This beautifully designed interactive world heat map allows students to see how different global warming scenarios will impact the temperature around the world.
Students can read stories, which are tagged on the map, about how global warming is affecting people and their environments.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This map is very simple and intuitive while providing an impressive amount of information.
Clicking the question mark in the top right-hand corner of the screen will lead students on a helpful tour of the resource.
Temperatures are provided in both Celsius and Fahrenheit.
Additional Prerequisites
Clicking on the circular "i" icon will provide more information, which is especially helpful for the "wet-bulb" data sets.
Students should pay close attention to how the legend changes when they choose a new data set.
Differentiation
Middle school science, geography, or math classes could assign students specific cities to research using this resource. Instruct students to zoom in on their city and click on a box to get specific data. Students can record the average temperature for each warming scenario and then make a line graph to show how the average temperature is expected to change as the global temperature rises.
Biology and health classes could discuss why wet-bulb days are dangerous for humans.
Other resources on this topic include this IPCC video on the potential impacts of global warming reaching 1.5°C, this articleon the increase in wet-bulb temperatures, and this video on the rising temperatures in Jacobabad, Pakistan.
Scientist Notes
The resource models warming scenarios to enable students to compare past, recent, and future climates. It provides the assumption that modeling the climate at different levels of warming works better than providing specific dates. Understanding the number of heat days at different latitudes can help us to design specific adaptation strategies at different levels to offset risks of uncertain weather patterns. This map is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-2 Analyze and interpret data on natural hazards to forecast future catastrophic events and inform the development of technologies to mitigate their effects.
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
HS-ESS3-5 Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.
College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Standards
Dimension 2: Geography
D2.Geo.2.6-8 Use maps, satellite images, photographs, and other representations to explain relationships between the locations of places and regions, and changes in their environmental characteristics.
D2.Geo.1.9-12 Use geospatial and related technologies to create maps to display and explain the spatial patterns of cultural and environmental characteristics.
