This lesson plan engages students in a real-life exploration of climate change as it is affected by greenhouse emissions from vehicles. The aim of this activity is for students to realize the impact of vehicle use in their family and to give students the opportunity to brainstorm viable alternatives to this use.

This video production is a part of a four-panel report from the National Academies' America's Climate Choices project. The video maps out the realm of our accumulated knowledge regarding climate change and charts a path forward, urging that research on climate change enter a new era focused on the needs of decision makers.

In this short video, host Dr. Ryan interviews graduate student Amy Steiker at the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research about her research, using isotopes of nitrous oxide, connecting human activity to greenhouse gas emissions.

This is a multi-step activity that helps students measure, investigate, and understand the increase in atmospheric CO2 and the utility of carbon offsets. It also enables students to understand that carbon offsets, through reforestation, are not sufficient to balance increases in atmospheric C02 concentration.

This is a laboratory activity in which students will compare the amount of carbon dioxide in four different sources of gas and determine the carbon dioxide contribution from automobiles. They test ambient air, human exhalation, automobile exhaust, and nearly pure carbon dioxide from a vinegar/baking soda mixture.

Prior to assigning this activity in lecture, students gather information about their personal energy consumption so that they can calculate their personal carbon footprint. Specifically they need to determine the gas mileage of their vehicle, the average number of miles they drive in a month, and bring to class an electric bill and a natural gas bill from their apartment. I provide the appropriate information for students living in dorms. Their task during the class period is to assemble this information and calculate how much carbon their activities are responsible for generating. Once this portion of the assignment is complete, they investigate options for reducing their carbon emissions and the costs of those options. The pros and cons of carbon-reduction strategies form the basis for the class discussion. Lastly, students are asked to brain storm a list of potential carbon sources that are not included in this simple exercise, such as the carbon required to make the things we buy (computers, edible dinosaurs, q-tips, etc.).

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Students conduct a greenhouse gas emission inventory for their college or university as a required part of the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment.

This video features a short animated sequence that illustrates the difference between young and old carbon released into the atmosphere from the consumption of food (young carbon) and the burning of fossil fuels (old carbon).

This activity from NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory introduces students to the scientific understanding of the greenhouse effect and the carbon cycle. The activity leads them through several interactive tasks to investigate recent trends in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Students analyze scientific data and use scientific reasoning to determine the causes responsible for these recent trends. By studying carbon cycle science in a visual and interactive manner, students can learn firsthand about the reasons behind our changing climate.

In this activity, students work in groups, plotting carbon dioxide concentrations over time on overheads and estimating the rate of change over five years. Stacked together, the overheads for the whole class show an increase on carbon dioxide over five years and annual variation driven by photosynthesis. This exercise enables students to practice basic quantitative skills and understand how important sampling intervals can be when studying changes over time. A goal is to see how small sample size may give incomplete picture of data.

Step 1. Students are asked to keep track of their energy use from a variety of sources (heating/cooling, electricity, transportation, secondary emissions, etc) during the 9 days of Thanksgiving break, when many of them are likely to travel. They use the total for the 9 days that they calculated using an online calculator to estimate their yearly footprint and compare it to US and world averages. For most of them, the amount of carbon emitted during those 9 days is quite large because of airplane travel or long-distance driving. However, using a week of break when many students will travel allows them to become aware of the significance of transportation in carbon emissions. We provided a table with electricity and heating/cooling bills for various residence halls for students who stay on campus during the break.

Step 2. Students complete an online survey where they are asked to enter the values that they have obtained for the various components of the calculator, perform some simple calculations and compare their annual footprint to the U.S. average. We used SurveyGizmo for the survey because it allows to download the data in a spreadsheet format and has some limited plotting features. The free version allows a maximum of 250 submissions, the Basic version ($19 per month, can be canceled at any time) has unlimited submissions.
Step 3. Students write an essay through BlackBoard/WebCT (Assignment). A few guiding questions are provided for this essay where students reflect on the results of their impact on the global carbon budget, what they found surprising, and if they plan to make any changes to their lifestyle to limit their impact. No length limit is set for the essay.

The guidelines and components of this assignment are available on a wiki page. The three steps can be implemented in BlackBoard/WebCT as a Lesson Plan with links to the online calculator (step 1), to the survey (step 2), and to the Assignment/essay (step 3).

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Students play the role of carbon atoms to learn about the carbon cycle and how it is changing. Students create two carbon cycle diagramsâvisual models of the cycle before and after the Industrial Revolution. They reflect on the game and how scientists believe humans are impacting this critical Earth system.

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.

This video focuses on the science of climate change and its impacts on wildlife on land and in the sea, and their habitats in the U.S. There are short sections on walruses, coral reefs, migrating birds and their breeding grounds, freshwater fish, bees, etc. Video concludes with some discussion about solutions, including reduce/recycle/reuse, energy conservation, backyard habitats, and citizen scientists.

This short video discusses where carbon dioxide, the gas that is mainly responsible for warming up our planet and changing the climate, comes from. It discusses how the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide comes directly from the burning of fossil fuels and indirectly from the human need for energy.

This is a simulation that illustrates how temperature will be affected by global CO2 emission trajectories. It addresses the issue that even if global emissions begin to decrease, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 will continue to increase, resulting in increased global temperatures.

This static graph of changes in CO2 concentrations goes back 400,000 years, showing the dramatic spike in recent years.

Carbon calculators, no matter how well intended as tools to help measure energy footprints, tend to be black boxes and can produce wildly different results, depending on the calculations used to weigh various energy factors. By comparing different calculators, learners can analyze which ones are the most accurate and relevant, and which are the most transparent.

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Students research electricity, its sources, how energy grids function, how to make grids most efficient, and how to bring different types of energy generation together to diversify grids. Students debate the costs and benefits of moving to a modernized Smart Grid.

This video illustrates the Keeling curve as evidence to establish man's role in global climate change.