Biodigesters produce gas for cooking, which helps families within the community to change their cooking habits to more sustainable ones.
Students learn about life-cycle assessment and how engineers use this technique to determine the environmental impact of everyday products and processes. As they examine what’s involved in making and consuming cupcakes, a snack enjoyed by millions of people every year, students learn about the production, use and disposal phases of an object’s life cycle. With the class organized into six teams, students calculate data for each phase of a cupcake’s life cycle—wet ingredients, dry ingredients, baking materials, oven baking, frosting, liner disposal—and calculate energy usage and greenhouse gases emitted from making one cupcake. They use ratios and fractions, and compare options for some of the life-cycle stages, such as different paper wrapper endings (disposal to landfills or composting) in order to make a life-cycle plan with a lower environmental impact. This activity opens students’ eyes to see the energy use in the cradle-to-grave lives of everyday products. Pre/post-quizzes, worksheets, activity cards, Excel® workbook and visual aids are provided.
At the end of a six-week class or unit on global warming, students role-play representatives from various countries and organizations at an international summit on global warming.
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This is a version of the UN climate mock negotiations exercise developed by Shangrila Joshi Wynn.
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In this activity, students will use actual CO2 data from the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii to create their own "Keeling Curve"; conduct an analysis of the data; and, attempt to match it to a mathematical function. They will then use the function to predict increases in CO2, both historical and future.
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Daisyworld is a classic model of complex feedbacks in a simple climate system; this activity guides students through the construction of a STELLA model that can be used to experiment with the system, exploring the somewhat surprising dynamics that arise from the interplay of positive and negative feedbacks between daisies and the temperature of their environment.
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Students gain experience using a spreadsheet and working with others to decide how to conduct their model 'experiments' with the NASA GEEBITT (Global Equilibrium Energy Balance Interactive Tinker Toy). This activity helps students become more familiar with the physical processes that made Earth's early climate so different from that of today. Students also acquire first-hand experience with a limitation in modeling, specifically, parameterization of critical processes.
In this activity, learners use the STELLA box modeling software to determine Earth's temperature based on incoming solar radiation and outgoing terrestrial radiation. Starting with a simple black body model, the exercise gradually adds complexity by incorporating albedo, then a 1-layer atmosphere, then a 2-layer atmosphere, and finally a complex atmosphere with latent and sensible heat fluxes. With each step, students compare the modeled surface temperature to Earth's actual surface temperature, thereby providing a check on how well each increasingly complex model captures the physics of the actual system.
We created a hands-on activity for middle and high school students that describes glacier mass balance in a changing climate. The students make a glacier using glue, water and detergent ("flubber") and construct a glacier valley using plastic sheeting. They are encouraged to run several tests with different values for valley slope, "flubber" temperature, and basal conditions. The students then calculate the "flubber" velocity for each scenario. We compare our glacier models to the dynamics of real glaciers and discuss how and why they might be changing over time.
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Prior to this lab, students will have read and learned about valley glacier processes, glacier mass balance, warm-based and cold-based glaciers, and can identify various glacier landforms formed by erosion. They will also have had an introductory lecture on ice physics, but that is not necessary to complete this activity.
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Understanding global climate change is challenging, even for adults, yet having an understanding of this topic is consequential for the future. In this activity, middle school students learn about global climate change using models that allow them to make predictions, observations, and then explain mechanisms for climate change. Component ideas include change over time, deep time, and accumulation. Students are asked to act as advisers on how to lower energy use, and refine their understanding of how and why this is important, before testing their ideas and finally revising their advice.
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In this activity, student teams design small-scale physical models of hot and cold planets, (Venus and Mars), and learn that small scale models allow researchers to determine how much larger systems function. There is both a team challenge and competition built into this activity. Experimental findings are then used to support a discussion of human outposts on Mars. The resource includes an experimental design guide for students as well as a handout outlining a method for the design of controlled experiments, and student data sheets. Student questions and an essay assignment are provided as classroom assessments. This is Activity A in the second module, titled "Modeling hot and cold planets," of the resource, "Earth Climate Course: What Determines a Planet's Climate?" The course aims to help students to develop an understanding of our environment as a system of human and natural processes that result in changes that occur over various space and time scales.
In this activity, students pose several hypotheses for what will happen if you continue heating or supplying energy to the hot and cold planet models (Mercury, Mars, Venus, and Earth) and then test their hypotheses using a spreadsheet based radiation balance model. The activity supports investigation of a real world challenge, experimenting with life support conditions for Mars at an Arctic outpost. The interactive model runs are conducted using a Java applet. This resource includes student worksheets, assessment questions and a teacher's guide. This is Activity B in module 2, Modeling hot and cold planets, of the resource, Earth Climate Course: What Determines a Planet's Climate? The course aims to help students to develop an understanding of our environment as a system of human and natural processes that result in changes that occur over various space and time scales.
In this activity, students explore the importance of adequate sampling strategies when conducting a scientific investigation. They are tasked with determining the average temperature of the Earth, using data sets easily found on the Internet, and determine the kind and size of sample necessary to calculate a representative average. The resource includes a student data sheet and an authentic assessment for the module, where students discuss the establishment of a habitation site on Mars. This is Activity C in module 2, titled "Modeling Hot and Cold Planets," of the resource, Earth Climate Course: What Determines a Planet's Climate? The course aims to help students to develop an understanding of our environment as a system of human and natural processes that result in changes that occur over various space and time scales.
This video is simple in its appearance, but it contains a wealth of relevant information about global climate models.
As Public Works Director of Nogales, Arizona, Alejandro Barcenas works to ensure a safe and secure water supply for the city’s 20,500 residents. His task isn’t easy: the city is located in an arid region just north of the United States–Mexico border, and its entire supply comes from groundwater.
Half of Nogales’ water comes from alluvial aquifers that are highly responsive to rainfall events. Though this convenient source of water recharges easily, it is also vulnerable to climate-related changes such as reduced precipitation and increased evaporation. The other half of the city’s groundwater comes from a lower-quality source—this water is more expensive to produce. To optimize the use of the two sources of groundwater into the future, Barcenas is contributing to the development of a modeling tool that simulates how the aquifers may change in response to climate.
IDS.410J Modeling and Assessment for Policy explores how scientific information and quantitative models can be used to inform policy decision-making. Students will develop an understanding of quantitative modeling techniques and their role in the policy process through case studies and interactive activities. The course addresses issues such as analysis of scientific assessment processes, uses of integrated assessment models, public perception of quantitative information, methods for dealing with uncertainties, and design choices in building policy-relevant models. Examples used in this class focus on models and information used in earth system governance.
This set of activities is about carbon sources, sinks, and fluxes among them - both with and without anthropogenic components.
This hands-on activity demonstrates and explains the reasons for the seasons caused by the tilt of Earth on its axis as it orbits around the sun.
In this activity for undergraduate students, learners build a highly simplified computer model of thermohaline circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean and conduct a set of simulation experiments to understand the complex dynamics inherent in this simple model.