Teaching Climate

The lesson plan describes activities focusing on the big question, does eating locally grown food help reduce your carbon footprint? Many elements are interconnected and function together to create the natural and productive living system that is your garden. At the end of the activity guide there are additional lesson plans, activity guides, and videos that can help you bring together soil, water, habitat, food, and community to explore your dynamic garden ecosystems.

Students create a model of sea level rise based on the melting of land ice, sea ice, or grounded ice. Student predictions are recorded and models are run. Making explanations based on data, cause and effect, and asking questions are emphasized in this activity.

Students describe the basic principles of nuclear chemistry, discern between diagrams and representations of nuclear equations and processes, and use context clues to correctly categorize nuclear events.

This video provides history on product development by General Motors and other industries that led to the release of Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). It explains the connection between global warming and the ozone hole, chemical build-up in our lower and upper atmospheres, the increase in GWP gases, increased air quality ozone alerts and the 1987 Montreal Protocol that banned the use of CFCs globally.

This is a simulation to explore how climate change will affect a specific region in the coming decades. Graphs and maps in The Climate Explorer help students understand past, present, and future climate projections for their location.

This short Youtube video shows a visual model of greenhouse gases using tennis balls, explaining why carbon dioxide absorbs more heat energy than oxygen or nitrogen.

This tribal climate tool provides maps, graphs and reports that summarize projected changes in climate for specific tribes in the Pacific Northwest and Great Basin.

This climate model simulates the Earth's climate system by allowing users to toggle different influences on climate (e.g. oceans, atmospheric gases) based on model version used.

This pair of interactive visualizations allows students to explore basic and more complex concepts around heat conduction, heat capacity and energy transfer. The basic simulation demonstrates how heating and cooling iron, brick, water, and olive oil adds or removes energy from a system and transfers between objects. At the more advanced level, the systems simulation allows students to see that energy takes various forms, as well as how energy flows and changes from one form of energy into another.

This video explores the affect on seabirds of a three year ocean warming event (2013-16) in the NW Pacific. With ocean warming, a massive die off occurred based on the decline of food resources.