The Teacher-Friendly Guide to Climate Change

This book was written for teachers who could benefit from a “teacher-friendly” resource on climate change. Our focus audience is high school Earth science and environmental science teachers, but we expect that a much wider audience will find it useful, including educators of other grade levels, subjects, and contexts, as well as non-teachers who find the approach helpful. Ultimately schools may find it an effective strategy to incorporate climate change across disciplinary boundaries, including all STEM subjects, social studies, and other humanities. Climate change is a scientific issue, but it is also a historical, social, psychological, and economic issue that can only be deeply understood through mathematics, language and art. Like any book about a topic as complex and growing as climate change, this one is just a starting point, thus we have listed sets of resources at the end of each chapter. This book focuses on scientific aspects of climate change: how climate works and why scientists think it’s changing, and the science and engineering behind the steps that would mitigate climate change and enable humans to adapt to climate changes that do occur. We focus especially on why scientists think human-induced climate change is happening, yet we do not present the existence of climate change as a debate. While all scientific hypotheses are, in principle, provisional, there is such a substantial set of independent evidence that climate change is happening now, built across decades by thousands of climate scientists internationally, that we treat the broad phenomenon of human-induced climate change as effectively “true.” There is, however, scientific uncertainty about countless details such as the rates of change and interactions among components of the climate system; this is the nature of research on all complex systems, and is important to understand as an aspect of scientific practices.