¡Alerta! Our World Is Changing: Revealing Impacts on Our World with Mathematics
Kyndall Brown, Dee Crescitelli, Silvia Llamas-Flores, and Carlos LópezLeiva
Climate change has brought about expansive changes and has had negative global ecological and economic consequences. In addition, the widespread prevalence of environmental pollution has been exasperated by human-caused pollution, which causes devastating harm to our earth’s ecosystem. In our previous blog we discussed reciprocity as being one of the 4R’s, which describes kinship and obligation as “cyclical” or mutual (Harris & Wasileski, 2024, p. 5). As such, we have an obligation to respect our mother Earth by limiting and/or eliminating human-caused pollution.
This blog explores littering pollution and extreme weather events, both of which, one can argue, serve as exploitation of the Earth and its resources. The intent of this blog is to highlight and raise awareness of the harmful effects of human activity on our Earth through a series of mathematical tasks and ideas designed for high school teachers. The two tasks in this blog focus on the mathematical modeling of face mask disposal and extreme weather events, both of which can be modeled by exponential functions.
In the following activities, students are tasked with doing a model analysis, creating a mathematical model that best represents the data, extrapolating, and making recommendations based on their findings. The extent of scaffolding that is needed to create and interpret the mathematical models depends on the level of experience and exposure that students have with Desmos and running different types of regressions. The following Desmos linear regression guide is provided for your convenience. We encourage you to make the tasks/topics your own by scaffolding the activities in ways that are conducive to your individual students’ needs.
Lastly, in addition to the two tasks, there are a series of ideas that can be used to explore other climate change topics using a mathematical lens. The hope is that teachers feel compelled to explore issues of climate change with their students and have meaningful and impactful conversations about what our responsibilities are to our Earth and ways to mitigate the damaging effects of climate change.
Extreme Weather
As students engage with the topic of extreme weather, consider the following discussion topics. The hope is to encourage students to use a mathematical lens to make informed and responsible decisions about the role of climate change on our Earth.
- Using a mathematical argument, based on your finding above, what recommendations would you make to stakeholders about climate change?
- If you were speaking to your high school graduating class, what message would you convey about climate change? Why? How can you use a mathematical argument to help support your message?
- Based on the extrapolation data, what are some ways that human activity can counter climate change?
Activity 1
There has been a significant increase in storms and floods in the 21st century. According to the International Disaster Database Tracking (EM-DAT), the cumulative number of natural disasters/extreme weather events in Europe since 1939 has significantly increased in recent years (Center for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (Em-Dat), n.d).
The data seems to indicate that in the past 100 years, more than 1,500 extreme weather events, including droughts, floods, storms, and extreme temperatures, have occurred in Europe, with approximately 67% of those events taking place since early 2000.
