Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Clean Air

This past week in New York City, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon hosted world leaders at the Climate Summit 2014.  The hope was to gather leaders from all walks of life to "catalyze climate action."  Climate change is an issue that not only disrupting economies today, but will be burden for every country to carry in the future.

Was the summit successful?  Will this be a step in the right direction to fix the climate change dilemma?  Where do we go from here?

Watch this video:

Or read this article from Mashable:

http://mashable.com/2014/09/24/united-nations-climate-summit-takeaways/

Were you surprised by anything that you read or watched?  The UN insists that affordable solutions are available now.  What are those solutions? What solution would you suggest?  Where do we go from here?

If you were a guest speaker at the Climate Summit, what would you talk about?  This is what Leonardo DiCaprio said last week in his opening address:

Ebola: What should we do now?

I have actually already covered Ebola last year in this blog in the April 4 post.  (You can go back and read what last year's students thought about Ebola and the potential to spread outside of Africa.)  The majority of my students were not too worried about the spread of Ebola to other countries in Africa and definitely not worried about the spread of the virus into the United States.  Should we be worried?

Articles from this weeks TIME magazine:

Timeline: The Worst Ebola Outbreak in History

"UN Launches 'Unprecedented' Mission to Combat Ebola"

Link to the World Health Organization

Link to the Center of Disease Control

Link to NPR (Includes a bunch a great articles and an awesome graph depicting the prediction of spread of Ebola by the end of this year.)

Pick an article or two from the choices above or from another article.  Start your blog post with the title of the article underlined.  Then in a scholarly paragraph explain what the article is about.  Give an overview of the article, your opinion of the article and your opinion of the Ebola outbreak.  Are we doing enough?  Are non-profits doing enough?  What do you think we should do to stop the spread of this virus?  Do you support President Obama's decision?  After your concluding statement in your post, please copy and paste the URL for the article that you read.  If you find another Ebola article from a reputable source (I can tell you if you are not sure if your source is legit or not), feel free to use other sources as long as you give me the title and URL of the article.

7 Bug and Spider Myths Squashed

     Urban myths or truly disturbing reality?  After exploring the Bess Beetle in the first unit of the school year, I thought the perfect transition into blogging would be to read an article about creepy crawlers.  Do we really swallow eight to ten spiders in a year?  Could cockroaches really survive a nuclear war?

     For our first blog post of the year, I would like you to read this short article below about bug and spider myths.  Which myth did you believe before you read this article?  Which bug or spider myth do you still have questions about?  Do you know where any of these bug and spider myths came from? 

http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/09/11/bugs-animals-insects-spiders-mosquitoes-tarantulas-science-myths/

    Once you have read the article, post a scholarly response to the article.  What did you think?  Did you like the article?  Why or why not?  Would this article convince you to be less afraid of bugs and spiders or are you still going to reach for your bug spray at first site of a mosquito?  I expect you to write this paragraph in the same fashion that you would write a paragraph for English class.  Capital letters, proper punctuation, correct spelling and format are expected.  You classmates will also write a response to this article.  Can you include a link to other cool bug sites?  What other myths would you like debunked?  In addition to your own response, I would like you to comment on at least one classmates response to the article.  All of these initial responses will be posted to my blog for the world to see, so do your best.