After a night at my friend Julia’s apartment and retrieving my bike (which Julia stored in the corner for the week), I biked to Environmental Charter High School near Manhattan Beach in L.A. and talked to two classes of students. The school requires all of its students to take environmental science, and I enjoyed looking at photos on the walls of field trips to natural environments far away from the city school.
Today I talked at University High School (it’s a high school, not a University) in West Los Angeles. The teacher, Mr. Ransom, who has masters in physics and has used computer models, argued that our models of the climate are simply not good enough to act on. He does not trust them.
Can we trust these computer models predicting future warming? These models break the world into a grid, use basic physical equations, and figure out weather in every cell for the course of a year for many centuries.
While these complicated models are not good at simulating some aspects of the climate (tropical rain patterns and the effects of sea ice, for example), they can generally reproduce the current climate of the planet. Most impressively, we can well simulate changes in temperature over the past century, giving us confidence that we do understand how the world’s climate works. In 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which reviewed all current climate science, decided that these models were good enough to make predictions, and the models have improved since then. While Mr. Ransom may have been correct a decade or more ago, I don’t think he is correct any more.
This is why I feel I can make claims about California’s future—the science is good. To see a better defense of climate models, click here. To run a simple one on your own computer, click here.
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Today I visited Ventura High and Cabrillo Middle school in Ventura. I talked to two earth sciences classes at Ventura High, and two classes of 6th-graders at Cabrillo middle school. I highly recommend clicking on the picture (actually a movie) on the right.
I visited Pacific Grove High on the Monterey peninsula and talked with Ms. Long’s earth sciences class before leaving town at noon. The school sits on a hill well above the ocean, and it was tiring to ride up from the research station to the school. Pacific Grove High had a student run news service, which all the students watched at the beginning of the period (it was somehow broadcast to the television in the room).
After visitng Mountain View High in the morning, I got in my car (which is now for sale…) and drove half an hour up to Thurgood Marshall High School in the Bayview district of San Francisco. I met with teacher Ellen Yoshitsugu, and then talked with her 9th grade earth sciences class and her 12th grade AP environmental studies.
Perhaps the most interesting parts of my school visits have been seeing what different schools in the bay area are like. People in the bay divide themselves impressively between their municipalities. At Palo Alto High, the majority of students are Caucasian, and you would have no idea that over 40% of California is Latino. In east San Jose (or East Palo Alto), you would have no idea that California is anything but Latino. I think that Mountain View (see post after this) was actually the most representative mix of ethnicities and backgrounds in the area.
Thurgood Marshall High was a diverse mix of Asian, Latino, and African Americans. It is difficult to make more generalizations other than appearance, however, in my short visits. The two classes I talked with at the school were quite different. The first class, a 9th-grade class, was very difficult to connect with. The second class, a senior AP environmental studies was quite interested in this trip. A number of the students stayed after the class ended and talked with me about college applications as well as about my trip.
