This resource was created by Kayla Henery, in collaboration with Lynn Bowder, as part of ESU2's Mastering the Arts project. This project is a four year initiative focused on integrating arts into the core curriculum through teacher education and experiential learning.
Bell Telephone Science Hour produced this video in 1958, explaining how the production of CO2 from factories and automobiles is causing the atmosphere to warm, melting the polar ice caps, and causing the sea level to rise.
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 course is an introduction to basic ideas of geophysical wave motion in rotating, stratified, and rotating-stratified fluids. Subject begins with general wave concepts of phase and group velocity. It also covers the dynamics and kinematics of gravity waves with a focus on dispersion, energy flux, initial value problems, etc. Also addressed are subject foundation used to study internal and inertial waves, Kelvin, Poincare, and Rossby waves in homogeneous and stratified fluids. Laplace tidal equations are applied to equatorial waves. Other topics include: resonant interactions, potential vorticity, wave-mean flow interactions, and instability.
In this kinesthetic activity, the concept of energy budget is strengthened as students conduct three simulations using play money as units of energy, and students serve as parts of a planetary radiation balance model. Students will determine the energy budget of a planet by manipulating gas concentrations, energy inputs and outputs in the system in this lesson that supports the study of climate on Mars, Mercury, Venus and Earth. The lesson supports understanding of the real-world problem of contemporary climate change. The resource includes a teacher's guide and several student worksheets. This is the second of four activities in the lesson, How do Atmospheres affect planetary temperatures?, within Earth Climate Course: What Determines a Planet's Climate? The resource 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 OSPI resource provides curated collections of free activities, lessons, units, and informational "texts" (articles, passages, e-books, videos, podcasts) to support every NGSS Performance Expectation (standard) in grades K-5. This resource is intended to support teachers with teaching science while also integrating science and ELA to grow student knowledge, thinking, application, and skills in both content areas. Materials are organized into units based on the topics and essential questions in each grade. Resources listed are all freely available online, with some requiring teachers to create free accounts to access. Some trade books are also listed that might be accessed through a library system. Gratitude is expressed to the Washington State Science Fellows, Science Fellows Emeriti, and ELA Fellows who contributed to curating the informational texts. For questions or comments contact OSPI Elementary Science at Kimberley.Astle@k12.wa.us.
Climate Action! is a freely available community research guide developed by the Smithsonian Science Education Center (SSEC) in partnership with the InterAcademy Partnership as part of the Smithsonian Science for Global Goals project. Smithsonian Science for Global Goals community research guides use the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as a framework to focus on sustainable actions that are defined and implemented by students.
Climate Action! is the new community research guide from the Smithsonian Science for Global Goals project for students aged 11 to 18. In the guide, young people explore the question “How can we mitigate human impact on the atmosphere?” The guide contains themes that lead youth to discover their interconnectedness with the atmosphere and understand complex climate systems. Together, these themes help prepare youth to take action towards a sustainable future for the planet.
© 2024 Smithsonian Institution
All rights reserved. First Edition 2024.
Copyright Notice
No part of this module, or derivative works of this module, may be used or reproduced for any purpose except fair use without permission in writing from the Smithsonian Science Education Center.
Heidi Gibson, Smithsonian Science Education Center - Manager of the Global Sustainability Series, is the author.
Jamie Rumage is the Oregon Open Learning - Science Group Administrator, not an official author or contributor of the published materials of the Smithsonian Science Education Center.
This course provides students with a scientific foundation of anthropogenic climate change and an introduction to climate models. It focuses on fundamental physical processes that shape climate (e.g. solar variability, orbital mechanics, greenhouse gases, atmospheric and oceanic circulation, and volcanic and soil aerosols) and on evidence for past and present climate change. During the course they discuss material consequences of climate change, including sea level change, variations in precipitation, vegetation, storminess, and the incidence of disease. This course also examines the science behind mitigation and adaptation proposals.
Using a systems dynamics approach, students will work in groups to conceptualize and construct a model of the global carbon cycle considering five major Earth systems: atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, cryosphere, and biosphere. The models will draw on information from the pre-class activity and invoke system features such as boundaries, stocks, flows, and control variables. Using a scenario describing a global, catastrophic event, the students will consider how new conditions change the behavior of carbon cycling in their model world. Students will use the model to explain changes in environmental variables such as permafrost cover, atmospheric gases, and global temperature, as well as feedbacks within the system.
