How much of an impact does air travel have on climate change? What can be done about it? Through a hands-on demonstration and a short literature review, students consider the impacts and future of aviation. With data, students consider why climate communicators and scientists focus on carbon dioxide. This guide is an extension of the TILclimate episode "TIL about planes."

In this series of activities students investigate the effects of black carbon on snow and ice melt in the Arctic. The lesson begins with an activity that introduces students to the concept of thermal energy and how light and dark surfaces reflect and absorb radiant energy differently. To help quantify the relationship between carbon and ice melt, the wet lab activity has students create ice samples both with and without black carbon and then compare how they respond to radiant energy while considering implications for the Arctic.

In this activity students learn how Earth's energy balance is regulating climate. This activity is lesson 4 in the nine-lesson module Visualizing and Understanding the Science of Climate Change.

This activity introduces students to global climate patterns by having each student collect information about the climate in a particular region of the globe. After collecting information, students share data through posters in class and consider factors that lead to differences in climate in different parts of the world. Finally, students synthesize the information to see how climate varies around the world.

We hear about climate impacts all over the world, often in global terms. But what is happening where? And what will happen in our own communities? Students play a game to understand changes to precipitation. Then, using the US Climate Resilience Toolkit, they investigate local climate concerns and solutions.

This Guide for Educators was developed by the MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative as an extension of our TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate) podcast, to make it easier for you to teach climate change, earth science, and energy topics in the classroom. It is an extension of the TILclimate episode "TIL about climate impacts."

This unit consists of seven distinct activities that teach climate change, the water cycle, and the effects of the changing climate on water resources through the use of games, science experiments, investigations, role-playing, research, and creating a final project to showcase learning.

This teaching activity is an introduction to how ice cores from the cryosphere are used as indicators and record-keepers of climate change as well as how climate change will affect the cryosphere.

The Student Climate Assembly Toolkit describes how we design and implementation of the program. This is not a plug and play unit plan. Instead, it is a guide with options and resources for teachers to adapt this model to their own region and classroom.  The primary audience for this toolkit is high school civics teachers, but it may be of interest to other educators.This toolkit includes: a description of SCA preparation, components and how they were presented (section 1); background information about climate science, deliberative democracy, climate justice and social emotional learning (sections 1 & 3); learning standards & student assessment (section 2); sources for teacher and student research (section 3); and examples of SCA teaching tools (section 4)

Hands-on laboratory activity that allows students to investigate the effects of distance and angle on the input of solar radiation at Earth's surface, the role played by albedo, the heat capacity of land and water, and how these cause the seasons. Students predict radiative heating based on simple geometry and experiment to test their hypotheses.

In this course will focus on both biotic and abiotic systems. You will learn about ecosystems and their interactions, water (including surface water, ponds and lakes, groundwater, water quality), soils, and resources both renewable and non-renewable resources. You will also how the basic systems influence the ecosystems of the Earth. You will investigate threatened and endangered species in our world. Environmental health and the importance of agriculture are also discussed in terms of their impact on our ecosystems.

Exploring Climate Science With Virtual Reality, a Teacher/Scientist Partnership experience. High school teachers engage with working scientists and engineers to for content learning for climate science and virtual reality and engage in follow-up sessions with professional development facilitators to develop pedagogical expertise for use in creating formative classroom tasks that are formative and productive. It is a three day initial workshop with four follow-up days to
1) deepen teacher understanding by learning with climate scientists to understand climate science standards content knowledge
2) increase awareness and knowledge of the use of virtual reality devices in climate science learning
30 to co-develop a climate science simulation game for use on Oculus Go devices with teachers, their students and a virtual reality scientist/engineer team
4) to develop and implement embedded formative classroom tasks that
complement climate science learning by using a relevant, place based phenomena, and provide insights into student thinking and productive next steps in learning.

Creative Commons License CC BY
Exploring Climate Science With Virtual Reality Professional Learning Module by Georgia Boatman, ESD 123 and Peggy Willcuts PNNL is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

In this activity, students examine global climate model output and consider the potential impact of global warming on tropical cyclone initiation and evolution. As a follow-up, students read two short articles on the connection between hurricanes and global warming and discuss these articles in context of what they have learned from model output.

This activity supports educators in the use of the activities that accompany the GLOBE Program's Earth System Poster 'Exploring Connections in Year 2007'. Students identify global patterns and connections in environmental data that include soil moisture, insolation, surface temperature, cloud fraction, precipitation, world topography/bathymetry, aerosol optical thickness, and biosphere (from different times of the year) with the goal of recognizing patterns and trends in global data sets.

How do greenhouse gases affect the climate? Explore the atmosphere during the ice age and today. What happens when you add clouds? Change the greenhouse gas concentration and see how the temperature changes. Then compare to the effect of glass panes. Zoom in and see how light interacts with molecules. Do all atmospheric gases contribute to the greenhouse effect?

Explore how the Earth's atmosphere affects the energy balance between incoming and outgoing radiation. Using an interactive model, adjust realistic parameters such as how many clouds are present or how much carbon dioxide is in the air, and watch how these factors affect the global temperature.

In this role-playing activity, learners are presented with a scenario in which they determine whether the Gulf Stream is responsible for keeping northern Europe warm. They must also address the potential future of the Gulf Stream if polar ice were to continue melting. The students work in small groups to identify the issue, discuss the problem, and develop a problem statement. They are then asked what they need to know to solve the problem.

This lesson explores the chemistry of some of the greenhouse gases that affect Earth's climate. Third in a series of 9 lessons from an online module entitled 'Visualizing and Understanding the Science of Climate Change'.

In this problem-based learning module, students research and report on Hurricane Katrina, using an earth systems science analysis approach.

This is the first of nine lessons in the Visualizing and Understanding the Science of Climate Change website. This lesson is an introduction to Earth's climate and covers key principles regarding Earth's unique climate, atmosphere, and regional and temporal climate differences.