Fires, Floods, and Droughts: Impacts of Climate Change in the U.S.

Classroom Activities

Introduction to Climate Change

I plan to start this activity with a simple question for my students: “how is climate change currently impacting you, your family, and/or your community?”. I expect to hear a few responses about hotter temperatures and maybe a comment or two about sea level rise. However, I am not sure that students will have much understanding of why temperatures in Delaware are getting warmer, or where and why Delaware is so impacted by rising sea levels. My goal is to then help students develop a deeper understanding of what climate is and why it is changing. Much of this happens via a combination of supported by a series of slides and guided notes, and a lab. We start by creating an initial model of the climate system, which gets revised throughout the unit. Then, students complete a basic greenhouse effect lab. In this lab, students examine the temperature change of an inverted glass beaker system when exposed to a heat lamp. In the control system, the beaker is empty and the temperature change inside the beaker is roughly the same as the change outside. In the treatment beaker, CO₂ is added by combusting a small amount of ethanol, and the temperature inside gets warmer than the temperature outside. Students create simple dot plots of line graphs of temperature over time, then use their initial understanding of the greenhouse effect to update their climate system model and explain why the addition of CO₂ caused the temperature inside the beaker to increase more than the temperature outside the beaker. I then help students refine their understanding of the greenhouse effect and its relationship to climate change through textbook readings,⁵¹ YouTube videos,^{52 53} and chunked direct instruction. They revise their model one final time to reflect any new information. Students also learn about historical climate records and atmospheric CO₂ concentrations in this activity. This portion of the unit should take between two and three 90-minute block to complete.

Analyzing Historical Data

Because historical climate change occurred on relatively long time scales, it can be hard for students to understand the significance of the rates of ACC. One way to help them understand why ACC is so different from historical changes in climate is to have them interact with the data themselves. This activity asks to students to obtain, plot, and analyze historical temperature, precipitation, and sea level data for New Castle, DE. Students obtain the temperature and precipitation data from the National Centers for Environmental Information⁵⁴ and the sea level data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Tides and Currents service.⁵⁵ Though the data set used in this activity is highly localized to my district, it is easily adaptable to any location with a weather monitoring station and/or sea level data. Managing data sets like these is likely above the skill set of most students, so this activity is heavily scaffolded using a guided Google Doc. This document includes live links to data sets, guidance on how to sort and plot the data, and a tutorial on running basic statistical analysis for comparing data sets. The goal is for students to produce line graphs of their data over time, run linear regressions to obtain lines of best fit, and then to determine if the most recent 30 years of data is significantly different than the previous 30 years of data using t-tests. Students are also tasked with using their lines of best fit to predict future changes in temperature, precipitation, and sea level rise, which we can then compare to the model-predicted changes later in the unit. This activity should take two 90-minute blocks to complete, though students with experience in data analysis may complete it more quickly.

Mapping the Impacts of Climate Change

In this activity, students use a wall-size map to visualize the impacts of climate change on a global and national level. As they learn about an impact, they add a pushpin and sticky note on the map with a summary sentence of the impact felt in that location. In addition, students learn about the scientific concept/process that connects a specific impact to a warming climate: for example, when learning about sea level rise as an impact, students learn that it comes from both the melting of land ice and thermal expansion. This process is then repeated with a map of just the state of Delaware to increase the local relevance of the unit. Students also read several excerpts from the science fiction novel “The 2084 Report”,⁵⁶ which tells the story of climate change from around the world from the human perspective. While this novel is fiction, the science it includes is in line with the projections of climate scientists. It also paints a bleak picture of a future without considerable mitigation and adaptation strategies that may serve as an eye-opener to students who still have doubts about climate change and its impacts. Additionally, students can add specific impacts to the locations from the novel to our map of impacts. I consider this activity to be the hallmark of the unit because it drives home the scale but also the human component of climate change impacts. My role in this activity is to facilitate discussion of the impacts and occasionally intervening with some small chunks of direct instruction to cover the science behind each impact. This portion of the unit should take two 90-minute blocks to complete.

Inquiry Activity on Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies

After learning about the impacts of climate change, students turn their attention to potential mitigation and adaptation strategies. This is an inquiry-based activity where students ask questions of themselves and of me to identify the most pressing needs for the state of Delaware. Next they work in small groups to brainstorm some ideas for how to address those needs, narrowing their ideas down to two or three. Then they use our course textbook and internet resources to research some mitigation and adaptation strategies and compare their own ideas to what is being done (or at least being proposed). Finally, each student group presents their findings to the class. My role in this activity is to point students in the right direction for resources and to help groups prevent overlap in their mitigation and adaptation strategies so that all the groups don’t present on the same topic. I also facilitate a discussion of the merits of each group’s findings and drive home the point that stopping the emission of GHGs is the most important step that can be taken to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. This activity should take one 90-minute block to complete.

FRQ Notebook

In this culminating activity for the unit, students answer two FRQs from our course page on AP Classroom, a highly valuable resource with topic overviews, video supplements, and progress checks for each unit of study. There are more than a dozen FRQs to choose from that assess the standards this unit addresses. My students are given the “Impacts of Global Climate Change” and “Sea Level Rise” questions since they most closely align with the unit’s content. Students answer the questions in their notebook, score their response using the rubric from the AP Classroom site, and trade with a partner to repeat the scoring process. To keep conditions as close to exam day as possible, students are given 23 minutes for each question. Since they are answering and scoring two questions, this activity takes anywhere from 60 to 70 minutes to complete. I often pair FRQ notebook days with some soft review in preparation for upcoming unit exams to fill the remaining time.