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We’ve had people ask us, if climate change is caused by adding too much CO2 into the atmosphere, can’t we just suck it back out? Won’t that solve our climate change problem? In this episode of TILclimate (Today I Learned: Climate), Professor Niall Mac Dowell of Imperial College London joins host Laur Hesse Fisher to demystify the process and feasibility of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
This activity investigates the oceanographic and climatic characteristics of El NiÃo/La NiÃa (ENSO) events using observational data from moored ocean buoys in the tropical Pacific Ocean. Data are obtained from NOAA's Tropical Atmosphere Ocean (TAO) project website which provides a web-based interface for accessing and displaying oceanographic data. In addition to providing an introduction to ENSO, this activity is designed to give students practice interpreting real oceanographic observations by emphasizing the description and identification of patterns in large data-sets. Students first describe patterns in sea-surface and cross-sectional transects of ocean temperatures and surface winds associated with "normal", El NiÃo, and La NiÃa years and then use this as a basis for classifying observations from unknown years and interpreting connections between oceanographic and atmospheric processes occurring in the tropical Pacific.
(Note: this resource was added to OER Commons as part of a batch upload of over 2,200 records. If you notice an issue with the quality of the metadata, please let us know by using the 'report' button and we will flag it for consideration.)
This course provides students with a scientific foundation of anthropogenic climate change and an introduction to climate models. It focuses on fundamental physical processes that shape climate (e.g. solar variability, orbital mechanics, greenhouse gases, atmospheric and oceanic circulation, and volcanic and soil aerosols) and on evidence for past and present climate change. During the course they discuss material consequences of climate change, including sea level change, variations in precipitation, vegetation, storminess, and the incidence of disease. This course also examines the science behind mitigation and adaptation proposals.
Required for all Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences majors in the Environmental Science track, this course is an introduction to current research in the field. Stresses integration of central scientific concepts in environmental policy making and the chemistry, biology, and geology environmental science tracks. Revisits selected core themes for students who have already acquired a basic understanding of environmental science concepts. The topic for this term is geoengineering.
Find out how air holds its shape when put to the test in this episode of Smithsonian Science Starters with Hubble Astronaut Megan McArthur.
Think science has all the answers? Think again. This course will use real, authentic data to explore and investigate modern controversies in Earth Sciences. Use tide gauge records to understand how countries around the world attempt to protect themselves from tsunami events. Process seismic data to predict earthquake recurrence in the New Madrid seismic zone, right here in the breadbasket of the US. Sort through the millions of years of the geologic timeline to shed some light on what actually did, and did not, kill the dinosaurs. Finally, use global atmospheric data to understand how misrepresentation of data can be used to paint a distorted view of past, present, and future climate.
This course offers a broad overview of physical, chemical, biological, geological, principles of environmental sciences, and serves as a core course for EEOS majors. Examples will focus on linked watershed and coastal marine systems. The student will be introduced to natural processes and interactions in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and on land. There is a focus on biogeochemical cycling of elements as well as changes of these natural cycles with time, especially with recent anthropogenic effects. Topics include plate tectonics, global climate change, ozone depletion, water pollution, oceanography, ecosystem health, and natural resources.
Short Description:
This book describes how Earth's climate is changing, how it has been changing in the recent geological past and how it may change in the future. It covers the physical sciences that build the foundations of our current understanding of global climate change such as radiation, Earth's energy balance, the greenhouse effect and the carbon cycle. Both natural and human causes for climate change are discussed. Impacts of climate change on natural and human systems are summarized. Ethical and economical aspects of human-caused climate change and solutions are presented. Data dashboard
Word Count: 52328
(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)
This is a lesson using Digital Age Skills in Science and Earth Science in Grade 8.
Original Author: Jamie O'Connor, Freeman
Word Count: 51481
ISBN: 978-0-9880427-0-4
(Note: This resource's metadata has been created automatically by reformatting and/or combining the information that the author initially provided as part of a bulk import process.)
This visualization graphically displays temperature and CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as derived from ice core data from 400,000 years ago to 1950. The data originates from UNEP GRID Arendal's graphic library of CO2 levels from Vostok ice core.