Michael Faraday, 30,000 Teenagers and Climate Change
Abstract
One of the objectives of IPY is to engage the awareness, interest and understanding of schoolchildren, the general public and decision-makers worldwide in the purpose and value of polar research and monitoring. Between January and March 2006 I co-presented the Faraday Lecture, run by the Institution of Engineering Technology, which aims to interest the public, and young people in particular, in science and engineering. The topic of the lecture this year was climate change and the technologies that have the potential to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions. As a research fellow at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London, I was able to use my knowledge of the polar regions to help explain the fundamentals of human induced climate change, from using ice cores for paleoclimate studies to what would happen if Greenland melted. The lecture was attended by 30,000 people, mainly aged between 14 to 16, at theatres across the UK and Asia, as well as broadcast on the web to North America and Europe. While the lecture was generally well received, it was apparent that there are misconceptions about the roles of scientists and engineers and a limited understanding of the polar regions and why they are important. The Faraday Lecture is a useful example of a large-scale vehicle for public understanding of science, and for assessing what works and what does not work when addressing young audiences. We consider the lessons learnt from the Faraday lectures in terms of bringing the IPY activities to the attention of the next generation of polar scientists using not only lectures, but a also wider variety of multi-media techniques.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2006
- Bibcode:
- 2006AGUFMED13B..08G
- Keywords:
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- 0815 Informal education