Beaut Mid Winter Weather to Make a Lizard House

This lovely sunny weather has invigorated me and i am dealing with my garden, and noticing lots of wildlife around town - bats, tui, bellbirds, etc.
I love our native flora and fauna and would like to keep chipping away at my impact on the earth and it's resources so as not to contribute to the destruction of more habitat and species. Afterall, there is only one earth and we need to look after it - especially as our consumption and population growth spiral out of control.
Check out this website for practical advice on how to live more sustainably.

Learn how to attract lizards to your home - but beware of your cat!

Small World

Appreciate what you have... watch this video to see why. It's about imagining the population of the planet as being only 100 people and showing the proportions of ethnicity, wealth, etc. as they are today.

You will need flash and broadband... [approximately only 3% of the world's population can achieve that]

Miniature Earth

Our Breathing Space

we can breathe. We can go out in the Sun with out getting fried. We can watch life evolving all around us.
How do we do this when we are on a lump of rock hurtling through space?
We have an atmosphere. Let's find out a little more about it...

questions:

1. how come we have air to breathe?
2. why doesn't the sun fry us?
3. why does our air stay around us instead of flying out into the vacuum of space?
4. why does the air temperature change and how come we aren't frozen like we would be if we left the Earth without a spaceship?
5. where does the ozone layer exist? what is it? how does it help us? is there a hole in it? how did that happen? is it our fault?
6. do we humans have an effect on our atmosphere?
7. what is the greenhouse effect? can we replicate that in class somehow as an experiment?
8. do you like growing tomatoes or chillis or beans?

[I'm hoping you will add todays questions to this post]

here are sone links to investigate:

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Atmosphere/overview.html

http://www.sciencemadesimple.com/sky_blue.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth

http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/lect/earth/atmosphere.html

http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/academy/space/atmosphere.html

http://www.windows.ucar.edu/tour/link=/earth/Atmosphere/layers.html

http://www.cosmos4kids.com/files/solsyst_earth.html

take this quiz when you've done some research... or take it first to find out what you don't know ...

http://www.geography4kids.com/extras/quiz_atmintro/index.html

hotspots

do you know your world news?
does politics and international relations tickle your fancy?
are you a geographer?

where would you say there are political hotspots to watch out for?

today we discussed Pakistan and the state of emergency which General Musharraf has put in place... why?

any other potential hotspots in the world? places that could effect all of us if things went wrong?

AND what about ecological hotspots? perhaps the Amazon Rain forest?

OR how about environmental hotspots? like the ever growing economy of China or India using up resources?

OR countries like America and Australia who refuse to sign the Kyoto Protocol and continue to dispute global warming and the perils of carbon emissions?

please post intelligent justified opinions with references if needed.