Our Planet (Netflix series)

Sometimes I go somewhere for spring break. This year I went everywhere on our planet.

Our Planet | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix


As described by the producers:

Our Planet is a groundbreaking, four-year collaboration between Netflix, Silverback Films and WWF. It explores the rich natural wonders, iconic species and wildlife spectacles that still remain, and reveals the key issues that urgently threaten their existence. Today, we have become the greatest threat to the health of our planet. 

Our joint mission is to inspire people over the world to understand our planet - and the challenges it faces. If we can truly understand why nature matters to us all, and what we can do to save it, then we can create a future where nature and people thrive. 

It is very BBC Planet Earth-esque in many ways: stunning wildlife photography accompanied by a David Attenborough narration. But in it's storytelling, it does describe human impact. There are times when that impact is beneficial, but more often it is detrimental. Appallingly detrimental.

But no part of the series is "pollution porn". No images of filth being pumped into waterways or oil-covered birds struggling amid the sludge.

By and large it is a celebration of nature as it remains and an assurance that, given the opportunity, the extent to which it can recover. And photography tools and techniques have advanced significantly since Planet Earth was made.

There are disturbing vignettes. The fungus that bursts forth from the corpse of an ant whose dying behavior it commandeered, the successful orca hunt of an outmatched penguin, and "the walrus scene". The walrus scene will likely stay with me for a very long time. It should be noted that the entire eight-episode series is rated TV-G.

I may never have need or cause to direct my own students to watch this series. But others might. It seems very much in line with the NGSS three-course model's "The Living Earth". But I know I'm unwilling to use expository video resources without an accompanying set of questions. For long-form videos such as each episode of Our Planet, a sequence of surface-level questions can keep students focused on the narrative.

So I spent a significant portion of spring break preparing video question sets that teachers could use with students while watching any or all episodes of the series. For me, that requires first screening the episode as a passive audience member. Next I go through the process of watching and listening and pausing while I allow the text of the narration to suggest possible questions.

Fill-in-the-blanks are simple and can be effective. Sometimes. But not when the key word or phrase is something like "Rub' al Khali" or name of any exotic place or organism. Multiple choice can be deployed here, but it's key to develop distractors of such quality that even a clever student would be attracted to a wrong answer if they were not paying attention.

There are occasions in which multi-select checklists are appropriate. Rarely, it is even possible to create a matching sequence.

In any case, I came up with Our Planet (Netflix) Video Question Sets and have posted them to The Lessons of Phyz at Teachers Pay Teachers.

Often the producers of such programs will develop deep and expansive curriculum through which an instructor could make a semester or yearlong course based on the documentary series. And the producers of Our Planet have produced a companion book for the series.

For now, my own classroom interests have never risen to that level of ambition. Not even for The Mechanical Universe. I prefer to incorporate the resources rather than to be incorporated by them.

If you know someone who might want to replace their use of Planet Earth with something a little more environmentally conscious, send them this post. Our planet is stunningly gorgeous, as is Our Planet.

The psychological implications of climate change

The rising tide of factual observations continually encroaches on the Island of Climate Denial, leaving fewer and fewer occupants. They become more desperate with each new wave of data.

The rest of the world moves on.

One aspect of that is the acknowledgement that climate change produces psychological problems.

A recent report from the American Psychiatric Association urges people to "participate in policy and advocacy to combat climate change." 

And that's just one of the medical groups writing about the connection between adverse mental health effects and global disasters related to changing climate.

NPR: Here and Now:A Connection Between Climate Change And Mental Health — Experts Say It's Time To Take Notice

YouTube Skepticism: Nobel physicist doubts global warming

The scientific debate about the reality of anthropogenic climate change has resolved itself in the past 10-15 years. Much like natural selection and heliocentrism before it, the once-contentious scientific finding is no longer argued among serious scientists.

But there are backwaters.

Small, cult-like bands of like-minded authors and followers cling to geocentrism (and, indeed, to the notion that the Earth is flat). In America, legions of science-averse enthusiasts embrace "intelligent design" (and, indeed, young-Earth creationism).

Climate science deniers find solace in the handful of legitimate scientists who argue against the position of the vast majority of climate scientists. Their heroes on this melting ideological ice floe are—almost to a person—old white male physicists. The 2015 documentary, Merchants of Doubt, identifies a common thread among this small fraternity. Most are aging Cold Warriors who see environmentalists as "watermelons": (ecology) green on the outside but (Communist) red on the inside.

Fred Singer, Freeman Dyson, William Happer, and Ivar Giaever are leading representatives of this group. A math teacher at my school maintains a very active conservative political blog. He is a public school teacher in California whose contract is the product of collective bargaining. He opposes unionism, advocates for charter schools, and frequently derides California as the worst state of them all.

And he is an aging Cold Warrior who denies the well-established findings of climate science. When he came across an old speech by Nobel laureate physicist, Ivar Giaever, he shared it in a post.

I found it inspirational. I was inspired to write a corresponding video question set.

