Site Guide: Climate Change and Global Warming

General Collections of Climate Change Resources

Cutting Edge - Teaching Climate Change - This site allows educators to locate and use the best resources for teaching about Earth's climate system and the changing climate over the past one million years. Here you will find teaching activities, courses, workshop outcomes, teaching ideas and links to useful teaching resources.
Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) - The CLEAN project, a part of the National Science Digital Library, provides a reviewed collection of resources coupled with the tools to enable an online community to share and discuss teaching about climate and energy science.
Cutting Edge - The Hurricane - Climate Change Collection - Large hurricanes have captured the attention of many citizens in recent years and prompts the inevitable question about the relationship between climate change and hurricanes. This website focuses on recent hurricanes and the latest climate change research to engage students and help them understand the central issues of climate change and hurricane activity.
Climate Proxies from the Microbial Life Educational Resources collection - This website provides information about what climate proxies are and how they are used to infer past climate.
Communicating Global Climate Change: Using Debate to Engage Integrative Learning. This series of video clips from MERLOT/ELIXR demonstrates the use of debate as a strategy for engaging student with the issues surrounding climate change. Project materials, timelines and PowerPoint slides are also included.
Teaching about Energy in Geoscience Courses - Energy plays a big role in current climate science, as well as in policy and economics as it relates to climate change. This website contains course descriptions, an activity collection, visualizations, recommended books and websites, workshop outcomes and more.

Websites and Data Sets

Recommended Web Sites for Teaching Climate Change - This page contains quick links to handy sites for climate change information. Includes research summaries, data sets, imagery and carbon footprint calculators.
The Climate Change Collection - Unsure of how to navigate the web for reliable scientific information about climate science? This suite of web-based resources has been reviewed by a team of science teachers, climate scientists and learning experts who reviewed hundreds of resources for accuracy and effectiveness. See the related climate literacy catalog for more resources.
Atmospheric science and climatology data sets - These sites, from the Using Data collection, provide on-line or downloadable tools for visualizing or manipulating data or datasets that can be used in the classroom.

Teaching Activities

Climate Change Teaching Activities - from Cutting Edge - This link provides classroom and laboratory teaching exercises and activities involving climate change from the Cutting Edge Climate Change collection.
Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network activity browse - This hand-picked collection of scientifically and pedagogically reviewed teaching activities involving climate science, climate change, and energy awareness includes materials for middle and high school students as well as undergraduate classrooms.
Earth Exploration Toolbook - Chapters Related to Climate Change - These chapters from the Earth Exploration Toolbook include background information and data-rich activities and visualizations regarding climate change and its consequences.
Ideas for Teaching with Ice Core Data - from Cutting Edge - During the 2008 Cutting Edge workshop on teaching climate change using ice core data participants were asked to work in small groups to brainstorm for ideas to bring ice core data into the classroom. These ideas are not fully-formed teaching activities (such as are found in the classroom activities collection), but rather they are outlines that could be developed into fully formed activities.
Carbon Footprint Collection - from Cutting Edge - This web collection contains a variety of classroom activities that can be used to help students measure or reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. This type of activity can be used with introductory level students via ready-made footprint calculators, or left as open-ended calculations in upper level courses.
The Hurricane - Climate Change Connection - This site provides material from a 2008 workshop on teaching about climate change and hurricanes. Materials include a summary of current research, classroom activities, recommended websites, presentations and discussions from the workshop, course information, visualizations and data, and other resources involving climate change and hurricanes.
Experienced-Based Environmental Projects - This creative approach offers a way for students to apply classroom topics like energy use, global warming, water quality and land use to their own lives, and to realize that although these issues may be global or regional, they ultimately have roots at the individual level. The module features The Lifestyle Project, a three-week project that challenges students to learn about environmental alternatives by modifying their own lifestyles.

Visualizations

Climate Change Visualizations - These pages were developed as a part of the Teaching Geoscience with Visualizations workshop and website. Each page presents quality visualizations on a particular topic in the geosciences, this one focuses on climate change visualizations. You can browse through the whole collection of visualization pages on the Teaching with Visualizations website.
Visualizations about Hurricanes and Climate Change - These pages were developed as a part of the Teaching Geoscience with Visualizations workshop and website. The quality visualizations provided on this site involve climate change and hurricanes.
Paleoclimate: Climate Change Through Time - These pages provide access to a spectrum of visualizations and supporting material that can be used effectively to teach students about paleoclimate through geologic time. Visualizations include simple animations, GIS-based animated maps, paleogeographic maps, as well as numerous illustrations and photos.
Energy Visualizations - These visualizations include videos, illustrations, maps, etc. that can support teaching about energy in the classroom. They involve fossil fuel formation and how fuels are converted to energy, resources about nuclear energy, and alternative energy.

Courses

Courses about Climatology and Climate Change - Review syllabi, course goals and course design strategies for over 20 different climate-related undergraduate courses.
Teaching About Energy in Geoscience Courses - This page is part of a workshop on teaching about energy in the classroom. It includes a list and description of courses taught about energy and the environment, including courses related to climate change and alternative energy sources.

Workshops

Navigating Climate Complexities in the Classroom - An online workshop held June 7 - 8 and 14 - 15, 2011. This workshop was designed to help faculty expand their knowledge of the climate system and gain pedagogic strategies for effective teaching of complex topics. This workshop was part of the CLEAN professional development series.

Climate and Energy Webinar and Book Club Series - Join us for a monthly series delving into emerging topics in climate change and energy. These issues are evolving quickly and are constantly in the news, which is why our students find them to be relevant and interesting. On the other hand, keeping ourselves up to date becomes challenging. This monthly series will explore the science of energy and climate, along with promising teaching approaches for these topics.

Teaching About Energy in Geoscience Courses: Current Research and Pedagogy - Held Saturday, October 30, 2010 in conjunction with the GSA Annual Meeting in Denver, Colorado, this workshop brings together geoscience educators to share their understanding about energy in the context of teaching and learning geoscience. The workshop also showcases approaches for teaching about energy and provide a forum to develop new educational materials.

Teaching About Earth's Climate Using Data and Numerical Models - A virtual workshop held October 21-22 and 25-27, 2010, that explored the role of numerical models in undergraduate climate change education.

Teaching About Earth's Climate Using the Geologic Record - A workshop held August 10-11, 2010 that introduced participants to an array of paleoclimate records and explained how they are collected, analyzed, and interpreted.

Teaching Climate Change with Ice Core Data - This 2008 workshop was part of the bi-annual meeting of the American Quaternary Association, and featured Richard Alley, Sridhar Anandakrishnan and Todd Sowers. See the workshop program and photo gallery.

Teaching Climate Change: Lessons from the Past - This 2006 workshop was the first of a series of workshop associated with the bi-annual meeting of the American Quaternary Association.

Related Site Guides

Sustainability Site Guide

Energy Site Guide