Useful Education Links

Mapping, Interactive Tools, and Related Applications

AAG's Teaching about Global Climate Change program is a free, online professional development module for geography and social studies teachers at the middle and high school levels. The module provides the preparation materials for teachers who are teaching about global climate change.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) displays various flowcharts depicting energy, carbon, and water flow, both domestic and international.

Microsoft's Fetch Climate is a fast, free, intelligent climate data retrieval service that operates over the cloud to return only the climate data one needs, intended to make it easy to retrieve data for any geographical region, at any grid resolution, and for any range of years (1900 – 2010). When multiple sources of data could potentially provide data on the same environmental variable FetchClimate automatically selects the most appropriate data sources.

Reports and Case Studies for Student and Teachers

Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange (CAKE) is an online forum that aims to build a shared knowledge base for managing natural and built systems in the face of rapid climate change. Among their many online resources, CAKE provides:

A database of case studies profiling on-the-ground adaptation projects with links to complete project information. Case studies are extremely valuable tools for sharing results, approaches, and inspiration.
A Virtual Library is a complete, managed repository of documents relating to climate change adaptation. It gathers in one place the information relevant to adaptation appearing in journals, reports, books, case studies, videos, and government plans.
In addition, CAKE manages a directory of people and organizations engaged in on-the-ground climate change adaptation, with relevant contact information.
The Tools section of CAKE directs users to the wealth of tools available on other sites to help process climate change information and make adaptation decisions.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency website contains a suite of links, materials, and resources dedicated to the science, research, and policy of climate change, including:

A list of 10 simple steps one can take in the home to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
An extensive teacher's tool kit, including lesson plans, basic information, and templates, about climate change and other environmental issues here.
Here is a list of 6 ways to cut emissions on the nation's roads to reduce dependence on foreign oil, and save money.
Here is a directory of some education and action-planning resources to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions at school
The EPA also features a household carbon footprint calculator which gives a rough estimate of personal or family greenhouse gas emissions so that one can explore the impact of taking various actions to reduce emissions.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a number of assessment, special, and methodology reports available, in addition to several technical papers, supporting material, figures and tables, and supporting data.
The Metcalf Institute organizes an annual public lecture series that runs concurrently with the Annual Science Immersion Workshop for Journalists. The week-long series brings top scientists, journalists, and policy experts to the University of Rhode Island Narragansett Bay Campus to talk about current issues in environmental research, media coverage, and how science influences public policy. In addition, the Metcalf Institute provides:

A wide list of various resources on the environment and environmental issues, ranging from periodicals/journals to books to news programs, etc.
The book Communicating on Climate Change: An Essential Resource for Journalists, Scientists, and Educators offers important tips and tools for covering one of the most complex issues of the day, reporting on Metcalf's unprecedented series of workshops and featuring essays on major issues in climate science communication by participating climate researchers and journalists.

Various National Research Council (NRC) reports from the last 3 years are presented here, with topics ranging from climate stabilization targets to ocean acidification to verification of greenhouse gas emissions, including climate change studies available for public purchase in a variety of scientific fields, including climate change.

The America's Climate Choices series of reports provides authoritative analysis to inform and guide responses to climate change across the nation.The reports were produced by committees of experts convened by the National Research Council to address certain issues, and their findings were peer reviewed. The issues include advancing the science of climate change, limiting its magnitude, adapting to its impacts, and informing an effective response to it.

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) makes available a collection of resources on climate change from booklets and reports in brief.

NAS also features many videos and multimedia on climate change covering a wide variety of topics.

The NASA website contains a wide variety of atmospheric, land, and water studies and resources addressing climate change topics, including:

A list of key indicators of global climate change, namely carbon dioxide concentration, global surface temperature, Arctic sea ice extent, land sea ice extent, and sea level.
An exploration of the climate change evidence for rapid climate change, including sea level rise, global temperature rise, warming oceans, shrinking ice sheets, declining Arctic sea ice, glacial retreat, increasing frequency of extreme events, and ocean acidification.
An examination of the human and natural causes of global climate change, discussing the greenhouse gas effect, the role of human activity, and solar irradiance.
The natural and anthropogenic effects of global climate change are discussed, looking at the consequences in different geographic regions and time scales.
NASA also acknowledges the uncertainties of climate change in the science of climate change, particularly forcings and feedbacks.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is the government's leading agency for climatological studies and weather research. Among their many resources available online, NOAA provides:

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), the world's largest climate data archive and provides climatological services and data to every sector of the United States economy and to users worldwide. Records in the archive range from paleoclimatic data to centuries-old journals to data less than an hour old. The Center's mission is to preserve these data and make them available to the public, business, industry, government, and researchers.
An Education Resources portal, designed to assist educators in accessing materials from one centralized interface. The content here is organized by Themes, Types of Content, and Sources of Content, and is aligned with common teaching topics and expressed needs of educators. The Themes are Ocean and Coasts, Climate, Weather and Atmosphere, Marine Life, and Freshwater.
A Sea Level Rise and Coastal Flooding Impacts Viewer allows coastal communities to visualize potential impacts from sea level rise, providing a powerful teaching and planning tool. A slider bar is used to show how various levels of sea level rise will impact coastal communities. The visuals and accompanying data and information cover sea level rise inundation, uncertainty, flood frequency, marsh impacts, and socioeconomics.

Useful Links and Other Teaching Resources

In addition to AAG's Teaching about Global Climate Change program, AAG provides a companion website, the AAG Geographic Advantage which hosts a wide variety of information on how to teach and educate on topics related to our changing planet, including environmental issues, sustainability, socioeconomi rapid spatial recognition, and technology.

The UK's Met Office Climate Guide looks at all aspects of climate, climate science, and climate change, answering such questions as what is climate, what is climate change, how has our climate changed, and how it may change in the future. It also provides information about the actual science behind climate change.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) presents the facts and figures of climate and climate change, with the following highlighted topics: Climates of the Past, A Thousand Years of Climate, How Do We Know Earth is Warming?, Climate of the Future, Understanding Regional Effects of a Shifting Climate, El Niño's Effects, and Drought and Wildland Fires.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) offers an abundance of publications of research that it funded, from many different fields, including climatology.

The Earth System Science Center at Penn State has a series of selected publications of their ice and climate research, covering such topics as the influence of soot on climate change, tides on ice stream motion, and seismicity on the flow of Antarctic glaciers.

TheSUDPLAN provides online access to their climate change results, available for public access, listed under the categories of General Project Information, Concept and Validation, Scenario Management System, Common Services, its various European pilot studies, and Dissemination.

The United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) seeks to educate people about climate change by listing at least 30 ways to combat climate change, from solar loans for rural homes to promoting clean and more efficient vehicles to converting agricultural biomass waste into energy.

UNESCO's Climate Change Education for Sustainable Development programme aims to make climate change education a more central and visible part of the international response to climate change, aiming to help people understand the impact of global warming today and increase "climate literacy" among young people.