Climate Models and Uncertainty Educator Guide

TILclimate uncertainty guide for educators

Photo Credit

Pavel Brodsky via Unsplash

This Guide for Educators was developed by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative as an extension of our TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate) podcast, to make it easier for you to teach climate change, earth science, and energy topics in the classroom. It is an extension of the TILclimate episode "TIL about uncertainty."

Browse all TILclimate guides for educators.

Description

Earth's climate system is enormously complex, and scientists develop climate models to understand how climate change will play out in different parts of the world. Students play a climate resilience game, and then explore the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 5th Assessment Report to learn more about how climate scientists handle uncertainty in models.

SWBAT:

Understand that scientists use multiple models to predict the future of Earth’s climate.
Explain the importance of agreed-upon language for uncertainty.
Understand that specifics may be uncertain, even while the overall trend is very clear.

Skills:

Graph reading
Close reading of scientific text
Group communication

Standards:

HS-ESS3-5 Analyze the results from global climate models.
RST.11-12.2 Determine the central ideas or conclusions of a text; summarize complex concepts, processes, or information presented in a text.

Disciplinary core ideas:

ESS2.A Earth Materials and Systems
ESS2.D Weather and Climate
ESS3.C Human Impacts on Earth Systems

What is included in this Educator Guide

How to use TILclimate Educator Guides (Download)
Teacher pages (Download)
- Includes materials, discussion questions, background resources, and adaptation suggestions for science, social science, and ELA teachers
Student pages (Download)
- NOAA Beat the Uncertainty hands-on game
- Reading: Representative Concentration Pathways
- Reading: IPCC Confidence and Likelihood
- Excerpts from IPCC Summary for Policymakers