Teaching anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) using climate models

ABSTRACT

Geography educators have long taught anthropogenic global climate change (AGCC) using geospatial data, visualizations, analysis tools and models. We examined the attitudes of teachers at secondary schools, research institutions, colleges and universities tasked with teaching using one such technology. We designed a seventeen-question online survey about the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Educational Global Climate Model (EdGCM) that was completed by 115 respondents. Researchers and educators at more than 150 research and educational institutions internationally have utilized EdGCM since 2005. There are numerous reasons why teaching AGCC with a global climate model (GCM) is attractive, and this study examined the successes and challenges teachers confront when implementing such educational technologies. Those in our sample provided insight into what methods and approaches proved effective in reinforcing conceptual understandings of the geographic processes that shape the Earth system. Our findings show educators are willing to use complex scientific models in their classroom but prefer those that enable genuine student research. We also found that more easily accessible online technologies pose fewer technical challenges and often are preferred by teachers to more complex climate education technologies.

KEYWORDS:

• Geography education
• climate modeling
• human dimensions of climate change

Acknowledgements

This work was partially supported through a McGill University Richard H. Tomlinson Fellowship in University Science Teaching given to the first author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The Google MyMap made to display this study’s sample is available in a link from the Figure 2 caption. It is also available here: https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=15USXpWrmRfW7KewLf4VBehKypJMwfAEM&ll=3.4808078626691668%2C0&z=2

Supplementary material

Supplementary data can be accessed here.

Notes

1. Hansen et al. (1983) designate their model as a general circulation model; whereas many sources refer to the same software as a global climate models (GCM) or more simply a “climate model.” GCMs are a specific type of scientific instrument different from many educational technologies labeled as climate models. GCMs are numerical models that simulate the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean on a 3-D gridded Earth system by incorporating 1. Fundamental physical principles such as the conservation of energy, mass, momentum and moisture, 2. Discrete theoretical physics such as the Navier-Stokes equation of fluid motion and 3. Empirical physics formulas such as evaporation resulting from wind speed and humidity. For the sake of simplicity, we refer to GCMs as a global climate model in this paper and the individual scenarios or runs as simulations.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the McGill University Richard H. Tomlinson Fellowship in University Science Teaching.