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Resources for teachers on teaching climate science in Key Stage 3 and 4 Geography.

Stock image, storm seen from space

Key Stage 3 and 4 Geography

These materials are aimed at Key Stage 3/4 Geography. For suggestions on how they may be used in teaching GCSE, see the ‘Introduction for Teachers’.

Some of the materials require access to computers taking part in the CPDN (short for climateprediction.net) experiment, however some sample CPDN results are downloadable from the bottom of the page.

The materials can be used in isolation or combined.

Title and description Notes
Introduction for Teachers

Teachers’ notes (pdf, 110KB)
Creating climate maps using CPDN software

Requires the CPDN model and visualisation software to be installed (pdf, 170KB)
Forecasting Presentation (pdf, 1.5MB) The topic links to the GCSE, AS and A2 specifications including:
  • AQA: weather and climate, climatic hazards and change
  • EdExcel: managing hazards, natural world, physical systems
  • OCR: People and environment, atmospheric systems, applied climatology, hazardous environments
Exploring energy resources Presentation (pdf, 1MB) The topic links to the GCSE, AS and A2 specifications including:
  • AQA: weather and climate, climatic hazards and change
  • Edexcel: managing hazards, natural world, physical systems
  • OCR: People and Environment, atmospheric systems, applied climatology, hazardous environments
Risks and responses to climate change Presentation (pdf, 2.3MB) The topic links to the GCSE, AS and A2 specifications including:
  • AQA: weather and climate, climatic hazards and change
  • Edexcel: managing hazards, natural world, physical systems
  • OCR: People and Environment, atmospheric systems, applied climatology, hazardous environments
The Day After Tomorrow

Exercise with lesson plan Can be used with or without class internet access (rtf, 10KB)
Energy Summit

Presentation Role-play exercise (pdf, 670KB)

Students’ worksheet (pdf, 30KB)
Renewable Energy

Students’ worksheet (pdf, 30KB) Worksheet for investigating sources of renewable energy. No answers supplied

 

 

The Day After Tomorrow

Scientific truth, political agenda or just a disaster movie?

Here is a wide selection of reviews of the film:

For each review, think about

  • whether it is for or against the film
  • whether it thinks the science behind the film is correct or not
  • what it says the message behind the film is
  • whether or not it thinks the film gets its message across well
  • whether you are told enough about the author to see whether they are biased in any way

Various organisations carried out polls of public opinion about climate change issues at the time of the film:

 

Background information

What is an Ice Age?

What were they doing cutting an Ice Core in Antarctica?

When do ice shelves split off?

What is the Gulf Stream?

The Gulf Stream is part of the thermohaline circulation. Whereas the thermohaline circulation could ‘switch off’ – for example if a lot of fresh water was introduced to the system at the Poles, the Gulf Stream never will, as it is also driven in part by the wind.

The Gulf Stream keeps Britain and the rest of North-Western Europe several degrees warmer than it would otherwise be.

Could it get that cold that quickly?

In the film, temperatures fall by 10°C per second to ‘the temperature of the tropopause’. The tropopause is the boundary between the troposphere (where all the weather is) and the stratosphere, and is found at about the height of the top of Mount Everest (10km) where aeroplanes tend to fly. Temperatures are typically about -60°C – not all THAT cold (central Siberia often experiences -50°C in a normal winter). Crucially though, you can only get temperatures that low if the pressure is also as low as it is at the tropopause – about a tenth of the atmospheric pressure we usually experience on the surface of the Earth (that’s why mountaineers tend to have to breathe bottled oxygen). To get pressures that low, the hurricanes would have to have had wind speeds of about 500m/s (1000 miles per hour!!). It wouldn’t have been the drop in temperature that killed people.

What is a Paleaoclimate model? How is it different from a Hurricane Model?

The main difference between them is that whereas a paleaoclimate model has to calculate hundreds of thousands years of weather, and therefore tends to have a very coarse resolution in space (large grid squares) and time (long timesteps), a hurricane model doesn’t have to represent the whole Earth, and only has to be run for a few months at most, so can have a very fine resolution in order to capture all the small scale features of the hurricane.

Can you get hailstones that big?

I thought it was global WARMING that was the big issue?

Read about how we are trying to find out what the affect of a thermohaline circulation slowdown:

How is CPDN looking at thermohaline circulation slowdown?

One CPDN experiment is investigating the effect that a slowdown of the Gulf Stream would have on the world’s climate. It is NOT looking at what the likelihood of a slowdown would be. To find out more, go to the Thermohaline project page:

 

Global development and CO2 emissions

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas. It is released into the atmosphere when we burn fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) for energy – which we are currently doing more than ever before. In the atmosphere, it insulates the Earth – the more there is, the warmer the Earth. How much we emit over the next 100 years will determine how the Earth’s climate changes.

By 2100 the world will have changed in ways that are difficult to imagine. How much carbon dioxide is emitted between now and then will be governed by how our lifestyles change; how rapidly we adopt more efficient technologies, whether we accept legislation which limits carbon emissions – even if that means the cost of living is higher, how our family size changes etc.

Below are details about 4 possible ways the world might develop in the future. By 2100 the worlds are very different in terms of how many people there are, how wealthy they are, how much technology has advanced and, crucially, what kind of fuel they use.