In this activity, students participate in a class discussion of the carbon cycle and how increases in carbon may impact global climate patterns. This activity is complementary to the video "The Ecology of Climate Change."

This blog is designed for North Carolina's K-12 teachers and students who are interested in the topic of energy and alternative energy (nuclear and renewables). This blog is maintained by Dana Haine, K-12 Science Education Manager for UNC-Chapel Hill's Institute for the Environment, with funding provided by Progress Energy.

This guide was developed to support teachers in teaching topics with real-world context, and provide them with the background to feel competent and comfortable when teaching about the climate change. The guide includes numerous education features, such as teaching tips and student thinking, that help to connect the content to classroom practice.

Understand how humans can have a positive or negative impact on the environment.

In this lesson, students will run the climate modeling software, Educational Global Climate Modeling Suite (EdGCM), to visualize how temperature and snow coverage might change over the next 100 years. They will begin by running a "control" climate simulation to establish a baseline for comparison. After this first simulation, they will run a second "experimental" simulation. Then they will compare and contrast the changes in temperature and snow and ice coverage that could occur due to increased atmospheric greenhouse gases. Next, students will choose a region of their own interest to explore and compare their modeling results with those documented in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) impact reports. Through working with EdGCM, they will gain a greater understanding and appreciation of the process and power of climate modeling.

In this unit, students will develop an understanding of climate change and how it is different from climate variability. Students will read articles and access data, maps, and graphs of trends. They will also view several short video clips and learn about and compare climate models. Students will see how climate impacts life and life impacts climate in both short and long timescales.

In this lab, students will get a better sense of how rapidly the most recent—century-scale—changes in global temperature are taking place as compared to past—millennial-scale—changes. They will gain a better understanding of the interrelationship between global temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of the greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Students will also view satellite maps showing the spatial patterns of global warming over the past 150 years.

In this lab, students will look forward in time and learn about climate models and view the projected changes in climate for the upcoming century. This lab also includes different scenarios that can affect climate in the future.

This demonstration uses a water balloon to show how Earth's oceans are absorbing most of the heat trapped on our warming world.

This set of graphs from the Web site for the NOVA/FRONTLINE Special Report: "What's Up with the Weather?" reveals how atmospheric carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides from the burning of fossil fuels have climbed over time. The graphs show data collected during the study of ice core samples and are featured in the article "Stories in the Ice." Supplemental resources, including a background essay and discussion questions, are also provided.

In this lesson, students review evidence of global effects of rising global temperatures, and then consider what (if anything) should be done about it. A set of discussion questions is provided. In an associated activity, students take part in a mock Global Warming Summit meeting and take on roles representing various countries. The culminating task of the lesson will be for students to write a legally binding international treaty on global warming that all represented nations would be willing to sign.

In this activity, students learn about the greenhouse effect and its possible effects on global warming and rising water levels on Earth.

In this lesson, students observe demonstrations, and build and evaluate simple models to understand the greenhouse effect and the role of increased greenhouse gas concentration in global warming.

In this lesson, students will practice distinguishing between correlation and causation within the context of global climate change. Students will think critically and analyze different claims and datasets related to what might be causing increasing temperatures in a fictitious town called Solutionville, as well as around the globe. Although students will be working within the context of a fictitious town, the temperature and carbon dioxide data they will be analyzing are real and will enable them to see relationships between global temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. Finally, students will watch a video in which they will be learn that the burning of fossil fuels releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and they will begin to explore the connections between human activities and global climate change.

This brief video lesson discusses processes used to create a cleaner version of coal. Discussion/assessment questions and suggested supplemental resources are also included.

This infographic highlights all of the factors that contribute to carbon dioxide increase on the planet.

Students use computational models to explore how Earth's surface and greenhouse gases interact with radiation. Then they interpret real-world changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide over short and long time frames.

In this activity, students will demonstrate the environmental and economic effects of increased carbon dioxide content in the atmosphere.

In this lesson, students investigate weather patterns and climate and how they are changing. Students conduct research about an assigned weather topic and create an interactive project/presentation that can be used to teach classmates about a weather topic.