Is Climate Change Happening?

King's Centre for Visualization in Science

For this lesson, the guiding Concept Question is: What is climate change and how does climate relate to greenhouse gas concentrations over time? This activity is the second lesson in a nine-lesson module 'Visualizing and Understanding the Science of Climate Change' produced by the International Year of Chemistry project (2011).

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Notes from our reviewers

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Basic high school chemistry knowledge is needed. Activity is self-directed and robust in content. This activity would benefit from educator interaction and group discussion at intervals to pose and answer questions, clarify visualizations, etc. This resource would make a very nice homework assignment and would be useful for home school students. Could be used as a student self-directed resource as a formative assessment.
This resource shows long-term (800,000 years ago to present) changes in common greenhouse gases (CO2, methane, and nitrous oxide) and temperature, as revealed by ice core samples. Resource provides a useful tool to understand the relationship between these greenhouse gases, temperature, and anthropogenic and natural disturbances. This resource also does a good job of explaining that even though there is a relationship, the data does not allow us to know whether one factor is causing the other factor to change (i.e. correlation does not necessarily mean causation). Comments from expert scientist: Very thorough and rigorously presented materials on isotopic determination of temperature from ice core data. Comprehensive presentation of current knowledge and methods. The lesson tool is highly sophisticated and enlightening, and the authors are to be commended for its development. I believe this presentation is very strong and is highly effective at communicating the issues and the scientific methods.
Carefully constructed self-paced activity that consists of primarily reading brief text passages, examining graphs, and answering questions. Includes Key ideas, Test your Knowledge (at end of lesson), applets, and master list of definitions for the set of activities in this sequence. Explanations are well supported with diagrams, photos, interactive graphs, citations, and references.