This video describes the ways that attribution scientists can identify the links between extreme weather events and climate change.
It describes how the findings from the most recent IPCC reports that unequivocally found that human activities are causing global warming.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This video helps students understand the level of detail and accuracy involved with climate models.
It highlights the sound science and global scientific consensus about climate change.
Additional Prerequisites
Students should be familiar with the scientific method.
Differentiation
Government and civics students could discuss the implications of this research with regard to national policies and funding.
Science and social studies classes could use this when discussing climate action, climate policies, and global climate action.
Have students read a much older summary report from the IPCC (maybe from the 1990s) that uses different language to describe the certainty of human causation in global warming, so that students can compare the two reports. What do students notice has changed? Does this help explain why bolder actions may not have been taken in the past? What other factors may have been working against bold climate action?
As an extension, have students watch The Cost of Carbon and then review this Table of Solutions to come up with a solid argument for taking climate action, select which actions should be prioritized, and support their argument with data.
Scientist Notes
This resource is a 6-minute video that explores the state of attribution science, which is a field of study in which we attribute a portion of a given extreme weather event directly to human-caused climate change. A warming event in the eastern Pacific Ocean is used as an example. This resource does an excellent job describing the complexities of attribution science in a clear manner and exploring the impacts that climate change and attribution science will have on our decision-making in the future. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Science and Engineering
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-2 Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects.
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’s systems.
