Climate Change Indicators

 

Introduction

What is Climate? Climate tells us what the weather is usually like where you live - over a period of years. The difference between weather and climate is the time scale. Whereas weather is a description of the atmosphere day by day, climate is a description of how the atmosphere behaves over a long period of time.

What is the climate like where you live? Scientists that study climate are called climatologists and they might study climate for the past 30 years, 200 years, or even 1,000s of years. How would a scientist know that there are changes in climate? What data would they look for? Let the students brainstorm ideas: temperature, snowfall, glacier melting, sea ice melting, etc

Other examples of trends in the natural world that scientists might look for include: birds altering their migration patterns; extinction due to climate changes; ice over on lakes - does the lake still ice over and for how long?

What human actions impact climate? Burning fossil fuels sends gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere. These gases trap the sun's heat and warms up the earth, much like a car sitting in the sun heats up. Scientific evidence has shown that human activities have increased the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere thus enhancing the greenhouse effect. Scientists believe that greenhouse effect is responsible for an increase in the earth's temperature by 1° F over the past 100 years.

 

 

Image Credit: Fullerton College Department of Biology

What are fossil fuels and why do we need them? Fossil fuels provide the energy we need to do much of our day-to-day activities such as driving a car or bus to school, working on computers, cooking food, and turning on the lights. We do many other activities that require energy such as walking and running, playing a sport, or riding a bike. The energy for these activities comes from the food we eat.

 

Objectives: Students examine ways in which human activities impact climate change. They will also examine evidence from a local data set to determine trends in climate change over the past 100 years.

New York State MST Standards:

Standard 1: Mathematical Analysis and Scientific Inquiry
Standard 2: Information Systems
Standard 5: Computer Technology

 

Activity 1: Students will graph historical data on the ice on and off dates for a lake in Central New York to look for a trend that would indicate climate change over the last 100 years.

Activity 2: Students will construct a bar graph of the types of activities they do each day that use energy. They will then categorize these activities by the types of energy used: fossil fuels or other.

 

Web Sources: EPA's Climate Change for Kids ; The National Energy Education Development Project ; Global Lake and River Ice Phenology ; NASA

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