Featured Resources

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The United States and Climate Change: Mitigation and Adaptation through Existing Federal Environmental and Natural Resources Laws

NOAA Climate Stewards Education Project Webinar
January 9, 2017

NOAA's Climate Stewards Education Project is pleased to welcome Robin Craig, William H. Leary Professor of Law, and Acting Director of the Wallace Stegner Center for Land, Resources, and Environment at the University of Utah as our featured...

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The Youth Climate Summit Scale-up Initiative

November 24, 2015

The Association for Science Technology Centers (ASTC) and The Wild Center have teamed up to share The Wild Center’s successful Youth Climate Summit format, designed to engage high school students in climate literacy through meaningful dialogue and action planning on climate change.

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Southeast and Caribbean Region

The NCA Education Resources for the Southeast and Caribbean Region features key figures, related resources, reviewed lesson plans, videos for all of the NCA key messages for each region.  The site contains information that will help educators and students gain a deeper understanding of climate science and the implications for the nation.

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2014 National Climate Assessment Resources for Educators

Explore a series of guides for educators that focus on the regional chapters of the Assessment Report, helping to unpack the key messages of each region and point to related, high-quality online resources.

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Teaching Climate Literacy

  • Climate and energy are complex topics. There are many ways to approach climate and energy depending on the grade level, course topics and instructional method.

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Professional Development

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Jan
9

The United States and Climate Change: Mitigation and Adaptation through Existing Federal Environmental and Natural Resources Laws

Monday, January 9 at 7:30 pm Eastern Time

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National Climate Assessment Teaching Resources

  • Explore a series of guides for educators that focus on the regional chapters of the Assessment Report, helping to unpack the key messages of each region and point to related, high-quality online resources.

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Case Studies

Unique and diverse youth programming models and student-driven initiatives that are advancing place-based climate solutions.

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Events

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Blog

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Educational Resources

Renewable Energy Living Lab: Energy Priorities

In this activity, students explore real data about renewable energy potential in their state using a mapping tool developed by NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) to investigate the best locations for wind energy, solar energy, hydropower, geothermal energy, and biomass.

Climate Variability in the Equatorial Pacific

In this activity, students work with climate data from the tropical Pacific Ocean to understand how sea-surface temperature and atmospheric pressure affect precipitation in the tropical Pacific in a case study format.

A New Angle on Solar PV Efficiency

In this hands-on activity, students examine how the orientation of a photovoltaic (PV) panel -- relative to the position of the sun -- affects the energy-efficiency of the panel.

Effectively engaging with climate skeptics

In this activity, students select an argument of a climate skeptic, research it, and write up a mock dialog that portrays a back-and-forth discussion between the skeptic and a non-skeptic, while presenting a scientific argument that counters the false claim.

Communicating Climate: Literary Representations of Climate Change

This activity explores how the topic of climate change is represented in various forms of writing, from scholarly articles to opinion pieces and works of fiction.

Interpretations: Reading the Book of Earth

In this activity, students graph and analyze methane data, extracted from an ice core, to examine how atmospheric methane has changed over the past 109,000 years in a case study format.

El NiÃo and La NiÃa Explained

This short video illustrates the phenomena of El NiÃo and La NiÃa: their relationships to tradewinds and surface water temperatures, and their effects on precipitation in North America.

AAAS - Global Climate Change video

This video features residents of Shishmaref, Alaska, plus environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert and scientist John Holdren, exploring the human impacts of global climate change.

Chicago fights extreme urban heat with greener ideas

As a segment in PBS's Coping with Climate Change series, Hari Sreenivasan reports on the actions the city of Chicago is taking to mitigate climate change in an urban landscape.

What's Happening to Our Climate: Natural Factors Cannot Explain the Recent Warming

This classroom resource is a combination of 3 visualizations and accompanying text that illustrate how 3 key natural phenomena - cyclical changes in solar energy output, major volcanic eruptions over the last century, and El Nino/Nina cycles - are insufficient to explain recent global warming.

Annual Arctic Sea ice Minimum 1979-2015 with Area Graph

This series of visualizations show the annual Arctic sea ice minimum from 1979 to 2015. The decrease in Arctic sea ice over time is shown in an animation and a graph plotted simultaneously, but can be parsed so that the change in sea ice area can be shown without the graph.

Yale Climate Opinion Maps

This visualization focuses on public acceptance of climate science. The set of interactive maps illustrates public opinion on a variety of climate beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support. The data is from the Yale Project on Climate Communication.

Yale Climate Opinion Maps

This visualization focuses on public acceptance of climate science. The set of interactive maps illustrates public opinion on a variety of climate beliefs, risk perceptions, and policy support. The data is from the Yale Project on Climate Communication.

If All the Ice Melted

This visualization is a collection of maps, by continent, that project the impact on coastlines of a 216-foot rise in sea level, which is assumed to be the result of melting all the land ice on Earth.

Graphing Ocean Acidification

This applet is an ocean acidification grapher that allows user to plot changes in atmospheric C02 against ocean pH, from 1988 to 2009, in the central North Pacific.

Earth: an animated map of global wind and weather

This animation depicts real-time wind speed and direction at selected heights above Earth's surface, ocean surface currents, and ocean surface temperatures and anomalies.

Sea Level Rise: Threatened Areas Maps

This interactive tool allows viewers to explore, by county, the areas of California threatened by a rise in sea level through this century.

NOAA Sea Level Trends

The NOAA Sea Level Trends map illustrates U.S. regional and some international trends in sea level, with arrows representing the direction and magnitude of change. Students can investigate sea level changes around the U.S.

Biofuels/Biomass Cellulose Lab

In this lab activity, students investigate how to prepare a biofuel source for conversion to a combustible product. The activity models how raw materials are refined to process liquid fuels.

Thermal Expansion and Sea Level Rise

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

Bioprospecting for cellulose-degrading microbes

This is a long-term inquiry activity in which students investigate locations they believe harbor cellulose-digesting microbes, collect samples, isolate them on selective media, and screen them for cellulase activity. These novel microbes may be useful for the production of cellulosic ethanol.

Fermentation in a Bag

This is a hands-on inquiry activity using zip-lock plastic bags that allows students to observe the process of fermentation and the challenge of producing ethanol from cellulosic sources. Students are asked to predict outcomes and check their observations with their predictions.

Fermentation Challenge: Making Ethanol from Cellulose

This hands-on activity introduces students to the process of fermenting different carbohydrate sources into ethanol. Teachers demonstrate yeasts' inability to metabolize certain food sources.

Life Cycle Assessment of Biofuels 101

In this activity, students conduct a life cycle assessment of energy used and produced in ethanol production, and a life cycle assessment of carbon dioxide used and produced in ethanol production.