Engage: Whereas the majority of scientists agree that climate change is occurring because of humans, many Americans do not believe climate change is happening. Many also aren’t willing to agree that it is mostly due to human activities. Our country is in a state of debate over what actions, if any, should be taken to combat climate change. In this unit, scholars are asked to consider what would happen if we did nothing. In this Engage lesson, they begin a unit-long journey to find out the truth about climate change through exploration and research.
- Lesson 1: How Do We Know What To Believe? Scholars question how information on climate change is portrayed to the public, the implications of inaction, and possible solutions to the problem. By examining the public’s relationship with science, particularly those who do not have a background in science, and the methods of propagandizing science, scholars are able to better assess the reliability and bias of a source.
Explore: Through modeling and graphing, scholars discover the factors that influence and intensify climate change. They learn that greenhouse gases contribute to climate change, and increased human emission of carbon dioxide is the main culprit in the shift of climate we are seeing today. As scholars learn the process by which climate change is occurring, more questions form about what would happen if we keep doing nothing about it.
- Lesson 2: What Do Greenhouse Gases Do to the Environment? This investigation allows scholars to model the greenhouse effect to understand how our atmosphere influences Earth’s climate.
- Lesson 3: What Is Natural Climate Variation? Scholars create mathematical models of both natural and biased global temperature change. They apply this analysis to our real-world global temperature data to see that the variation of the graph is not caused by nature but is the result of human impact.
- Lesson 4: Where Does Carbon Come From? Through this whole class role-play exercise, scholars explore how carbon interacts with Earth’s systems. They act as a carbon atom to better understand where we find carbon, how it gets released into the atmosphere, and how humans have impacted the carbon cycle in recent history.
- Lesson 5: Model Man-Made Climate Change. Scholars become reinvested in the Essential Question when they model human-added carbon versus natural carbon during the investigation. Based on the knowledge they have gathered so far, they should be able to predict several possible outcomes of humans’ disruption of the carbon cycle.
Explain: Scholars learn the impact of climate change is incredibly varied. To further complicate the situation, some impacts intensify or change the probability of other events from happening. Scholars are able to describe the impacts, how it connects to climate change, and what secondary impacts it may have. They use these critical effects to construct an argument to the Essential Question.
- Lesson 6: What Will Happen to Weather? Scholars examine what a warmer ocean may mean for the development of hurricanes. By understanding the basics of hurricane formation, scholars learn that we can anticipate the impact of rising global climates on these extreme weather events.
- Lesson 7: What Will Happen to Oceans? Scholars use a NASA website to examine changes in the landscape that occur as ice melts, glaciers recede, and ocean levels rise. Scholars perform an experiment to see the impact of CO2 on water as a proxy for our oceans. Though the problem of ocean acidification may feel far away to us, the effect that an acidic ocean would have on underwater life would impact the way we and other societies across the world eat, how our coastlines look, and how certain countries attract visitors.
- Lesson 8: What Will Happen to Human Lives? To give scholars a broader sense of the global impacts of climate change, they examine six regions across the world to describe the many ways Earth will change and the impact on humans if we do nothing to stop climate change.
Elaborate: Now that scholars have all the facts about climate change, they are pushed to think about possible solutions to the problem of climate change.
- Lesson 9: Green Energy. Scholars examine different ways of fulfilling the energy needs of our society by studying different forms of energy to determine the benefits and drawbacks of each energy source and evaluate whether it is a realistic energy solution.
- Lesson 10: Lifestyle Changes. Scholars research the electricity consumption of different appliances they use frequently. They determine the amount of carbon they contribute to emissions just based on these appliances and consider what they can do to reduce their carbon footprint.
Evaluate: Scholars demonstrate their understanding of climate change by using information they have gathered throughout the unit to respond to the information around them, whether it is accurate or not. They practice responding to climate change deniers using social media, which for many people is their primary news source.
- Lesson 11: Responding to Skeptics. Scholars practice making concise arguments by writing tweets. Through this investigation, scholars feel empowered to jump into the climate change debate using the facts they have learned in class and argumentation skills they have built over the course of the year.