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We give science teachers the tools and skills they need to help their students overcome misconceptions and misinformation about climate change and evolution.
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Local Climate Impacts
Let's take a gamble... In this lesson, students delve into local impacts of climate change and try their hand at beating the odds to see how climate change really is loading the dice and increasing the odds of more extreme weather.
Age Level
Grades 5-12
Duration
1-2 50-minute periods
Disciplinary Core Ideas
- HS-ESS2.D3: Changes in the atmosphere due to human activity have increased carbon dioxide concentrations and thus affect climate.
- HS-PS3.A1: Energy is a quantitative property of a system that depends on the motion and interactions of matter and radiation within that system. That there is a single quantity called energy is due to the fact that a system’s total energy is conserved, even as, within the system, energy is continually transferred from one object to another and between its various possible forms.
- HS-PS3.B1: Conservation of energy means that the total change of energy in any system is always equal to the total energy transferred into or out of the system.
- HS-PS3.B4: The availability of energy limits what can occur in any system.
- HS-PS3.D1: Although energy cannot be destroyed, it can be converted to less useful forms—for example, to thermal energy in the surrounding environment.
Performance expectations
- HS-ESS3-5: Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.