This engaging PBS video explains the differences between greenhouse gases and their impacts.
The video explains why CO2 is the greenhouse gas that is creating the largest impact on our planet.
Teaching Tips
Positives
This video creates engaging and clear content by incorporating music, graphics, and text.
Additional Prerequisites
The video finishes at 4 minutes and 30 seconds. There is an advertisement that plays after the content.
Students will need to have a basic understanding of climate change and greenhouse gases before watching the video.
The video omits nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with global warming potential between methane and sulfur hexafluoride. Nitrous oxide is almost always mentioned in climate change videos, but it is not here.
You could create groups of students to conduct research about individual greenhouse gases. Groups of students could study water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and sulfur hexafluoride.
Scientist Notes
A trope of climate denialism is to take the focus off of cutting carbon emissions and talk about water vapor. It is true that water vapor is an important greenhouse gas that makes are planet livable, but it is not the culprit of climate change, as this video from PBS explains. This resource is recommended for teaching.
Standards
Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS)
ESS3: Earth and Human Activity
MS-ESS3-3 Apply scientific principles to design a method for monitoring and minimizing a human impact on the environment.
MS-ESS3-5 Ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century.
HS-ESS3-5 Analyze geoscience data and the results from global climate models to make an evidence-based forecast of the current rate of global or regional climate change and associated future impacts to Earth systems.
