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 >
SNOWING IN SEATTLE
I live in Seattle, where it is already snowing. This is not normal for the area this time in the year. Could this be because of climate change?
It is almost impossible to attribute a single weather event to climate change. But changes in precipitation patterns, for example, is one of the predictions for future climate change in the northwest of the US.
One way to think of it is that weather is on a short time scale (day to day), climate is on a longer time scale (~10 years and longer). So to understand the effect of climate change, one needs to look at the overall pattern.
Having said that, scientists have started to develop models where they can attribute one of the contributing factors to freak storms like superstorm sandy of a few years ago to changes predicted by climate change. Same can be said for the severity of hurricanes, which are influenced by sea water temperatures, which itself is impacted by climate change.