Teaching Climate

This video is about Eunice Newton Foote, who studied the effect different gases have on the heat from the sun's rays. This is an engaging and funny video that describes the basis of climate science, while also discussing the hindering role of sexism in advancing science.

This resource from the Paleontological Research Institute includes a worksheet, videos, and hands on experiments to demonstrate how absorption, reflection, and transmission of light relates to the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and how small changes in that amount (e.g., parts per million or ppm) can have large impacts.

In this video, learn how John Tyndall designed an experiment to reveal evidence that carbon dioxide traps heat. Teachers could use this resource to consider the role carbon dioxide plays in regulating Earth's temperature and its relationship to current trends in global warming.

This video discusses the fossil fuel fingerprint in isotopic analysis of atmospheric carbon dioxide. It does an excellent job of presenting this topic, which is too often overlooked in other discussions of the evidence for anthropogenic global warming.

Sustainability is a complex term applied to many different contexts in a variety of ways. As a result, it can be challenging to determine how sustainable something really is. In this module, students will use an analytical framework with publicly available data to formulate questions, analyze data, and report metrics of sustainability.

Here students use data from the NOAA carbon dioxide monitoring sites, such as Mauna Loa, to graph the Keeling Curve for themselves on large sheets of paper. Each group graphs one year, and the graphs are joined at the end to reveal the overall upward trend. The explanation describes the carbon cycle and how human activities are leading to the overall trend of rising carbon dioxide.

This activity utilizes a PhET greenhouse gas simulation to explore the interaction of different atmospheric gases with different types of radiation.

This animation allows students to explore the infrared spectra of greenhouse gases and depict the absorption spectra. Vibrational modes and Earth's energy spectrum can also be overlaid.

This video is the second of a three-video series in the Sea Change project, which follows the work of Dr. Maureen Raymo, paleogeologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, who travels with fellow researchers to Australia in search of evidence of sea level that was once higher than it is today.

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).