I was excited to see this recent posting from my institution, CU Boulder. If you’re a teacher looking to teach climate change in the classroom, a group of scientists, science education researchers, and middle and high-school teachers have developed and refined a set of problem-based lessons:

Visit them at LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu

They say:

The result is a set of model lessons that focus on the following single driving questions:

• Evidence of Climate Change — How would we know if Colorado’s climate is changing and how will it affect me?
• Mountain Pine Beetles — Why are our forests dying?
• Zoo Poo — Does burning poo at the Denver Zoo reduce CO2?
• Modeling Climate — What makes you hot?

It seems to be in vogue to teach about climate change.  Thank god.  I mean, is there anything else more confusing nowadays?  Teaching students just to wade through the puddles of mud being slung across party lines is a message in media digestion in itself!

Luckily there are many resources being developed to help educators teach about climate change.  Here I’m listing a bunch that I’ve been running across.

1.  Free standards-based climate change films (polar regions)

From CIRES in Boulder comes a set of films for use in the classroom.  Sadly, they’re right now out of DVD’s, but you can see all the clips on their website. They say:  “The film contains 7 stand-alone segments appropriate for use in all kinds of science classrooms and informal settings from the middle level through college. The segments illustrate the problem of climate change and how scientists are working in Alaska and Greenland to understand it. Each segment is about 10 minutes long.  The video was developed to align strongly with the National Science Education Standards across all science subjects”

Segment 1: Introduction to Climate Change
Segment 2: Polar History
Segment 3: Studying Alaskan Permafrost
Segment 4: Ice Core Drilling
Segment 5: Studying Glaciers
Segment 6: Studying Sea Ice
Segment 7: Conclusion and Solutions

2.  Hot questions about climate change

Also here in Boulder (working for NCAR/UCAR), my fellow blogger Sharon Glassman has created a set of 30-second climate change videos, such as “What difference can a few degrees make?” (embedded below).  She says:  “The segs are fun, trustworthy, free – and designed to be spread through the atmosphere of the Web and friendship.”
©UCAR

3. Climate Discovery online courses

Also from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) are a set of online courses. They are accepting registrations for winter term (starting Jan 22nd) here.   They cost $225 and there are several courses available.  They say:  “Are you seeking a K-12 professional development opportunity that will enhance your qualifications, competency, and self-confidence in integrating Earth system science, climate, and global change into your science classroom? The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) offers a series of six and seven week online courses for middle and high school teachers that combine geoscience content, information about current climate research, easy to implement hands-on activities, and group discussion. The courses run concurrently from January 22 through March 14, 2010.”

4.  How to effectively teach climate change

One teacher recommends a glacial melt activity here.  And a carbon calculator for kids.

CIRES has been working on a set of resources to help teach about controversial projects like climate change.   They have a set of helpful resources here. In particular:

• Common misconceptions about climate change (PDF)
• Climate change clicker quiz (PPT)
• Edutopia’s Taking the fear out of teaching global warming (HTML)
• Dealing with controversy (PDF)

5.  I also have a few activities and webcasts on climate change myself:

• Several hands-on activities about weather and climate here and here (such as a rice model of the composition of the earth’s atmosphere, and a model of how carbon dioxide resonates in the infrared).
• A set of webcasts – climate in the past (a synopsis of the included activities here) and in the future (a synopsis of content and activities here).

Also recommended are the following two books:

From AAAS website: Former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize Winner Al Gore

Al Gore spoke to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and gave an updated and truncated version of his “Inconvenient Truth” speech.  I recommend taking a look at it (you can watch it over breakfast if you’re like me and don’t like to sit and watch videos on your computer… I get restless).  I am so duly impressed by what a good speaker Mr. Gore is, and how he brings both passion and intelligence to what he says, only glancing occasionally at his notes on the podium.  He gave a strong call in this speech for scientists to get involved in the politics of combatting global warming.  It’s a half-hour well spent.

Here’s the link.

There have been several posts around the blogosphere of late regarding a report from journalist Steven Goddard that the arctic sea ice isn’t melting as quickly as we thought. In particular he was calling into question the validity of the data reported from the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado — I’ve included that graph below.

However, his analysis was not well-founded, and he’s since admitted his mistake. The Island of Doubt has posted a nice summary of what was wrong with his arguments. They write:

Goddard’s article is rife with scientific errors and evidence of his lack of familiarity with the science. His main argument, that the ice area up there is 30% larger than last year, not just 10%, is the product of the fact that Goddard based his story on his own analysis of images from the NSIDC and other sources. That analysis… consisted entirely of counting white pixels…. It turns out that Goddard got confused because he didn’t take into account map-projection distortion differences between competing images.

Once that little problem is dispensed with, it turns out that there is no discrepancy, the arctic is melting faster than normal, and may yet break last year’s record. Or not. Even if Goddard had been right, though, that says nothing about long-term trends. The point is, as Goddard proved, if you’re going to argue that an entire field of scientists got it wrong, you really should know something about the subject.

To Goddard’s credit, though, he admitted his mistake.

Sadly, the story has already started to make its way around the internet. So, just like myths like polar bear fur being a fiber optic (it’s not), or cats which grow wings (they don’t) it may be hard to get this one to go away. Why is it so much easier to spread rumors that something false is true than to fix the problem by telling people that something they think is true is actually false?  It’s made worse by the fact that some folks want to have fodder to fuel denialist claims, so they don’t have a lot of reason to correct erroneous information.

Deltoid also blogs about Goddard’s article here.

Wow, I just saw a great YouTube by a science teacher on climate change. He frames the issue in terms of risk management. Rather than “who’s right?”, he asks “which scenario would we rather risk?” The one where we waste money to try to save an earth that’s fine as it is, or the one where we neglect to address the issue and are visited by multiple disasters? This is a common way to attack the issue, but the video is very well done. As my friend who sent it to me said, “ten minutes well spent!”