Communicating Climate Change

This section includes teaching resources aimed at a variety of levels from elementary school on up.

The website, USGCRP, is a coordinated program that integrates federal research on “changes in the global environment and their implications for society,” includes a section on resources for educators: http://www.globalchange.gov/resources/educators

It also includes a visually engaging educational toolkits focused on regional environmental changes due to climate change, aimed at middle and high school students: http://www.globalchange.gov/resources/educators/toolkit

NOAA, NSF, and AAAS-sponsored guide focusing on teaching climate change literacy a wide variety of adult audiences. This guide can be used a discussion starters or beginning point for science projects. Educators can also use this guide to teach climate science as part of science curricula.

The booklet is available in English and Spanish at: http://www.globalchange.gov/resources/educators/climate-literacy

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has resources to improve climate literacy on this website, including on communicating and visualizing the effects of climate change. http://www.education.noaa.gov/Climate/

This distributed computing project allows computer users to participate in climate modeling using their computers while they are not running at full capacity: “The aim of climateprediction.net is to investigate the approximations that have to be made in state-of-the-art climate models. By running the model thousands of times (a 'large ensemble') we hope to find out how the model responds to slight tweaks to these approximations --slight enough to not make the approximations any less realistic. This will allow us to improve our understanding of how sensitive our models are to small changes and also to things like changes in carbon dioxide and the sulphur cycle.” http://climateprediction.net/

The learning resources from the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) are based on the research at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). http://spark.ucar.edu/

This playful website explains climate change for families: http://billsclimatelab.org/