How can we help students really see climate change when it is a planet-wide process gradually unfolding over decades? Any given hurricane, prolonged drought or scorching hot day (or summer) might be more likely to occur because of the changing climate. But there will always be weather anomalies; just like in sports, records will be set.
Images can be very powerful (like a video of a starving polar bear), and they can be an important resource in helping young people to see the effects of a warming planet. But perhaps no visual can tell the story of climate change more succinctly, and more effectively, than graphs. Because a single graph can show change over time.
In this teaching resource, we have gathered 30 graphs previously published in The New York Times that relate to climate change. We organize them by topic: rising air temperature, intensifying storms and changing precipitation, warming oceans, greenhouse gas emissions, and climate solutions. Above each graph you’ll find the link to the original Times article. Scroll down to the bottom of this post to find teaching strategies for using one or more of these graphs in your classroom.
Note: For more climate-related graphs, visit this post from 2019.
Strategies for Teaching With This Collection
1. Notice and wonder.
For more than seven years we have been collaborating with the American Statistical Association to bring New York Times graphs into classrooms via our What’s Going On in This Graph? activity. Each week we post a new graph and then invite students to respond to four open-ended prompts:
What do you notice?
What do you wonder?
Teachers can use this same activity with one or more graphs from this collection. Students can journal individually or share their observations with a partner before moving into a class discussion. Or, you can host the conversations online (similar to our comments section), where students post their ideas in an online classroom forum and the teacher and other students submit replies with the goal of helping one another deepen their analysis.
For more detailed information about how to use this approach, visit our previous climate change graph collection, or watch our three-minute tutorial or 45-minute webinar.
2. Read and react.
Invite students to pick any graph from the collection and click on the article link above it. Then they should read the piece and answer these questions:
How does the article contribute to your understanding of climate change?
What role do the graphs embedded in the article serve? Do they make it better? If you were the article’s editor, would you have made the decision to include the graphs? Why, or why not?
What other questions do you have after reading the article?
3. Investigate.
To create each of the graphs in this collection, the Times graphics team used data from one or more sources. Ask students to find the source of the data, which is labeled on the graph itself or in the article, and then investigate using the following prompts:
Who collected this data? Why did they collect it?
How did they collect it? What was their methodology?
When was this data collected? Is it still current?
Is this data accurate and reliable? How do you know?
What do you think about the way Times editors decided to present the data visually in a graph? Do you think they made the right choices? Why, or why not?
How else could this data be presented?
4. Rank.
There are 30 graphs in this collection. Assign students to work in pairs or small groups, and then have them discuss which graph they think is most effective for teaching the general public about Earth’s changing climate. Or, have students choose a few. Then they should explain why they selected that graph — or those graphs.
