Teaching Climate

This is a teaching activity in which students learn about the connection between CO2 emissions, CO2 concentration, and average global temperatures. Through a simple online model, students learn about the relationship between these and learn about climate modeling while predicting temperature change over the 21st century.

In this activity, students collect weather data over several days or weeks, graph temperature data, and compare the temperature data collected with long-term climate averages from where they live. Understanding the difference between weather and climate and interpreting local weather data are important first steps to understanding larger-scale global climate changes.

Students perform a lab to explore how the color of materials at Earth's surface affect the amount of warming. Topics covered include developing a hypothesis, collecting data, and making interpretations to explain why dark-colored materials become hotter.

This multi-lesson set is focused on environmental justice and social science. It asks students to consider inequality and justice in the context of their own lives and the environment through a series of both hands-on and research-focused activities.

Pumping Iron is a station-based game meant to illustrate the movement of dust throughout different parts of the Earth system and the effects on the climate when iron-rich dust settles into the ocean and stimulates phytoplankton growth, which then leads to the drawdown of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through photosynthesis. In this game, players collect nutrients that phytoplankton need to live as they follow the dust moving throughout the Earth system - the player with the most nutrients wins!

In this activity, students connect art and science by creating a drawing and conceptual model of the thermohaline circulation. Students get to create drawings to understand how water moves in the ocean and the impacts of that movement.

This lesson provides a demonstration and lesson focused on ocean currents. The demonstration of how cold water and warm water interact is a strong learning tool for the topic.

This visualization depicts the global water cycle. It includes how human water use affects where water is stored, how it moves, and how clean it is.

In this activity, students demonstrate their knowledge of connections between natural systems and the built environment in which they live.

Through the five lessons in this module, students will explore relationships between carbon dioxide, ocean pH, and aragonite saturation state. By examining these parameters using interactive graphs and models, students can predict whether ocean conditions support the growth and survival of shell-building marine life, both now and in the future.