The Carbon Cycle & Global Climate Change

Kathryn Hoppe, Green River Community College

This activity is part of the On the Cutting Edge Peer Reviewed Teaching Activities collection. (view details)

This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Reviewed Teaching Collection

This activity has received positive reviews in a peer review process involving five review categories. The five categories included in the process are

Scientific Accuracy
Alignment of Learning Goals, Activities, and Assessments
Pedagogic Effectiveness
Robustness (usability and dependability of all components)
Completeness of the ActivitySheet web page

For more information about the peer review process itself, please see https://serc.carleton.edu/teachearth/activity_review.html.

Initial Publication Date: June 18, 2013 | Reviewed: January 17, 2015 (see revision history: 2 events)

Summary

This is two-hour lab exercise based on computer data sets. Students examine records of CO2 levels in the atmosphere as well as annual temperature records for the US and the world.

Climate Change | College Introductory

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Context

Audience

This lab is designed for introductory science students. I have used it in Oceanography and Geology classes.

Skills and concepts that students must have mastered

Student should know how to read and interprete graphs.

How the activity is situated in the course

This is a stand-alone laboratory exercise.

Goals

Content/concepts goals for this activity

Global climate records. The difficulty of interpreting the signal-to-noise ratio of large data sets.
Global change over human time scale and interglacial-glacial time scales.