This lab exercise is designed to provide a basic understanding of a real-world scientific investigation. Learners are introduced to the concept of tropospheric ozone as an air pollutant due to human activities and burning of fossil fuels. Students analyze and visualize data to investigate this air pollution and climate change problem, determine the season in which it commonly occurs, and communicate the results.

This module teaches students about ozone’s role in the atmosphere and explores authentic data to compare and contrast conditions that affect ground-level ozone values.

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 article looks at the growing energy consumption from consumer electronics and the increases it may cause in greenhouse gases and global warming. The article appears in the free, online magazine Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears.

In this lesson students will learn about evaporation, fossil fuels, greenhouse gases, and the greenhouse effect. Patterns in nautre are discussed, including what is happening over time and why we should care.

NGSS: 5-ESS2-1, 5-ESS3-1

Time: 55 minutes - 1 hour

Materials: laminated patterns in nature photos (photos included), plastic cups, rulers, Sharpies

Save The Food! A Food Waste Prevention Teacher's Guide This resource provides five lesson plans and resources about preventing food waste. Wasted food costs money and harms the environment. This course explains basic concepts of food waste prevention and provides easy tips for students to follow. The content was adapted from the EPA’s “Food: Too Good to Waste” tool kit.The course was developed by Audrey Seligman, MPH, with assistance and consultation from George Schooley, M.A. TESOL. Funding for the course was provided by the Ramsey/Washington Recycling & Energy Board.

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.

Students take virtual field trips to explore air quality research sites and investigate the causes, effects, and solutions to nitrogen deposition in Rocky Mountain National Park during this module.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Rising sea levels are the catastrophic image of global warming But the threat of melting ice at high latitudes goes much deeper Locked within the frozen soil in these regions are vast pools of prehistoric carbon Once freed, this carbon has the potential to accelerate the current rate at which the earth is heating up thanks in large part to microbes in the soil A new study shows that 5 years’ worth of warming is enough to seriously alter communities of bacteria priming them to convert newly thawed carbon into greenhouse gases like methane Experiments in Alaska revealed dramatic changes to the composition and functional structure of microbial communities which suggested an evolving sensitivity to warming over time The findings contrast those obtained from a similar experiment conducted over only 1..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

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.

This NASA video discusses the impacts of the sun's energy, Earth's reflectance, and greenhouse gases on the Earth System.

This short animated video provides a general overview of the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, and the greenhouse effect.

 U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.Senior Contributing AuthorsP. Scott Corbett, Ventura CollegeVolker Janssen, California State University, FullertonJohn M. Lund, Keene State CollegeTodd Pfannestiel, Clarion UniversityPaul Vickery, Oral Roberts UniversitySylvie Waskiewicz

By the end of this section, you will be able to:Describe the efforts to reduce the influence of immigrants on American cultureDescribe the evolution of twenty-first-century American attitudes towards same-sex marriageExplain the clash over climate change

Stanford University’s Understand Energy Learning Hub provides free access to Stanford course content on energy resources from fossil fuels like oil and coal to renewable resources like the wind, the sun, and efficiency; energy currencies like electricity and hydrogen; and energy services such as transportation and buildings. Explore the Hub and build your energy literacy to address climate change and sustainability issues, engage on equity and human development challenges, participate in energy industry markets and technology innovations, and make informed energy decisions.

In this activity, students analyze the results of an experiment, conduct research, and describe the potential importance of positive and negative feedbacks in governing the response of the Earth system. Teacher background information, assessment suggestions, and a scoring rubric are included.This is Activity 5 of the learning module, Global Balance, part of the lesson series, The Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. Completing A Sense of Balance: Activity 1 in this module is a prerequisite to complete this investigation.

This is a jigsaw activity in which students are assigned to research one step out of five in the geochemical process stages of the organic carbon cycle. Students then teach their step in cross-step groups until everyone understands all five process stages.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Mangrove forests are home to many varieties of methanogens, microbes that digest surrounding carbon into methane under low-oxygen conditions. Despite their important role in the global carbon cycle and climate change, the metabolic potentials of two novel methanogens in mangroves remain poorly understood. A new study reports on the ecological importance of Methanofastidiosa (MF) and Methanomassiliicoccales (MMA), two recently discovered groups of methanogens found to dwell naturally in the Mangrove Nature Reserve in Shenzhen, China. Using metagenomics, researchers examined how MF and MMA produce methane. Results showed that the two groups of microbes both use hydrogen to produce methane from compounds found naturally in mangrove sediments, including methylsulfides, methanol, and methylamines. This marks the first time the two groups of methanogens have been studied in the wild and could help scientists understand how these microbes contribute to global methane emissions and a changing climate..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

Students explore the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 40 years with an interactive online model. They use the model and observations to estimate present emission rates and emission growth rates. The model is then used to estimate future levels of carbon dioxide using different future emission scenarios. These different scenarios are then linked by students to climate model predictions also used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.