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Description
Scientists agree that the climate is changing and that human activities are a primary cause for this change through increased emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. There have been times in Earth's past that temperature and CO2 concentrations have been much higher than they currently are, so it is not just the actual temperature that is of concern to scientists, but the fact that the rate of change of temperature is unprecedented in the geologic record. We do not know how various factors will respond to such a rapid rate of change, and thus we anticipate that many species will not be able to adapt, leading to widespread extinction. In this module, students will explore how climate is changing from the recent record. They will then compare current patterns to pre-historic rates of change calculated from ice-core data and use their results to support whether or not human activity is likely to have influenced current climate change.
Project EDDIE Environmental Data-Driven Inquiry & Exploration) is a community effort aimed at developing teaching resources and instructors that address quantitative reasoning and scientific concepts using open inquiry of publicly available data. Project EDDIE modules are designed with an A-B-C structure to make them flexible and adaptable to a range of student levels and course structures.
Notes
The only changes made to the module were an inclusion of the Excel overview video and I did an interactive walk through of Excel at the beginning of the class to ensure they are all prepared to work on the module. I also added a brief “pre-quiz” at the beginning of lab using questions from the site: https://cleanet.org/clean/literacy/climate/quiz.html to see what students already know about climate change. Since these are Biology majors, many students have a basic understanding of climate change and global warming, so I wanted to get a baseline overview of their prior knowledge. All sections of the module were completed in class, with some students finalizing Part C for homework.
Cite this work
Researchers should cite this work as follows:
- MacDonald, A. M. (2022). Climate Change Module (Project EDDIE). QUBES Educational Resources. doi:10.25334/MH1D-0Y98