Critical Thinking

1. Critical Thinking • Definition: a type of reasonable, reflective thinking that is aimed at deciding what to believe or what to do. • Importance: a part of the formal education process which becomes increasingly significant as students progress through a university curriculum and into a professional environment. • Example: global climate change … four choices. • http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ • Method of Practice: • Exercise: break into 9 groups of six and discuss one of the issues listed below, developing a position on what to believe – • Great Lakes water diversions • Endangered species triage • Clean Coal

2. An Approach to Critical Thinking 1. Organize your present state of understanding. • What have you been told about it? • What do you know about it? • What is your opinion on the topic? 2. Perform additional research. • Keep an open, but skeptical, mind (e.g. Wikipedia) • Be attentive to vocabulary/concepts that merit clarification. • Gather research results, accepting or rejecting resources based on the merit of their argument and your experience, judgment, and beliefs.

3. An Approach to Critical Thinking 3. Establish your position. • Organize the accepted resources according to a pattern leading to a defendable position. • Review each resource seeking to identify and clarify opinion, prejudice, or bias. • Opinion is a belief or attitude towards someone or something which is based on an insufficient foundation • Prejudice is preconceived opinion without basis or fact. • Bias is a one-sided perspective, a tendency that lacks a neutral point of view. • Prepare a statement of your position, supporting that position by references to reliable sources.

4. Clean Coal Few if any of us buy coal, yet we regularly see Clean Coal advertised on television, e.g. Clean Coal: Now Is The Time, http://www.americaspower.org/video Coal is not clean; it is essentially highly compressed dirt. The combustion of coal yields flue gas, fly ash and heat. Flue gas contains sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen, both acid rain precursors and carbon dioxide and unburned hydrocarbons, both greenhouse gases. Fly ash contains a suite of heavy metals including arsenic, cadmium, chromium and lead. Coal combustion is the largest anthropogenic source of the mercury that contaminates fish flesh. What’s up with Clean Coal? Clean Coal: Now Is The Time

5. Endangered Species Species extinction is rightly considered to be a natural feature of the evolutionary process. However, the rate of species extinction is soaring well beyond that expected of simple evolution. Human activity is the driving force behind the phenomenon. Faced with a lacked of resources, both money and person power, conservations have proposed a sort of endangered species triage … prioritizing those organisms which will receive protection from extinction. Is conservation triage a bright new idea, a necessary or are compromise of are scientists selling out our natural biodiversity? What’s up with conservation triage?

6. Great Lakes Water Export The Great Lakes Compact, approved by the legislatures of the eight Great Lakes states and by Congress and signed into law by President Bush in 2008 prohibits (with some limited exceptions) new or increased diversions of water outside the Great Lakes basin. Dr. David W. Watkins, Jr., Professor of Civil & Environmental Engineering at Michigan Tech, has calculated that a withdrawal of 200 million gallons of water per day from Lake Erie would result in a drop in water level of only 1 cm over the course of a year. Much, much less than the predicted impact of climate change phenomena. What’s up with The Compact?