The Visualizing Change project, funded by NOAA, uses visualizations and social science to help connect learners to why climate change matters to all of us, to mechanisms that drive it and to ways people can work to address it. These scripted programs use scientifically accurate and well-tested metaphoric language that points to community-level solutions.
Visualizations were developed for a variety of platforms, including flat-panel and spherical display systems. The programs are supported by a series of trainings, hosted at partner institutions (National Aquarium in Baltimore, New England Aquarium, Buttonwood Park Zoo, Seattle Aquarium, Exploratorium, and the Aquarium of the Pacific.) These trainings also provide access to a toolkit to help interpreters understand the social science that supports climate change interpretation.
Included here are scripts and resources used in these programs.
Key Learning Goals
We have a shared responsibility to engage in collective solutions to protect people, places, and
habitats.
The ocean regulates our planet’s climate by moving heat and moisture around the globe.
Society’s reliance on fossil fuels is changing the climate, primarily by adding CO2 to the atmosphere, where it acts like a blanket that traps in heat around the world. The ocean is holding most of the trapped heat, so it is getting warmer, and the planet’s circulatory system is being disrupted as a result.
The key to addressing climate change is to shift to forms of energy that do not emit carbon dioxide or other heat-trapping gases.
Energy shift is feasible. Initiatives, programs, and policy-level solutions are changing the way our communities use energy – shifting our energy use in more responsible directions.
For more information about this project, please contact David Bader, Education Director at the Aquarium of the Pacific at dbader@lbaop.org or Emily Yam, Science Interpretation Supervisor at the Aquarium of the Pacific at eyam@lbaop.org.
Science On a Sphere
