Students from around the world calculated their class mean and standard deviations for their footprints and posted them on our world map.
Do you see differences across the globe? If so, why do you think those differences exist?
Did you use the calculator to try to reduce your footprint down to the average from a citizen of another country? What changes would you have to make to lower your footprint in this way? Are you going to try and take some of these actions in your daily life?
Student Footprints >
Science and the Environment
What have you learned over the past 3 days about your carbon footprint, greenhouse gases and climate change? How do they all relate to each other?
Over the past three days, we have learned a great deal regarding our carbon footprint, greenhouse gases, and climate change. We learned the true definitions of terms such as Weather, Climate, Climate Change, and Global Warming. We got to see our carbon emissions through a detailed 50-question survey which gave us an idea of how much carbon we are responsible for creating. Finally, we learned about greenhouse and non-greenhouse gasses and the ins and outs of how they work and what they do, non-greenhouse gasses can let heat out of the atmosphere because they are slightly imbalanced, this enables them to bounce off incoming heat and release it back into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases however are unable to do this therefore holding in more heat and causing global warming. In the article we read titled "More stuff = more climate change" I learned a lot more about what are the main producers of carbon emissions. Something I never thought about was how the more people there are in a given house, the fewer carbon emissions are produced per person, this is because the number of home appliances being used between the people is greatly lessened when under the same roof.