REGIONAL HISTORICAL DATA SETS LURE RELUCTANT STUDENTS TO SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING OF CLIMATE CHANGE

In rural southwest Montana, many students enter college with preconceived ideas about climate change that make them resistant to any new information on the subject. Even those who understand that global climates are changing often avoid translating that knowledge to thinking about impacts where they live.

We successfully challenged students’ resistance in a newly designed class in weather and climate change, funded by the Montana NASA Space Grant Consortium. With in-class direction, students analyzed historic climate data for southwest Montana that is available on the Western Regional Climate Data Center website (http://www.wrcc.dri.edu). Each student had “ownership” of a particular town, which they chose to obtain the longest possible record (around 100 years in many locations). They performed time-series analyses on temperature and precipitation data, graphing annual, monthly, and seasonal changes over the period of record. An important aspect of the work included sharing their results in incremental and final presentations to the group. Because this was new research, two students were also able to give outside presentations.

All sites exhibited discernable trends in precipitation, temperature, or both. Most, but not all, showed warming trends, with interesting seasonal variations. There was a greater variation in precipitation change, with wetter, drier, and little change observed at different sites. Having this data in hand opened useful discussions of local, regional, and global climate change; data and analysis validity; variability in the climate record; and the scientific process in general.

Funding allowed us to employ an outside evaluator, who tested students about their knowledge and attitudes toward climate science and climate change at the beginning and end of the class. We will be able to repeat these evaluations over several years, to overcome the small n-value of individual classes.