Coastal Climate Extension

What a busy month! I got in a little vacation time, but more recently I’ve been on the road. First, last week I attended a meeting for several university researchers who have projects funded under the North Carolina Pilot Project portion of the Ecological Effects of Sea Level Rise (EESLR) Program, under NOAA’s National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science (NCCOS) Center for Sponsored Coastal Ocean Research (CSCOR). Cool stuff, but this post is an attempt to be even more timely in addressing current events! At the beginning of this week, I was one of the instructors for the Center for Ocean Sciences Excellence in Education-Southeast (COSEE_SE) Ocean Sciences Education Leadership Institute, where a select group of middle school teachers, high school teachers, and informal educators are learning about teaching climate science and how climate changes in the short and long term affect the ocean and the Southeastern US. I had a lot of fun – and pulling together the presentations I gave is really going to help me out when I need presentations for my other extension efforts (if teachers liked it, I bet I’m safe showing it to municipal officials)! The OSELI goes through Friday, and I was hoping to get back up to Georgetown today for their discussion on how you know whether a climate resource is credible, along with activities on building communication between educators to support their climate teaching efforts. Alas, ’tis not to be. However, knowing that they’re all about to access this page in a couple hours, I want to pass along an interesting blog I just ran across that’s focused on climate credibility, among other issues. Climatesight.org is run by Kate, an aspiring climatologist in Canada. She’s put together a VERY interesting spectrum on judging the credibility of a climate source. In it, she’s very up front about where she falls on the credibility spectrum (bloggers don’t rate very high, except in a few rare cases), and admirably adjusts the content of her blog to avoid perpetuating “expert analyses” made by people who don’t really count as experts. On the Climatesight.org scale, where would you rank this blog’s credibility? Check it out! So welcome, OSELI’ers, and please feel free to comment on any post (even old ones) and let me know what you think!
Jess