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Climate Change Module (Project EDDIE)

Author(s): Jessica Domino

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Summary:
Students explore how climate is changing from the recent record. Produced by Project EDDIE.

Licensed under CC Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International according to these terms

Version 1.0 - published on 30 May 2022 doi:10.25334/4MF3-1A57 - cite this

Adapted from: Climate Change Module (Project EDDIE) v 1.0

Keywords

  1. climate data
  2. climate change
  3. volcanoes and climate
  4. climate trends

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  2. Audience Level
  3. Activity Length
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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.

Specific changes made during my implementation are described in notes. 

Notes

I adapted this module to meet the needs of my course and students by building on the idea of climate change. The course was a general education requirement for non-major students with some experience working with data. The lab time for this course was one hour session per week, so I adjusted the module to fit into this timeframe. We started the climate change unit by discussing how volcanic eruptions can cause global temperature changes over the short term. Lab 9, included here, is the assignment that contains data and exercises very similar to the climate change module. This exercise allowed the students to learn how to organize, read and graph data. The following week when we worked through parts A and B of the climate change module, the students were more familiar with processing data in excel and were able to consider the graphs more carefully for a better understanding of long term trends. Much of the original content of the module remained as was published. Upon completion of both exercises, our lab time ended in an unplanned conversation of the different ways scientists are able to study climate change, in both short and long term trends. 

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