Google Earth Community: Hurrricanes and 'Global Warming'

The Experiment.

You will like this.

A couple of weeks ago, two of my Grandchildren came to me and said
"heh poppy, mum told us to come and see you and ask if you could tell us all about this Global Warming deal"
" OK, but it might take a while " I told them.

These little tackers just love practical demonstrations, so I started to think of what I could do to entertain them as I started telling them about the history of the planet.

Practical demonstrations mostly always start with a trip to poppys back shed and workshop, so the little ones were instantly hooked and more than happy to put up with what they knew was going to be a long winded and probably boring explanation of this thing called 'Global Warming'.

Bingo, it all came to me as soon as I spotted the old white polystyrene float attached to the now dissused crab trap.
We had a little geography lesson as we drew all the countries on it with different coloured textas and then finished it off with the imaginery lines of the equator, tropics and polar lines. Actually , it looked quite good after the kids finished the colouring in.
We stuck a bit of old plastic conduit through the hole in the centre of it and there it was, a perfect model of the earth ! complete with handleable axis.
It surprised me how quickly we were able to cover our model with ice by commandeering Grandmas deep freezer and spinning the earth in a bowl of chilled water, every ten minutes or so another layer of ice formed on the earth before our very eyes. While the earth was going through the final stages of getting the last of the ice ages applied we went in search of the sun,,, what better than the old gas heater that was tucked away in that department of the shed.

All set, the gas heater fired up, a couple of seats set up around a plastic bucket in front of the gas heater, all we had to do to commence the experiment was to remove the earth from the ice age generator.

Nothing like a bit of audience participation to keep up the interest levels, so we all took turns in holding and rotating our frozen model earth just in front of our substitute gas fired sun.

Well, it didn't take long before the ice started melting, and as we couldn't replicate the earths gravitational pull, the plastic bucket positioned underneath certainly was handy as the rapidly warming ice turned into water and dripped away.
It was truely amazing to watch as the middle part of the earth, as it was closest to the gas heater, melt away first, exposing the equator and colourful parts of the countries that the kids had previously drawn.
The longer we rotated the earth in front of the heater, the further the ice receded and melted away from the centre until eventually all that was left of the ice layer was a couple of bits at either end of our earth.
At this stage it was quite evident that the centre was warmish to touch while the two ends still were quite cold as the ice was still there.
Our experiment came to an abrupt end when like trying to hastily eat an icecream on a stick on a hot day,,,, the end bits unceremoniously dropped off and splashed into the bucket of warm water !

I thought that I had done well to show the kids this practical demonstration, and suggested that we go and try a similar experiment with an icecream on a stick,,, when the questions started !

" but Poppy, that can't be what's causing Global Warming,,, if us humans stop doing all the bad things we do, global warming will stop, won't it ? "

" Poppy, can we make another one with volcanos and bushfires and everything on it ? "

and you'll really like this one,,,

" heh Poppy, now that we've finished that demo , can we stick a penny bomb in it and go out back to see what happens ? "

(Credit; GrinningPlanet, Mark Jeantheau)