On Tuesday 16th November, some Year 10 Gifted and Talented students attended a conference on Climate Change hosted by the Andover Rotary Club. The aim of the conference was for students to be able to discuss key issues on climate change with some leading experts and discuss what changes should be made in the future.
Hosted at Rookwood School, students from Harrow Way joined those from Rookwood and Test Valley schools along with members of the Rotary club. Firstly to understand what climate change is there was a presentation made by Dr Alan Parsley, a Geologist who has spent many years working in the fuel industry. He looked at relationships between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and rising temperatures over different periods of time. The resulting effects of rise in temperature where also discussed, including rising sea levels and ocean acidification.
The next guest speaker was Dr Tony Wildig, a Mining Engineer with many years of experience in research, operations and planning for oil and gas businesses. He drew up a list of different types of energy sources with the students and then looked into the sustainability, expense and efficiency of each one.
To present last was Richard Scriven, an industrial psychologist. He looked at the political constraints that certain energy sources have. After group discussion students put forward questions to to the guest speakers and gave their thoughts and opinions on where they think the government should focus our energy sources on in the future.