Killer CO2 cloud – the story climate change “skeptics” hope you won’t read

From Neat-o-rama: Grazing cattle killed in the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster (Image Credit: Water Encyclopedia)

It’s not even secret.  But those propagandists who run advertising claiming that carbon dioxide is natural and, therefore, harmless, hope against hope that you don’t know the true history, that you’ve never heard of Cameroon, that you don’t know about volcanic emissions, and that you forgot the story of the killer CO2 cloud of 1986.

Read it here, “Cameroon:  The Lake of Death.”

More information:

• “Dead town monument to disaster,” New York Times 1987
• Environmental Geology 406/506, at ISU (volcanoes and carbon dioxide, among other topics)
• BBC’s “This Day in History,” August 21, 1986
• Neat-o-rama story on the 1986 disaster
• CO2 killing trees around Horseshoe Lake in the Long Valley Caldera (California), USGS Long Valley Observatory (if that link doesn’t work, try this one)

Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, shortly after the 1986 killer CO2 cloud. Image from Neat-o-rama.

Help make a cloud of witnesses:

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When is a kid “grown up?”

Sometime commenter “Cassie” asks poignantly on her blog, Relaxed Politics: How do you know when  you’re grown up?

. . . I am asking because I will be 18 in a few weeks and everything in my life is changing. It seems like graduating from high school is the least of the changes, and the one I am most ready for.

The biggest change may be that I will be allowed to use my last name and my real photo on facebook, if I want, instead of the silly silhouettes I’ve been using for three years.

No, that’s just the change I am enjoying considering, even though I hate my senior portrait and will probably have it re-done.

There’s more at Cassie’s blog — click over there, you will be grateful.  I have more than 150 students this semester who ask the same question.  Got advice?

Cassie has more reason than most kids to ask, but I’ll wager that the answers are similar regardless the kid’s situation.

Quick assist for students doing papers on climate change

So, you’re a student doing a paper on climate change, and you need help limiting the topic, or finding information about related topics.

Hot Topic has just the thing:  Interactive “debate maps.”

Hot Topic is a website dedicated to the issue climate change in New Zealand — after the book by the same name.

Does anyone know where similar maps might exist for other social studies topics?