Greta Stacy is a high school science teacher in Doha, Qatar. She has previously taught in Ecuador and the United States.
This topic has two questions that students can engage with: (1) How well can scientists understand and model the physics of climate systems? and (2) How can advancements in computing help scientists improve their models? As an introduction to this topic, students can use this video to learn about the scientific accuracy of climate models. To dive deeper, this 5-lesson unit uses the concept of video games to engage students in learning about how climate models are developed. This topic is important to teach because it addresses a key component of climate skepticism, which is that climate models are unreliable and their predictions cannot be trusted.
Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative
The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.
Climate models can give us a preview of how humanity’s actions—or inaction—will change our planet over the coming decades and centuries. They reveal what happens to temperatures, sea levels, and other factors under different scenarios, such as if people cease creating climate pollution or if they go on with business-as-usual-emissions. But because the planet is such a complex system, they aren’t perfect: climate models have uncertainties that grow larger as they go farther into the future. Research that improves our understanding of climate physics, as well as new innovations in computing that help modelers work with enormous data sets, can shrink those uncertainties.
That will make climate scientists more confident in the precision of their long-term predictions, explains MIT professor of oceanography Raffaele Ferrari—especially when it comes to the fine details of how climate change will affect different regions differently.
