Teaching Climate

This video highlights a variety of climate change research initiatives from scientists at the University of Colorado, Boulder. It describes the changing dynamics of Antarctic ice sheets and the impacts of reduced Arctic sea ice. The video illustrates the excitement of this research through interviews and video clips of scientists in the field.

This activity allows students to demonstrate the thermal expansion of water for themselves using water bottles and straws. The discussion allows them to explore the connection between this concept and sea level rise due to climate change.

This very short video introduces the concept of sea level rise and ties it back to global warming. The video is brief, basic, and clear. It can be used for a quick introduction, but nothing deeper than that.

This activity allows students to examine graphs of sea level rise data as well as global temperature data. They calculate amounts and rates of sea level rise for various time periods and answer questions discussing the data. They then compare the sea level rise trends to those in a graph of temperature data.

Students use long term sea-level rise data set to create models and compare short-term trends to long-term trends. They then determine whether sea-level rise is occurring based on the data.

In this short but effective demonstration/experiment, students investigate how thermal expansion of water might affect sea level.

This is a static visualization, referenced from a UNEP rapid response assessment report entitled In Dead Water, depicting the estimated contributions to sea-level rise from 1993 - 2003.

This activity engages learners in exploring the impact of climate change on arctic sea ice in the Bering Sea. They graph and analyze sea ice extent data, conduct a lab on thermal expansion of water, and then observe how a scientist collects long-term data on a bird population.