Global Climate Change: The Effects of Global Warming

Teachers' Domain

The activity follows a progression that examines the CO2 content of various gases, explores the changes in the atmospheric levels of CO2 from 1958 to 2000 from the Mauna Loa Keeling curve, and the relationship between CO2 and temperature over the past 160,000 years. This provides a foundation for examining individuals' input of CO2 to the atmosphere and how to reduce it.

Click to View

Notes from our reviewers

The CLEAN collection is hand-picked and rigorously reviewed for scientific accuracy and classroom effectiveness. Read what our review team had to say about this resource below or learn more about how CLEAN reviews teaching materials.

In the first activity, the chemistry that indicates the presence of CO2 is not described. This is not critical for the activity. However, students may want to know what is happening chemically to accept that the experiment is showing what is described. Educator should clarify this point. The extension activity refers to how much the temperature has changed since the beginning of the 20th century. Since time is moving on, that number will change depending on when the activity is used. The educator should check the IPCC report for the latest information about how much temperature has changed since 1900. Collecting of car exhaust may be difficult and may not be allowed in a high school class.
The activity addresses the issue that human emissions produce global warming in a fairly indirect way. The statement could be stronger. This activity is data-rich and has excellent media resources. This is a robust lesson that allows for serious discussion of the topic. In Part I, step 3 directs the user to some text titled Global Warming: Graphs Tell the Story. The user should click on the "View" button to get to an article called "Stories in the Ice, Nature's Time Machine." This examines climate change on longer time scales. In particular, there is a graph of the climate record in the Vostok ice core that shows the relationship between temperature and both CO2 and CH4 (methane). It shows that over the geologic record, temperature and greenhouse gases change together, although it is not always clear which occurs first. While this is an area of research, the point is that they change in the same direction over geologic time. The Vostok climate records graph does not have a key for the colored lines. The blue line is the CO2, the red line is the temperature, and the green line is methane.
Activity provides a progression that builds student learning about the greenhouse effect. It can lead to more complex understanding of the topic, including human impacts and how to reduce them. As the resource uses a variety of data types, different learning styles are potentially addressed. Students will benefit from working in groups. There are multiple methods in the various components of this activity. This might make the information more accessible to learners with various learning styles.