Scholarship details
The ClimateScience Olympiad 2022 is now accepting applications. The ClimateScience Olympiad is a free global competition that brings together young people aged 12 to 25 to find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing climate concerns.
ClimateScience, a UK-based educational organization focused on climate solutions, is hosting the event. Through several educational programs, ClimateScience has reached a global audience of over 1 million monthly learners. The purpose is to identify solutions to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) (SDGs). In 2021, the ClimateScience Olympiad drew thousands of people from 149 countries to the United Nations Climate Summit (COP26) in the United Kingdom, where guest speakers included Dr. Jane Goodall, DBE, and Dr. Renate Christensen (fmr. IPCC Director).
About the Scholarship:
Humans are attempting to comprehend the natural factors that influence the climate through climate science. The energy of the Sun falling on a planet’s surface determines its climate, which changes greatly depending on latitude and season. The complicated interplay between that energy and the Earth’s atmosphere, seas, and land masses ultimately determines climate.
Climate science is not a brand-new field. For at least 200 years, scientists have wondered why the Earth has the temperature it does, beginning with work done in the 1820s by French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier, who hypothesized that the Earth’s atmosphere played a role in trapping heat energy reradiated from the planet’s surface. In the 1850s, Irish chemist John Tyndall was the first to demonstrate that water vapor, carbon dioxide, and other gases absorb infrared radiation. In the 1890s, Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius demonstrated that increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere due to coal combustion could lead to global warming. Today, supercomputers run highly precise and complex computer models to account for how climate responds to changing conditions. Scientists have made significant advancements in the data, theory, and modeling of Earth’s climate system, allowing them to more confidently forecast future climate change. Nonetheless, a number of important difficulties make precise predictions of how global or regional temperature trends will evolve decade by decade in the future unfeasible. To begin with, we can’t forecast how much CO2 human activities will emit because it depends on a variety of factors, including how the global economy develops and how society’s energy production and consumption evolves over the next few decades. Climate refers to a location’s overall weather conditions over a long period of time. Maine, for example, has a chilly and snowy winter climate, whereas South Florida has a balmy environment all year.
Present-day weather and climate are monitored by Earth-orbiting satellites, remote meteorological stations, and ocean buoys, while paleoclimatology data from natural sources such as ice is utilized to reconstruct the past. Experts have been able to extend the earth’s climatic records back millions of years thanks to cores, tree rings, corals, and ocean and lake sediments. These data give us a comprehensive picture of the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, land surfaces, and cryosphere over time (frozen water systems). Scientists then input this information into sophisticated climate models, which can accurately anticipate future climate patterns. Location, whether there are mountains nearby, whether there is water nearby, and how high up it is all influence climate. Carlisle, for example, has a cooler, wetter climate than London as a result of its distance from the equator. Another factor is because it is closer to the mountains, which are known to enhance rainfall.
Our atmosphere, a layer of gases that surrounds the globe, also has an impact on climate. These gases wrap around the globe like a blanket, keeping the sun’s heat within our atmosphere. Some gases are better at trapping heat than others. Because they allow heat to reach the planet, greenhouse gases are the gases that trap the greatest heat. However, similar to how a greenhouse works, do not allow it to escape. Carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone, as well as water vapour, nitrous oxides, and fluorinated gases, are the most frequent greenhouse gases. The warmer the earth’s climate becomes, the more greenhouse gases there are.
This indicates that human actions like burning fossil fuels, which emit greenhouse gases, contribute to climate change. The design, location, and functioning of much infrastructure that supports economic activity are all influenced by the weather. Climate thresholds and operating ranges are incorporated into infrastructure design, building, and operation procedures. When climate thresholds are exceeded, the relevance of this integration is evident. During the 2009 heatwave in Victoria, for example, thousands of companies and households lost power when the Basslink interconnector (which allows electricity to be exchanged between Tasmania and the mainland) shut down after reaching maximum operational temperature. Climate change science is unmistakable. Climate change is already occurring, and more changes are unavoidable. This is because greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, stay in the atmosphere for a long time, allowing them to accumulate over time. This also means that there will be a time lag between when we lower emissions and when we see the results of such reductions. Even if we immediately eliminated all climate-altering emissions, the globe would continue to experience rapid climate change for years to come.
Scholarship Sponsor(s): ClimateScience
Scholarship Country: United Kingdom
Scholarship Worth: $15,000
Study Level: Undergraduate
Nationality: International Students
Scholarship Offer:
- The top 10 teams will compete for a $15,000 prize pool and the chance to speak at the United Nations Climate Summit, COP27, in Egypt.
- All students will receive participation certificates and will join the CS Olympiad Discord server to become part of a global community.
Eligibility for Scholarship
Students must complete the following tasks:
- Students between the ages of 12 and 25 can register alone or in a two-person team. Everyone is welcome to register.
- The CSO22 is divided into three age groups: under 16, 17-19, and 20-25. Participants compete in the same qualifiers and solve the same kind of problem questions regardless of age. The organizers, on the other hand, exclusively compare competitors within their respective age groups. This implies they’ll score the three brackets separately and then average the results.
- You can participate up to three times total, plus once for each referral.
Nationality
The ClimateScience 2022 Olympiad for Innovators is open to all international students
Application Procedure
Are you both interested and qualified? To apply, go to ClimateScience at account.climatescience.org.
Compete against youths from all over the world to find solutions to climate change on your own or in a team of two.
Application Deadline
The application deadline for ClimateScience 2022 Olympiad for Innovators is April 10, 2022
