A 5E Lesson About Global Climate Change

This great article is written for an activity laid out in a 5E method. The engagement has students wondering about the connection between sunspots and economy. This is followed by students... See More

This great article is written for an activity laid out in a 5E method. The engagement has students wondering about the connection between sunspots and economy. This is followed by students exploring NOAA data. As the students cycle through the rest of the E’s in this form of learning they come to conclusions that contribute to their understanding of global climate change in relationship to sunspots. It is a very good idea for a contemporary problem that students need to know about.

Correlating Sun Spots to Sea-Surface Temperature

This article describes a wonderful project-based lesson that could be used with high school students in an Earth/Space Science course. The objective of this lesson is to evaluate causality o... See More

This article describes a wonderful project-based lesson that could be used with high school students in an Earth/Space Science course. The objective of this lesson is to evaluate causality of changes in the solar surface to changes in regard to climate change and global warming. Students use graphing calculators and online data bases that have data for the number of sunspots that have occurred each month (from NOAA) and from sensors that read sea-surface temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean. Students select a 16 month period to gather data for each of these variables during the same time frame, and then graph it to see if there appears to be a causal relationship. They are given a false hypothesis from scientist named William Jevons who predicted that sunspot activity had a negative impact on our economic prosperity by causing global warming, droughts, and other events to take place. Thus students set out to find proof to support this hypothesis, and end up finding out that there doesn't