Global Temperatures

This activity has been selected for inclusion in the CLEAN collection.
This activity has been extensively reviewed for inclusion in the Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network's collection of educational resources. For information the process and the collection, see http://cleanet.org/clean/about/selected_by_CLEAN.
This resource received a gold-star rating from a Panel Peer Review
These materials were reviewed using face-to-face NSF-style review panel of geoscience and geoscience education experts to review groups of resources addressing a single theme. Panelists wrote reviews that addressed the criteria:
- scientific accuracy and currency
- usability and
- pedagogical effectiveness
- Accept
- Accept with minor revisions
- Accept with major revisions, or
- Reject.
Following the panel meetings, the conveners wrote summaries of the panel discussion for each resource; these were transmitted to the creator, along with anonymous versions of the reviews. Relatively few resources were accepted as is. In most cases, the majority of the resources were either designated as 1) Reject or 2) Accept with major revisions. Resources were most often rejected for their lack of completeness to be used in a classroom or they contained scientific inaccuracies.
This activity was selected for the On the Cutting Edge Exemplary Teaching Collection
Resources in this top level collection a) must have scored Exemplary or Very Good in all five review categories, and must also rate as “Exemplary” in at least three of the five categories. The five categories included in the peer review 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 http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/review.html.
This page first made public: Apr 12, 2006
This material is replicated on a number of sites as part of the SERC Pedagogic Service Project
Summary
Learning Goals
- Natural climate variability (volcanoes, El Nino);
- Climate trends;
- Climate predictability;
- Regional climate variations.
- Teach students how to describe and interpret graphical information.
- Explore the significance of global climate change patterns to a student's local region.
- Introduce students to the difficulties encountered in trying to extrapolate recent temperature trends into the future, and the need for models to make reasoned predictions of temperature change.
Context for Use
Teaching Materials
- Data in tab delimited format;
- Lab instructions and questions;
- Link to how to describe graphs;
- Link to how to write-up lab reports of this type;
- Images of:
- 2001 annual temperature anomaly relative to 1951 to 1980 mean;
- 1991 annual temperature anomaly relative to 1951 to 1980 mean;
- Regional trends in temperature for 1910-1945, 1946-1975, 1976-2000, and 1901-2000.
Teaching Notes and Tips
Assessment
References and Resources
- The Globally-Averaged Temperature Lab provides good documentation for references and additional reading.
Other relevant links include:
The graph below created by Robert MacKay can be useful when discussing global temperatures and global change.