Peter Berquist: Using Carbon, Climate, and Energy Resources at Thomas Nelson Community College

• Start with PowerPoint offering tips on how to evaluate the factual and logical validity of any particular statement. This defines logical fallacies and explains how to use this type of critical reading to evaluate technical material that you as an individual may not completely understand.
• Complete the What Are Logical Fallacies activity (provide handout). This activity defines several common logical fallacy structures and provides an example of each structure. The activity concludes with students identifying which logical fallacy best fits a series of logically invalid statements about climate science. As a possible extension or assessment, instructors can encourage students to write their own logical fallacies.
• After this activity, watch and evaluate a YouTube video that presents several ridiculous claims. Identify each logical fallacy used. This can serve as a formative assessment.
• Return to the PowerPoint presentation to take the Climate Quiz. This is not really a quiz per se, rather a series of 12 statements about climate science; students are asked to evaluate each statement as true or false. Largely this activity is intended as a way to introduce common misconceptions about climate science, so it is important for instructors to review each statement and explain why the statement is either true or false.
• The summative assessment for this unit is a brief quiz.

Unit 2

• As homework before we started working with Unit 2 in class, assign students to watch a series of very short videos about carbon. We ended up reviewing a few of the videos in class, just a review.
• The "Where's the Carbon?" activity was was a great, quick, exercise to get students thinking about where we find and do not find carbon. The strength of this activity is its brevity, and it helps students start to think about where carbon is and is not.
• The Origin of Carbon Power Point provides a very comprehensive, but also short summary of how carbon atoms actually form. I really liked including this information because it gets down to true origin of the atom we are focusing on — I think this essential understanding is really important to provide to students. I found I had to keep the lecture here short because it is tempting to go into more and more detail. So, I strongly recommend reviewing this lecture file well ahead of time in order to stay on track and address the critical information and provide sufficient time for the following activities.
• Students loved the carbon cycle game. It did not take long for them to get the hang of it, and within a few minutes there was playful interaction AND sincere talking about carbon and reservoirs. This activity provided a wonderful balance between play and learning. I was a bit surprised at how long it took to play several iterations, but was reluctant to cut the activity short because learning was clearly taking place.
• Do not let finding a big sheet of paper keep you from doing this activity! We used cardboard boxes, old discarded maps, and pieced together posters in order to have a sufficiently sized sheet of paper to draw the scaled carbon reservoirs. Rather than drawing an entire circle, we drew portions of a circle, especially for the larger reservoirs. This was a powerful activity and a wonderful example of how simple math and a little sketching can create a profound graphic. We have since added an appropriately scaled graphic to use as a key that you can print out on a large-format printer (with minimum dimension of 32").

Unit 3

• Introduction to paleoclimatology presentation was an effective, brief introduction to help set the stage. It was short and sweet!
• Foram coiling activity is as also another brief activity showing the real data scientists use to infer about past climates. There are several ways that an instructor could make this a more quantitative and Excel-focused lesson, but as it stands the data and steps are pretty streamlined.
• The isotope fractionation video is an excellent resource that I have used in other classes, as well. Be sure not to miss incorporating this straightforward explanation of how light isotopes behave in response to climate and how we interpret light isotope data.
• We piloted both the Vostok ice core and PETM activities, however, the first time around took much longer than anticipated. I think one major strength of the Vostok ice core exercise is the graphical interpretation of data. In particular, the exercises pose leading questions and the data reveal many important trends about climate change in the past and the implications for our current observations of climate. We did not endeavor into the Snowball Earth resources, due to time restrictions.

Unit 4

• These activities provide an important and sound foundation of renewable and non-renewable resources, with an emphasis on non-renewable resources and how these materials form. The resources provided are concise and interactive avenues to learn similarities and differences among our energy options, gain a sense of geologic time required to make these materials, and encourage students to explore which energy options are common in their home areas.
• The content covered in these activities set the stage for more meaningful discussion and synthesis for activities in Unit 6.

Unit 5

• The introductory activity for this unit includes an interactive exploration of atmospheric CO₂ observed over several different time frames. Presenting these trends individually permits students to gain a deeper understanding of how CO₂concentrations change in the atmosphere (building on the exchange of carbon reservoirs from Unit 2). This structure is intentional with the hopes that students can more clearly grasp how modern changes in CO₂ are meaningfully different than changes in the past.
• Additional resources, such as the PowerPoint presentation and videos provide further background demonstrating the uniqueness of the observed modern CO₂concentrations.

Unit 6

• We wanted to create an activity in which students had to critically evaluate suggested approaches to "solving" some aspect of climate change. The result is the one in Unit 6. Students are presented with six different proposals, each of varying degrees of seriousness and ridiculousness, although it should be noted that there are elements to each proposal that have been seriously suggested. Students must provide thoughtful, careful, and critical evaluation of these proposals, ideally drawing on the content and knowledge gleaned from the previous units.
• As written, this exercise can fit within a 50-minute class. If additional time permits, we strongly encourage instructors to use it. As a "capstone" exercise, a little more time can likely translate to more critical evaluation of proposal and synthesis of the merits and pitfalls of each.