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A funny thing happened just before a ceremony was to be held last week to commemorate a $3 million sea wall around the village of Kivalina way up on Alaska's Arctic coastline. The village, home to Inupiat natives for 4,000 years, is about to be washed into the sea, and the 1,800-foot wall is supposed to stop that. Alaska There's growing evidence that villages in the far North like Kivalina, Alaska, are being eaten up by the ocean due, at least in part, to global warming. (Northwest Arctic Borough,The Anchorage Daily News/AP Photo) But along came a modest storm, with winds of up to 40 miles per hour, and 160 feet of the wall washed out. The ceremony was canceled.

The 1001 Flat World Tales Writing Project is a creative writing workshop made up of schools around the world, connected by one wiki. This blog will be the home to the award-winning stories from each group of schools that participate in the workshop, different topics, different grade-levels, different cultures, brought together by the power of stories.So, enjoy the tales, click around, meet the authors - and check out their blogs!

It is most appropriate for Alaska to be hosting this week's Indigenous People's Global Summit on Climate Change here in Anchorage. Alaska's indigenous people know well a cruel irony of global warming: Those who are suffering the most from a warming climate are those who contribute least to the problem -- and they generally have the fewest resources to cope with the damage. Warming trends in the world's Arctic are undeniable. Sea ice is shrinking, giving storms more chance to pound unprotected shorelines and eat away at low-lying communities. Melting permafrost causes homes and other buildings to heave and twist.

Earlier this year, the World Bank released yet another in a seemingly endless stream of reports by global institutions and universities chronicling the melting of the world's cryosphere, or ice zone. This latest report concerned the glaciers in the Andes and revealed the following: Bolivia's famed Chacaltaya glacier has lost 80 percent of its surface area since 1982, and Peruvian glaciers have lost more than one-fifth of their mass in the past 35 years, reducing by 12 percent the water flow to the country's coastal region, home to 60 percent of Peru's population.

The Obama administration's carbon tax spokesman - the one who should sell this to the country - should be the president's national security adviser, Gen. James Jones, not the environmentalists. The imposing former head of the Marine Corps could make a powerful case that a carbon tax is vitally necessary to stimulate investments in the clean technologies that would enable the U.S. to dominate E.T., while also shifting consumers to buy these new, more efficient and cleaner power systems, homes and cars. He could make the case that the country with the most powerful clean-technology industry in the 21st century will have the most energy security, national security, economic security, healthy environment, innovative companies and global respect. That country must be America.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have established that "Environmental literacy" is integral to NOAA's mission. It has a central role in its strategic plan by recognizing that "all of NOAA's long-term goals ultimately depend on the public's capacity to understand and react to Earth system science and ecosystem conditions." NOAA's Climate Program Office Education and Outreach team are developing the climate part of NOAA's environmental literacy priority through a partnership with NOAA's Office of Education, outside agencies and organizations. The Climate program office is beginning the process of developing the climate literacy essential principles and fundamental concepts framework.

Welcome to our Science Alive project! We are students in two Middle School Grade 8 classes that have been working on a Science topic of our own choosing. First, we chose a topic and then we had to create our own wiki page that demonstrated our understanding of our topic. We had to show Higher-Order Thinking Skills as seen in Blooms Taxonomy.