The video runs for 33 minutes, but it feels like an hour because it's a disjointed series of tangents masquerading as an argument. The TL;DR synopsis is that a Nobel physicist is upset that society hasn't enthusiastically embraced nuclear power, the physicist also doesn't understand climate science (and thus dismisses its findings), but finds it laudable that China adopted a one-child policy to mitigate climate change. He doesn't accept historical temperature data, but uses that very data to propagate the old "climate has always changed" chestnut.

Some viewers complain about Giaever's tones of condescension and arrogance. The title of Giaever's 2016 book, I am the Smartest Man I Know, does little to blunt such criticism. Like most elite scientists, he is an atheist, and he does reject the legislative agenda of creationists. His Nobel-winning work involved modeling superconductivity. He now serves as a science advisor for the Heartland Institute.

In any case, what about the content of Giaever's talk? It has been dismantled by Skeptical Science in a post titled "Ivar Giaever - Nobel Winning Physicist and Climate Pseudoscientist." They were thorough, but didn't seem to break a sweat in assembling their takedown.

Still though, my climate science dismissive colleague found Giaever's tangential meanderings to be compelling. I will be delighted to show the talk to my students. But when I assign a video, I virtually always have a corresponding question set. Within the constraints of a presentation's contents, I like to mix multiple choice, fill in the blank, multi-select, matching, and short answer formats. I can't always include all formats, but I do my best.

In the wake of the March for Science, I am reminded of what I was told by a speaker at The Amazing Meeting 2 in 2004. In essence, it was "The cavalry isn't coming. If you see a problem where you live or work, you will have to be the person to solve it."

So here's the Giaever Video:
Nobel Laureate in Physics; "Global Warming is Pseudoscience"


And here's a link to my question set.
YouTube Skepticism: Is Global Warming Pseudoscience?

If you find yourself at the end of the year with awkward bell schedules that need to be filled despite students slipping below optimal attentiveness, here's a candidate that speaks to big-picture science issues.

March for Science: Dean's Whys and Wherefores

When murmurs of The March for Science began circulating, I raised my antennae. When the date was announced, I booked a hotel room in DC and burned a bushel of frequent flyer miles to reserve round trip flights on Southwest.

I harbored a strongly-held personal opinion that I needed to be part of it. In the early days of planning, it wasn't obvious that there would be satellite marches. The groundswell of support made satellites a reasonable speculation. Still though, I wanted to be at ground zero.

As the days and weeks passed, others have been eloquent about why this march needed to be held. Why a fist needed to be raised. Why voices needed to be heard.

There were also the predictable backlashes to this backlash. Every call to action--real or virtual--is guaranteed to produce axe-grinding finger-waggers. "You need to not do that thing you intend to do; instead, you need to take up arms for my cause. If my cause wins, the world will be free of all problems—this one included!" This is the internet-generation's version of "Follow me; I'll make your crops grow!" I cast those aside and pressed on.

Another flavor of marginalization that often arises among the complacent comes in the form of the innocently dismissive question, "What do you hope to accomplish?" No matter how insightful the answer, the follow-up will be to suggest that you could accomplish those goals without a high-profile march/protest. Valid responses to the question vary, and bear a modicum of uncertainty. The question is intended to put participants on the defensive. The hoped-for change will not materialize immediately at the conclusion of the march, so the march was pointless.

As a seasoned debater, I never take such obvious bait. Instead, I prefer to turn the question around. I know—with absolute certainty—exactly what would be accomplished by not marching. Acceptance of an Administration that has made an enemy of science. Sweeping budget cuts for research. Denial of settled science. Ceding leadership in science and technology to China and India. Tacit approval for going full bore in the destruction of the environment in the US and around the world.

Science is undeniably the single best method that humans have developed to determine the truth of the reality in which they live. It's success is unmatched by any other method ever devised.

Right now, science is under attack. And it's losing. The American voters spoke in November, and the minority elected the anti-Science narcissist actively favored by Vladimir Putin. The Vice-President and the Secretary of Education are Creationists. The President thinks Climate Change is a tactical political concoction of the Chinese. The chief of the EPA has long been an enemy of environmental protection.

So we march to support the principles of science. Principles that helped make the United States a great nation.

A nation makes an enemy of science at its own peril. Some nations have done so. They are not nations many American is eager to migrate to.

My friend, Neil deGrasse Tyson, says it much better than I do.



In my next post, "The Day Of," I'll tell the story of my Earth Day 2017 in Washington, DC: The March for Science.

Before the Flood

I am grateful to Bree Barnett Dreyfuss and Dan Burns for keeping The Blog of Phyz vibrant while I hunker down with the development of basic (non-lab based) Earth Science curriculum and juggle four preps, two of which are AP.

Last Sunday, National Geographic premiered Leonardo DiCaprio's Before the Flood, a worldwide journey of discovery, doom, and hope relating to the current state of climate change science and politics. He's not putting this highly-produced, cinematically stunning production behind any paywalls/ DiCaprio means for you to see it.

National Geographic: Before the Flood HD (Complete: 1h35m) TV-14



As it happens, my Earth Science students are in the midst of their unit on Climate, to be followed by their unit on Human Impact. Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and Alanis Morissette's Global Warming: The Signs and the Science are over a decade old now.

