Summative Assessment

Reminder!

After completing your Summative Assessment, don't forget to take the Module 8 Quiz. If you didn't answer the Learning Checkpoint questions, take a few minutes to complete them now. They will help your study for the quiz and you may even see a few of those question on the quiz!

Global Energy Consumption, Carbon Emissions, and Climate Activity

In this activity, we will explore the relationships between global population, energy consumption, carbon emissions, and the future of climate. The primary goal is to understand what it will take to get us to a sustainable future. We will see that there is a chain of causality here — the future of climate depends on the future of carbon emissions, which depends on the global demand for energy, which in turn depends on the global population. Obviously, controlling global population is one way to limit carbon emissions and thus avoid dangerous climate change, but there are other options too — we can affect the carbon emissions by limiting the per capita (per person) demand for energy through improved efficiencies and by producing more of our energy from “greener” sources. By exploring these relationships in a computer model, we can learn what kinds of changes are needed to limit the amount of global warming in the next few centuries.

Instructions

Read the activity text and then run the experiments using the directions given on the downloadable worksheet below (also repeated here in the following pages). We recommend that you download the worksheet and follow it, writing down your answers as you go through the exercise. But first, view the video at the top of the "Experimenting With The Model" page, linked to below. You will then need enter your answers in the summative assessment.

Files to Download

Download worksheet to use when submitting your assignment

Submitting Your Assessment

Once you have answered all of the questions on the worksheet, go Module 8 Summative Assessment (Graded). The questions listed in the worksheet will be repeated as a Canvas Assessment. So all you will have to do is read the question and select the answer that you have on your worksheet. You should not need much time to submit your answers since all of the work should be done prior to clicking the assessment quiz.

Grading and Rubric

This assignment is worth a total of 19 points. The grading of the questions and problems is below: