Metamorphic bugs and ancient forests return to the Sturgeon River this week with the opening of a popular summer nature centre.
The Big Lake Environment Support Society’s (BLESS) Summer Nature Centre throws open its doors this Monday. The centre, run out of the log cabin near Sturgeon Road and St. Albert Trail, gives kids a chance to get free lessons about nature. It typically hosts about 100 kids a week.
Running it for a third consecutive year is St. Albert native Christianne McDonald. “I’m fairly certain I have the best job in the city,” she says. “It’s the only place where I can really have fun, do what I love — which is to teach kids about nature — and get paid to do crafts.”
McDonald says she has planned eight weeks of science fun for St. Albert kids aged two to 16, including bird watching, bug catching and bean-bag tossing.
“We’re bringing back the metamorphosis unit,” she notes, in which kids will get to see butterflies, beetles and other creatures transmogrify into strange new forms. Bug week should see more ants and spiders as she breaks out the pit traps.
She’s also starting a new unit on the boreal forest. “A lot of kids don’t even know what the boreal forest is, and we live in it,” she says. The boreal is a vital source of freshwater, she notes, and has many animals with unusual adaptations in it.
The centre is open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. until Aug. 26. Call McDonald at 780-217-3983 for details.
Global temperatures hit a record high last year, says a team of hundreds of scientists, which should cause leaders to rethink their approach to climate change.
The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its State of the Climate in 2010 report this week. The peer-reviewed report, authored by about 368 researchers in 45 countries, offers one of the most comprehensive looks at climate change and trends available.
Last year was a wild one for weather, the report notes, with Washington, D.C., being buried by snow while the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver were running short on it. Floods deluged much of Australia, while temperatures reached either their highest or second-highest level on record. Two events — the shift from warm El NiĹ„o to cool La NiĹ„a and an oscillation in the jet stream — contributed to these strange weather patterns.
Last year was certainly Canada’s warmest year on record, notes Martin Sharp, a glaciologist at the University of Alberta and one of the authors of the report. Consistent with this, Canada saw the third-lowest amount of summer sea ice in the Arctic on record, the greatest summer melt in Greenland since 1979, and the continued shrinkage of glaciers around the world — with Canada’s Arctic melt showing every sign of speeding up.
While it’s tough to link any one event to it, Sharp notes, the amount of carbon dioxide in the air did rise by 2.60 parts per million last year — well above the 30-year average. Last year’s warming was consistent with what models predict would happen as a result of increased greenhouse gas emissions.
Leaders need to keep monitoring these trends and seriously rethink the steps they’re taking to address them, Sharp says.
“I don't personally believe that policy makers have been clear about the decision-making that needs to be done to properly evaluate either the magnitude of the climate change problem or the costs of dealing with it,” he says. “As a result, I don't believe we can be confident that the strategies being adopted are sensible — regardless of whether those strategies veer towards inaction or substantial immediate action.”
The full report is available at www.noaa.gov.