So I tinkered and toiled to develop a set of video questions to keep the students engaged in this otherwise passive activity. The intent is that it's enough to keep them focused but not so much they fall behind during the screening. This is what I produced.

Before the Flood Video Questions (PDF)

Another nice (and recent) production is National Geographic's Bill Nye's Global Meltdown (feat. Arnold Schwarzenegger). I leave it to others do develop curriculum for that one.

Too many teachers are getting climate science wrong

There is consensus among climate scientists:

"They've all said: [climate change is] happening, and it's being caused by human activity. Add to that the fact that most of the published literature that you see in the big journals, like Science and Nature and Geophysical Research Letters, is all showing a consensus. It's overwhelming."

But many classroom science teacher are getting climate science wrong. How so?

Well, roughly 30 percent tell students that humans are only partly to blame for climate change, along with natural causes. The problem with that, Plutzer says, is that it sends mixed messages, suggesting that the causes of climate change are still up for debate — when there is no debate among the vast majority of climate scientists. As for the rest ...

"About one in 10 [teachers] seem to be denying a human role altogether," while the remaining 5 percent don't talk about causes at all.

It's likely we came up in a time when the debate over global warming was robust, and consensus did not yet exist. And we may be accustomed to basic tenets of science not evolving so quickly. So we're comfortable teaching climate science as we learned it 20 years ago or so.

But the needle has moved on this one. Fairly dramatically. If we hope to convey contemporary reality to contemporary students, we need to move out narrative accordingly.

NCSE: Climate Confusion Among US Educators

NPR: Why Science Teachers Are Struggling With Climate Change

What's Really Warming The World?

Professional email listservs are treasure troves of good ideas and pedagogical sharing. I love them, and have been greeted by people I have never met before with "Oh you're that Bree! You're always commenting / replying / asking questions on [insert listserv name here]."

This link to a Bloomberg Business graphic called "What's Really Warming The World" recently came through one such listserv and I wanted to forward it to everyone I know. The Blog of Phyz seemed like a faster route.

The graphic and accompanying article discuss each of the most common suspected causes of our global climate change and general increase in global temperature. The data is based on the findings from NASA's Goddard Center for Space Studies.

The 1.4 degree temperature increase in our global temperature is plotted from 1880-2005. Each of the potential contributors is discussed in turn and their influence on the global temperature plotted. "Natural Factors" (orbital changes, the sun, and volcanoes) are discussed first followed by "Human Factors" (land use, ozone depletion, aerosol use and green house gases). I found the visual powerful and scientifically intriguing and that doesn't happen too often.

Click the link to the article: the graphs are large and animated. And compelling.

New video questions—Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey

I've updated the "Cosmos in the Classroom" page to include question sets for episodes 1–12 of the Neil deGrasse Tyson-hosted Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.

The Cosmos page still has all the question sets for Carl Sagan's Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Those pages have been updated to include name, period, date info in their headers.

So now there are sets for episodes I-XII of Sagan's Cosmos and episodes 1-12 of Tyson's Cosmos. Each series has 13 episodes, but my intent is for students to watch those final episodes without question sets.

Cosmos in the Classroom

My own classroom practice is to follow each unit with an episode of Cosmos. (Sagan's in Physics and Tyson's in AP Physics 2.)

I'm disappointed that Sagan's Cosmos was been removed from streaming video at Netflix and Hulu in September, 2013. That prohibits me from using these lessons as "flipped classroom" assignments.

I own the DVD version of both "seasons" of Cosmos. But I've noticed differences in the episodes on DVD compared to the episodes that stream on Netflix. Some are trivial and insignificant. But one invalidated a question I wrote in an early draft of the Episode 4 question set.

I hope someone out there is cataloguing all the "disc vs. streaming" differences. I'm not even sure why they exist at all. But I haven't delved deeply into the issue, as so many other projects beckon.

London skyscraper melts cars

The latest example of architecture that ignores geometric optics brings us to London. The so-called "Walkie-Talkie" building includes mirrored panels arranged on a concave surface.

No doubt the architect thought it looked so cool. But it burns so hot.

It was sure to stand out; no other building in the city has such bold curves. But there's a good reason for that. The building claimed its first victim of note recently.



The contractors blow this problem off, blaming the sun for its current position in the sky (how dare be up there so unexpectedly?) and suggesting the problem will be short-lived (a few weeks).

The US is not immune to such architectural oversight. Las Vegas is home to VDARA Death Ray:



I wondered if no one took physics anymore. But then I remembered that I have not taught geometric optics in my Physics 1 course since before California Academic Content Standards were adopted. Our "Grade A" Physics Standards dropped geometric optics.

But geometric optics do not return with Next Generation Science Standards. And with the AP Physics B redesign, geometric optics is relegated to the second year of AP Physics (AP Physics 2).

So expect to see more of these "death ray" buildings pop up in America and around the world. The increased sunshine from climate change will only add to the trouble.

Atmospheric CO2 data: The animated version

Representing the data on the history of global atmospheric carbon dioxide in an engaging manner poses a challenge. I submit that this animation, uhm, rises to that challenge. I'll be here all week!

Time history of atmospheric CO2



Hat tip: Paul Doherty