Bringing Climate Change into the Life Science Classroom: Essentials, Impacts on Life, and Addressing Misconceptions.

Climate change is at the forefront of our cultural conversation about science, influencing everything from presidential debates to Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2016 Oscar acceptance speech. The topic is becoming increasingly socially and scientifically relevant but is no closer to being resolved.Most high school students take a life science course but significantly fewer take earth or environmental science. This leaves life science educators with the critical task of conveying information about climate change despite many having never received any formal education on the topic themselves. Earlier this year, Science magazine and the National Center for Science Education published results from the first nationally representative survey on how teachers approach climate change in their classrooms (Plutzer et al., 2016a ,b ). The researchers found that most middle school science teachers and high school biology teachers allocate at least an hour to discussing recent global warming. However, most of these teachers were not aware of the extent of scientific consensus on the topic—97% of climate scientists agree that climate change is caused by human activity. This gap in knowledge may create a sense of pressure for teachers to provide a “balanced” presentation of the issue, although the evidence suggests that to do so would only serve to perpetuate misconceptions and erode the validity of scientific consensus in the minds of students. Thus, even high-achieving students may arrive at college with gaps in their knowledge that need to be addressed before moving on to study the consequences of climate change within the life sciences.In this Feature, we highlight free online resources that will be useful for science educators teaching climate change to high school and undergraduate students.