting thinner, making it difficult for them to hunt. So our subsistence way of life is threatened. This is going to change our way of life that we've been living for over 3,000 years."
But for most kids, climate change is something they read about in textbooks. The trouble is, many schools are burdened by textbooks that may not reflect the latest scientific consensus. Textbooks often take several years to develop, and students will use them for several years after the books are purchased. Also, despite the scientific consensus, climate change remains a controversial topic in some quarters. The president-elect of the National Science Teachers Association, John Whitsett, says publishers tend to avoid controversy.
WHITSETT: "With global warming, greenhouse effect, global climate change ? all of these items are not dealt with to a great extent in most of the mainline textbooks, and it's in part because of the political pressures that have been put on in the past that in some cases don't make them very saleable in some parts of the country."
In some classrooms, teachers are using an interactive exercise called Stabilization Wedges, developed at Princeton University. The wedges are a visual stand-in for steps taken to avoid the continued increase in the carbon emissions that contribute to global warming. One wedge might represent more fuel-efficient cars; another might represent nuclear energy. Using wind or solar power might be another choice, and each choice has its tradeoffs. Roberta Hotinski led some 500 scientists, educators, and others ? everyone with a wireless voting device ? through the exercise. In the first round, more than two-thirds agreed on their first choice
HOTINSKI: "So, increased efficiency, by a lot. Usually it comes up in the games. It's a popular, popular strategy. So now we've got one wedge of increased efficiency. Now that could mean really intense efforts in, say, doubling the fuel efficiency of passenger vehicles or less intense efforts across transport, buildings, and efficiency."
In six more rounds of voting, the group chose a second round of energy efficiency, plus wind and solar energy, driving less, using natural gas instead of coal to generate electricity, ending deforestation and applying farming practices that cut carbon emissions from cropland.