What's Happening to our Climate: The Problem

Climate Communications

Two short, narrated animations about carbon dioxide and Earth's temperature are presented on this webpage. The first animation shows the rise in atmospheric CO2 levels, human carbon emissions, and global temperature rise of the past 1,000 years; the second shows changes in the level of CO2 from 800,000 years ago to the present.

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Notes from our reviewers

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Best used as an opener or introduction in conjunction with other information or activities. Helpful resource to use when discussing how we know that Earth's climate is changing. This is a useful visual presentation of quantitative information. For example, students would have a harder time viewing this information as static graphs.
This pair of animations describes the essence of the climate change problem: carbon dioxide emissions. The first animation is especially helpful to show the strong correlation among fossil fuel burning and CO2 emissions, atmospheric CO2 concentrations, and temperature. The two different time scales (1000 years to present and 800,000,000 years to present) illustrate processes at different time scales. The data ends in 2012. Current data can be accessed from [link http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/]. Comments from expert scientist: Scientific strengths: - Excellent visual resources, showing land-use change, CO2 atmospheric increase, and temperature increase (one visual) and overall CO2 concentrations from past 800,000 years to demonstrate the effect of land use on the "natural" CO2 cycle.
Short animated videos help to introduce the changes of atmospheric CO2 concentration, the increased burning of fossil fuels, and the rise of global temperatures. Overlaps the three sets of data so viewers can see the correlation among them. This is the most interesting aspect of the visualizations. The pace of the presentation is just right; free of overly technical terms.