Ice Cores – Exploring the History of Climate Change. Climate Change: A Wisconsin Activity Guide. Wisconsin DNR. Grades 7-12. http://dnr.wi.gov/org/caer/ce/eek/teacher/Climateguide/pdf/01-1823-icecores.pdf. This section of the Activity Guide provides an activity and worksheets to help students gain an understanding of how the climate has changed over time and how scientists gain information about past climates.

Carbon Dioxide Exercise. SERC. Grades 6-12. http://serc.carleton.edu/introgeo/interactive/examples/co2.html. Students work in groups, plotting carbon dioxide concentrations over time on overheads and estimating the rate of change over five years. Stacked together, the overheads for the whole class show an increase on carbon dioxide over five years and annual variation driven by photosynthesis. This exercise enables students to practice basic quantitative skills and understand how important sampling intervals can be when studying changes over time. A goal is to see how small sample size may give incomplete picture of data.

The Little Ice Age: Understanding Climate and Climate Change. University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. Grades 6-9. http://eo.ucar.edu/educators/ClimateDiscovery/LIA_lesson9_9.28.05.pdf. This is a classroom activity about the forcing mechanisms for the most recent cold period: the Little Ice Age (1350-1850). Students receive data about tree ring records, solar activity, and volcanic eruptions during this time period. By comparing and contrasting time intervals when tree growth was at a minimum, solar activity was low, and major volcanic eruptions occurred, they draw conclusions about possible natural causes of climate change and identify factors that may indicate climate change. Investigating El Nino Using Real Data.

NOAA Ocean Data Education Project. Grades 6-12. http://www.dataintheclassroom.org/content/el-nino/. This is a sequence of 5 classroom activities focusing on the El Nino climate variability. The activities increase in complexity and student-directedness. The focus of the activities is on accessing and manipulating real data to help students understand El Nino as an interaction of Earth systems.

Earth’s Orbit and Climate Change. PBS Teachers professional development module. http://www.pbs.org/teachers/stem/professionaldevelopment/035/. Global climate change is one of the most profound environmental challenges facing humanity today. We have unequivocal evidence that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are contributing to a warming climate, but we also know that climate has changed significantly in the past, long before people were pumping CO2 into the atmosphere. What is the relative contribution of what we call "natural climate cycles" and human-caused greenhouse gases to the trajectories of change we see in contemporary climate records? References national standards.

The Climate Change Skeptic’s Argument: Natural Solar Cycles or Human Activity? PBS Teachers professional development module. http://www.pbs.org/teachers/stem/professionaldevelopment/025/. The sun has a well-known 11-year sunspot cycle that produces variation in energy output. Solar irradiance has been measured by satellites daily since the late 1970s, and this known solar cycle is incorporated into climate models. Evidence from historical sunspot observations, tree-ring measurements, and other proxy climate data sources show that solar output has not been constant over time. In this activity, we explore whether changes in incoming solar radiation can explain all or part of the warming trend we have seen in Earth’s planetary temperatures. References national standards.