Which Areas Are Measured For Warming Data?

Written By Teacher: Teresa Pettitt-Kenney

Hi there! My name is Teresa and I just finished my Bachelor's degree in Environmental Science and am excited to pursue environmental education in the future! I am extremely passionate about climate change, equitable climate action, and how education can work to address these issues. 

In our current climate, headlines about rising temperatures are frequent and can sometimes feel overwhelming, especially for our students. Having a better understanding of how this data is collected and what different levels of warming actually mean can give students a sense of control and help inform their decisions surrounding climate. Utilize the article below to expand your knowledge surrounding global temperature data collection and then introduce the topic to your students through fun and engaging resources, like this Graphing Global Temperature Trends activity from My NASA Data. 

Written By: MIT Environmental Solutions Initiative

The MIT Climate Change Engagement Program, a part of MIT Climate HQ, provides the public with nonpartisan, easy-to-understand, and scientifically-grounded information on climate change and its solutions.

In conversations about global warming, we often hear about 1°, 1.5°, or 2° Celsius—as in the Paris Agreement, where countries declared a goal to stop the world from warming any more than 1.5° C. But the world is a huge place, including deep oceans and layers of atmosphere extending many miles into space. It can be a little unclear what is actually being measured when scientists talk about the planet getting warmer.

Measures of global warming refer to our global average surface temperatures—that is, air temperatures taken right at the surface of the sea and land. These temperatures are collected across the world every day, week and month, and are combined to give us a global average. (When you read a sentence like “the world has already warmed about 1° C,” what is usually being looked at is yearly global averages starting from a certain year.)