Module VII: Climate or It's Getting Hot In Herrrre

How is Earth's climate connected to its geological, biological and cultural systems?

As shown throughout the course so far, the Earth system is a complex, and sometimes convoluted, connection of materials, energy, forces, and cultures. When you bring the beginnings of our planet into the picture, we expand to a universal system and discover many more connections – and much more convolution. One of the best parts of teaching 7^th grade science is that the curriculum, at least in Anchorage, is inherently integrated and it’s not much of a stretch to make connections. For instance, in one year, students will study a number of cycles or webs and through that, see this natural “recycling” as one of the fundamental parts of the natural world on Earth. They will also learn the law of conservation of energy and of matter – both of which are obvious in the cycles they have studied. However, one of the tougher parts of teaching 7^th grade science, is that it is inherently integrated and all of the major disciplines (physics, chemistry, life, earth, and space science) are taught in one single year. Not only that, but the focus is on the major concepts and “big ideas” of each discipline. This causes big problems when you have issues like were brought up in this module and with limited time and resources to teach the concepts.

The story of the origin of our universe and our planet is one such issue. Even for adults it’s hard to fully comprehend something so vast as the universe starting out as mere millimeters. One way to help students with these ideas is to walk them through the same thinking as the scientists have used. For example, the discovery of CMB is a good example of studying the after-effects of something and then using scientific deduction to get to the cause. (On a side not, it's also a very good example of serendipity in science and not having any preconceptions that might cloud your observations and reasoning) There are many small activities that can be set up to help students understand this process. It’s almost like discovering a crime scene and having to piece it back together. This type of inquiry is something students not only relate to, but love to tackle. We are not able to go back in time and watch any of this happen, so we are simply gathering all the forensic evidence we can and recreating the possibilities. I have encountered this same problem with other lessons involving things we cannot directly observe, such as atomic structure. I have used a black box to help students go through the process of observing things they can’t see based on it’s inputs and outputs or it’s influence on other things. Many of the big discoveries and big ideas of science can be reoriented as a sort of case study that is ready for inquiry. By putting the students in the scientists’ shoes, these big ideas are discovered, rather than dictated and memorized, helping students understand more truly.

Our climate is yet another vast and complex system. One problem with understanding climate (and climate change) is the physics behind the greenhouse effect, for example, is fairly simply and, as the TD video showed, can be explained using an analogy as simple as the interior of a car on a hot day. This simplicity is misleading due to the complex interactions that, over time, dictate our climate. When you throw the human industrial complex into the mix, it gets even more complicated. Then, as we have seen in the past couple lessons, you have to take the ocean and atmospheric systems into account, and it’s no longer as simple as a car on a hot day. With the content of the atmosphere heavily responsible for the Earth’s energy budget, if that changes, even slightly, so does the amount of energy in play on Earth. This increase or decrease greatly influences all kinds of other parts of the system. Species have evolved over millions of year to be good at specific things, such as living under specific conditions. When the climate changes, so does the ability of certain species to thrive. This could be temperature, chemical make-up of the environment, or the depletion or flourishing of other species, among other changes. These changes are the first dominoes in a long series of changes through interconnected systems, eventually leading to humans.

The other big idea of the connectedness of systems is once something is out of the system, often times it cannot be put back in. What’s done is done, as the old saying goes. Once a species becomes extinct, that’s it. Other times, the changes that are instantaneous one way, take millions of years the other way. Think of a lump of coal or a pocket of oil. It took millions of years for that coal or oil to form from dead organisms. Yet it takes only minutes, at most, to change completely and go back into the carbon cycle in a different form and place. These nuances of the Earth’s cycles are difficult to get across to students. Playing games showing all the possible paths of the water, rock, carbon, or nitrogen cycles, for example, helps students see the general big ideas, but not the nuances, nor are they able to grasp the time frame involved, which is geologic in many cases whereas our students operate on Twitter-time.

As we have seen in past modules and posts, humans are heavily dependent on the Earth’s systems for so many things – as are all species, of course, but we like to talk about ourselves. We build our cultures around and depend on the health of the biomes for food and for materials to make the things we need and want. We depend on the geologic make-up of different areas for everything from shelter and recreation to energy sources and mining materials. All of these have the potential to change due to climate fluctuations, both natural and human-caused. Rivers providing electricity will change with increased temperature as glaciers disappear. Some areas will become more prone to flooding due to lack of natural erosion control. Each of these changes resulting from a change in climate is in itself another first domino precipitating more and more changes. Many of these feedback into the same system, such as the melting of Arctic snow and ice decreasing the Earth’s albedo and, in turn, speeding up the melting of the snow and ice. Some of the changes are indeed double-edge swords. The opening of the Northwest Passage for transportation is a huge boost to industry, but at what cost? Many areas will be able to grow crops at a greater yield or with a greater diversity than before while others head toward being completely arid. Some areas will actually see sea level decrease as mass is removed due to glacial melting and new ocean-front property is revealed.

With so much heated rhetoric surrounding our climate, the best way to teach students about it is through inquiry and discovery. By walking through the physics first, so they have background knowledge on how the Earth’s systems move materials and energy around, one can get students ready for inquiry. Teacher’s Domain has many great resources that can be adapted for inquiry, such as this interactive about glacial change and this one about melting sea ice. These resources, like the CMB discovery, can be flipped to provide a case study for students to walk through and discover the mechanism driving such results. Students can see the changes that are taking place and then use proven mechanisms to trace their causes. Once that has been established, they can use the same line of thinking to predict and extrapolate what those changes will look like in the future under similar conditions. This discovery path also eliminates any tension from students whose parents might be skeptics or flat-out deniers. The students are allowed to come up with their own ideas based on the observations and physical concepts, so there is no wiggle room to claim the teacher was pushing an agenda. It's unfortunate that such a big scientific problem has come to this kind of thinking, but we play in the ballpark we're given. These inquiry lessons can then be combined with the great TD resources on cultural connections to climate change in this special collection. There are many videos with first hand observations of not only how climate has changed, but what that has meant for the cultures living in those changed areas.