One challenge in preparing pre-service teachers (PSTs) to teach about climate change comes with the complexity of student learning that can happen around the topic. To climate learning, students bring prior knowledge tied to controversy seen in their sociopolitical worlds, which can reshape otherwise predictable paths of sensemaking. This chapter discusses the need to attend to student ideas that go beyond science concepts and perhaps even embrace the social controversy that surrounds climate change as we prepare PSTs. To ground this discussion, we document one pilot instructional experience for PSTs that used a local phenomenon in which sociopolitical dynamics are salient. Using qualitative discourse analysis, we found that PSTs’ sensemaking involved (a) attending to multiple physical and sociopolitical dimensions of the phenomenon; (b) forging connections both within and across these dimensions; and, (c) linking such connections into coherent explanations through integration with prior knowledge. We discuss implications for teacher educators and how they might approach phenomena with sociopolitical dimensions in their classrooms.