This long classroom activity introduces students to a climate modeling software. Students visualize how temperature and snow coverage might change over the next 100 years. They run a 'climate simulation' to establish a baseline for comparison, do a 'experimental' simulation and compare the results. Students will then choose a region of their own interest to explore and compare the results with those documented in the IPCC impact reports. Students will gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the process and power of climate modeling.

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.

This Earth Exploration Toolbook chapter uses ArcGIS and climate data from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) Climate Change Scenarios GIS Data Portal to help users learn the basics of GIS-based climate modeling. The five-part exercise involves calculating summer average temperatures for the present day and future climate modeled output, visually comparing the temperature differences for the two model runs, and creating a temperature anomaly map to highlight air temperature increases or decreases around the world.

This teaching activity addresses regional variability as predicted in climate change models for the next century. Using real climatological data from climate models, students will obtain annual predictions for minimum temperature, maximum temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation for Minnesota and California to explore this regional variability. Students import the data into a spreadsheet application and analyze it to interpret regional differences. Finally, students download data for their state and compare them with other states to answer a series of questions about regional differences in climate change.

This is lesson five of a 9-lesson module. Activity explores the effects of climate change on different parts of the Earth system and on human well-being: polar regions, coral reefs, disease vectors, extreme weather, and biodiversity.

This animation shows predicted changes in temperature across the globe, relative to pre-industrial levels, under two different emissions scenarios in the COP 17 climate model. The first is with emissions continuing to increase through the century. The second is with emissions declining through the century.

A detailed Google Earth tour of glacier change over the last 50 years introduces this topic in an engaging way. Students are then asked to select from a group of glaciers and create their own Google Earth tour exploring key characteristics and visible changes in that glacier.

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?

This lesson covers different aspects of the major greenhouse gases - water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxides and CFCs - including some of the ways in which human activities are affecting the atmospheric concentrations of these key greenhouse gases. This is lesson six in a nine-lesson module about climate change.

In this assessment task from ClimeTime educators, students explore data relevant to the claim “A change in air quality can affect rates of asthma-related hospitalizations.” using the Department of Health’s Washington Tracking Network (WTN). Students develop an argument based on the evidence they gather that supports or refutes the claim.
Resource includes a student task document, teacher guide, and task facilitation slides.

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

Hurricanes are a fact of life for millions of Americans each year, and billions more people around the world. What is a hurricane, and how can we prepare for them? Through a model and student-level data, students explore the factors influencing storm frequency and intensity. They also consider the language of storms, as well as steps to resilience. This guide is an extension of the TILclimate episode "TIL about hurricanes."

This activity relates water temperature to fishery health within inland freshwater watersheds as a way to explore how environmental factors of an ecosystem affect the organisms that use those ecosystems as important habitat.

In this activity, students download historic temperature datasets and then graph and compare with different locations. As an extension, students can download and examine data sets for other sites to compare the variability of changes at different distinct locations, and it is at this stage where learning can be individualized and very meaningful.

In this activity, students use Google Earth to explore global temperature changes during a recent 50 - 58 year period. They also explore, analyze, and interpret climate patterns of 13 different cities, and analyze differences between weather and climate patterns.

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).

This activity uses a mix of multimedia resources and hands-on activities to support a storyline of investigation into melting sea and land ice.

In this activity, students compare carbon dioxide data from Mauna Loa Observatory, Barrow, Alaska, and the South Pole over the past 40 years. Students use the data to learn about what causes short-term and long-term changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide. This activity makes extensive use of Excel.

In this activity, students investigate the shifting of three penguin communities in response to climate change.

In this curriculum module, students in high school life science, marine science, and/or chemistry courses act as interdisciplinary scientists and delegates to investigate how the changing carbon cycle will affect the oceans along with their integral populations.

The oceans cover 70 percent of the planet and play a critical role in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide through the interaction of physical, chemical, and biological processes. As a result of anthropogenic activity, a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration (to 760 ppm) is expected to occur by the end of this century. A quarter of the total CO2 emitted has already been absorbed by the surface oceans, changing the marine carbonate system, resulting in a decrease in pH, a change in carbonate-ion concentrations, and a change in the speciation of macro and micronutrients. The shift in the carbonate system is already drastically affecting biological processes in the oceans and is predicted to have major consequences on carbon export to the deep ocean with reverberating effects on atmospheric CO2. Put in simple terms, ocean acidification is a complex phenomenon with complex consequences. Understanding complexity and the impact of ocean acidification requires systems thinking – both in research and in education. Scientific advancement will help us better understand the problem and devise more effective solutions, but executing these solutions will require widespread public participation to mitigate this global problem.

Through these lessons, students closely model what is occurring in laboratories worldwide and at Institute for Systems Biology (ISB) through Monica Orellana’s research to analyze the effect CO2 has on ocean chemistry, ecosystems and human societies. Students experiment, analyze public data, and prepare for a mock summit to address concerns. Student groups represent key “interest groups” and design two experiments to observe the effects of CO2 on seawater pH, diatom growth, algal blooms, nutrient availability, and/or shell dissolution.