Teaching Climate

This unit introduces high school students to climate change, the carbon cycle, and the effects of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide on Earth's climate. Students create a model from string, toss bean bags, and sort chemical cards to review key processes in the carbon cycle. Then they quantitatively model the carbon cycle by playing a board game.

In this activity, students use a physical model to learn the basics of photosynthesis and respiration within the carbon cycle.

This video documents how scientists, using marine algae, can study climate change in the past to help understand potential effects of climate change in the future.

Carbon cycle activity to demonstrate how carbon moves throughout the atmosphere. The activity ends with a discussion of how humans impact the carbon cycle.

In this activity, students will learn about and model the carbon cycle. Using data from Global Forest Watch, students investigate regional and global patterns of forest loss, gain, and carbon emissions to answer the questions: should we plant trees as a solution to climate change? Does location matter? How do we know?

In this activity, students develop concept maps of the carbon cycle through a die-rolling game that simulates carbon reservoirs and fluxes. By the end of this activity, students should be able to describe and explain how the carbon cycle has changed in the last 250 years.

Interactive visualization that provides a basic overview of the Earth's carbon reservoirs and amount of carbon stored in each, CO2 transport among atmosphere, hydrosphere, geosphere, and biosphere, and a graph comparing global temp (deg C) and atmospheric CO2 levels (ppm) over the past 1000 years.

In this 3-part lab activity, students investigate how carbon moves through the global carbon cycle and study the effects of specific feedback loops on the carbon cycle.

This article and slide show from the New York Times, features several scientists from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, who study the effects of thawing permafrost in Alaska.

This interactive follows carbon as it moves through various components of the carbon cycle.