Unpacked Content
Scientific and Engineering Practices
Analyzing and Interpreting Data
Crosscutting Concepts
Cause and Effect
Knowledge
Students know:
- Gases that absorb and radiate heat in the atmosphere are greenhouse gases.
- Increasing greenhouse gases increases global temperature that may result in climate change.
- Climate change can produce potentially serious environmental problems that affect Earth's systems.
- Global awareness and policies have been established in response to the potential threats caused by global climate change.
- Examples of evidence for climate change (such as precipitation and temperature) and their associated impacts (e.g., affects on sea level, glacial ice volumes, and atmospheric and oceanic composition).
- The outcomes predicted by climate models depend on the amounts of greenhouse gases added to the atmosphere each year and by the ways in which these gases are absorbed by the hydrosphere and biosphere.
Skills
Students are able to:
- Compare and contrast greenhouse gas production in developed and developing countries.
- Analyze the data and identify and describe relationships within the datasets, including changes over time on multiple scales and relationships between quantities in the given data.
- Analyze data using tools, technologies, and/or models in order to make valid and reliable scientific claims about global climate change.
- Analyze the data to describe a selected aspect of present or past climate and the associated physical parameters (e.g., temperature, precipitation, sea level) or chemical composition.
- Analyze the data to predict the future effect of a selected aspect of climate change on the physical parameters (e.g., temperature, precipitation, sea level) or chemical composition (e.g., ocean pH) of the atmosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, or cryosphere.
- Describe whether the predicted effect on the system is reversible or irreversible.
- Identify sources of uncertainty in the prediction of the effect in the future of a selected aspect of climate change.
- Identify limitations of the models that provided the data and ranges used to make the predictions.
Understanding
Students understand that:
- Important discoveries are still being made about how the ocean, the atmosphere, and the biosphere interact and are modified in response to changing climate conditions.
- Scientific knowledge is based on empirical evidence, and scientific arguments are strengthened by multiple lines of evidence supporting a single explanation.
- The magnitudes of human impact are greater than they have ever been, and so too are human abilities to model, predict, and manage current and future impacts .
- Change and rates of change to systems can be quantified over short or long periods of time, and some system changes are irreversible.
Vocabulary
- global climate change
- abiotic reservoirs
- biotic reservoirs
- photosynthesis
- cellular respiration
- Greenhouse Effect
- Industrial Revolution
- carbon sequestration
- non-fossil fuel energy sources
- carbon footprint
- sea level variations
- temperature
- precipitation
- chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) = refrigerants, aerosols, foams, propellants, solvents
- methane
- nitrous oxide
- water vapor
- Kyoto Protocol
- IPCC
- The Paris Agreement
- UNFCCC
