Week 4 Materials

Day 1

1. Watch a video on climate change, produce by PBS's Frontline
2. Post-video survey.

Day 2

1. Garden Party. The point of this activity is not to convince you or change your mind about anything, but to start having a conversation about climate change.
2. Write on the handout three things you know about climate change or are wondering about climate change, and choose a number for each of the questions corresponding to how strongly you agree or disagree with each statement.
3. The Garden Party itself -- get two slips of paper, and write down two different questions or facts about a topic related to climate change.
4. Round one: spend two minutes talking to one other person about one of the topics on one of your pieces of paper and one of the topics from one of their piece of paper. You have to understand the topic and the other person's explanation or questions well enough to share it with someone else. After two minutes, pass the paper you discussed to the other person (and keep the other one). You should now have your own piece of paper and the one from the first person.

4. Round two. Speak for two minutes to another person about one of the two topics you have in your hand, then pass the paper for the topic you discussed to them (and take one from them).
5. Round three. Repeat
6. Round four. Repeat
7. Number line. You're going to stand next to a number representing how you currently feel about each of the three statements about climate change. After each round, talk to your neighbors about why they're in that spot (they may have different reasons). The goal is not to convince anyone of anything at this point, but to have a sense for yourself about what you think, and to have a sense of what other's think

Day 3

Present climate graphing activity

The climate of an area can be, at its most basic, considered the temperature and precipitation (rain and snow) throughout the year. The climate of an area depends on many factors such as

• northern or southern hemisphere
• high or low latitude
• near ocean or not
• high or low altitude
• shielded by mountains

Seattle and Spokane

1. Look up the monthly average temperature and precipitation for Seattle and Spokane at http://www.weatherbase.com/. Read the climate summary for each city.
2. What are examples of climate variables available for the two cities?
3. Make a graph that has two lines plotted on it, one line for the average temperature in Seattle and one line for the temperature in Spokane. Rescale the plot to best show the data. Label your axes. Paste the graph into your notes.
4. What similarities do you see in temperatures between the Seattle and Spokane?
5. What differences do you see in temperatures for the two cities?
6. Now make a similar graph of precipitation for the two cities. Paste it here.
7. What similarities do you see in precipitation between the Seattle and Spokane?
8. What differences do you see in precipitation for the two cities?
9. Draw a sketch of a map of the State of Washington on a marker board. Take a picture of it and paste it in your notes.
10. Based on that map what is likely to cause the similarities and differences that you see in temperature and precipitation for Seattle and Spokane?

The rest of the world

You will now look up five pairs of cities from around the world and try to determine what impact the factors listed at the beginning of this activity have on climate. You are looking for cities that are similar for all of the factors listed except one. For example, Seattle and Santiago, Chile have roughly the same altitude, latitude and are both near the coast. One way they differ is that they are in different hemispheres. Look up the monthly average weather (in other words climate) for pairs of cities from around the world using the data and climate summary from http://www.weatherbase.com/. Mark the locations of your city pairs on the map given out in class.

1. You can mark the cities on the paper map you were provided (and then snap a picture of it to paste into your notes)
2. Now make plots in plotly of the monthly temperature for each pair of cities just like you did for Seattle and Spokane. Make sure to rescale your plots to best show your data.
3. For each pair of cities paste in the plots of temperature and then answer the following questions (Wikipedia might help here)

• City name?
• Regular and severe weather patterns (e.g. monsoons, hurricanes, etc)?
• Climate classification?
• How are the temperatures differ or similar and how is that related to the factors listed above?

Day 4

Quiz on the Frontline video and graphing activity